После Тарковского

Alienation is the most important notion of modernist thinking; it unites political, legal, historiosophic, existential and psychological content. The conflict behind this notion is one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s topics (perhaps, his main topic): happiness as the human object of desire is questionable due to the super-human law. The line by a character from The Mirror, «Leave me alone; I only wanted to be happy» elicit the image of the hero of Ivan’s Childhood who is radically alienated from the very possibility of such a desire (Jean-Paul Sartre: «For this child, the whole world becomes a hallucination, and he himself-a monster and a martyr-is in this world a hallucination for others»). Cinema after Tarkovsky returns to this topic explicitly and non-explicitly. Thus, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant (2002) does this by directly quoting Tarkovsky: its protagonist explicitly does not want to be happy, cultivating his «alienation». Less explicitly, but more radically this is done in Bakur Bakuradze’s Shultes (2008): the main character tries to edge out his accidental happiness (and there is no other happiness!) that was destroyed by a disaster, and turns into a professional «luck hunter», but fails.

Andrei Tarkovsky & the «Weak Messianic Power»

Alexander Skidan is a poet, essayist, critic, translator. Member of the editorial board at the New Literary Observer. Awardee of Andrei Bely’s prize (2006).

Andrei Tarkovsky probably never read, or even heard, of Walter Benjamin. But that fact is irrelevant for this paper; that discusses the structural similarity, or homology, between Benjamin’s idea of the messianic time and Tarkovsky’s cinema.

Unlike orthodox Marxists and theorists of social democracy, Benjamin criticized the idea of historical progress-in it, he saw a permanent disaster. In his opinion, it is the past, not the future that must be saved. The basic principle of his historical materialism is a stop, an «interruption of the context». Tarkovsky demonstrates this «messianic cessation of happening» (Benjamin’s expression), first of all, in The Mirror, where documentary footage interrupts the diegesis, tears «a certain epoch from the homogeneous course of history». This visual principle is echoed in a text: Pushkin’s letter to Chaadaev dated 19 October 1836, which in the film is read (quoted) by Ignat. In this and other similar scenes, Tarkovsky paradoxically sublimates and saves (in Benjamin’s sense) all the Soviet era, or, rather, its messianic, meta-historical meaning.

Coincidence-image vs. Excess-image: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hong Sang Soo & the Modernism of the Coincidental

Yoel Regev is a philosopher, professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His areas of expertise include materialist dialectics, speculative realism, history of modern philosophy. He has published papers in English, Hebrew and Russian dedicated to philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Marion, Alain Badiou, as well as to methodological problems of academic studies in Jewish mysticism and problems of radical secularisation.

Film is a radical means of revolutionary self-liberation of actuality; this argument by Gilles Deleuze places cinema in the very centre of the modernist project of «unspelling» and emancipation of reality. In the centre of the Deleuzian interpretation of cinema’s liberating essence is the notion of «time-image» that brings about the materialistic expropriation of theology’s inner core: the cinema of revelation-without-fear-of-God that turns the world itself, always new and always impossible, into the object of faith.

The aim of this paper is to uncover the fundamental duality of this Deleuzian notion. The confrontation of the modernism of excess and the modernism of coincidence will be shown to be one of the main conflicts of the modern cinema. The dialectic of this struggle of the two kinds of modernism and two strategies of «victory over time» is clarified with the help of films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Hong Sang Soo.

The End of Postmodernism? The Return of Modernism?