Tarkovsky's Cinematic Landscape

The Great Dream of Nature in Tarkovsky’s Landscape

Tarkovsky’s cinematic landscape serves as a conceptual means, exactly like the chôra, to express that which is inconceptualisable. In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky states that his films are not made to be deciphered as a set of signs and symbolisms, but “watched as one watches the stars, or the sea, as one admires a landscape. There is no mathematical logic here, for it cannot explain what man is or what is the meaning of life” . A paradox seems to arise in the fact that, on the one hand, the notion of landscape functions as a major aesthetic principle in his work, but on the other hand, that there are few literal landscapes to be found in his films. Landscapes in this case refer

Unlike any other filmmaker of his generation, Tarkovsky’s films invent a language of the spirit through the poetry of cinematic images. As opposed to the genre of “religious films” which deal with the role of religion in the lives of people, the “spiritual cinema” of Tarkovsky is about interior terrains where a person is one with oneself – where faith is not about making public declarations of belief but more about waiting for the miracle to happen, a miracle that occurs on the borders of invisible realms and can be felt rather than logically

Above all Tarkovsky is interested in the Russian earth. However, no excessive imagery or fetishisation of the earth as a material substance can be observed in his films. On the contrary, the earth’s presence is always omniscient and suggestive, only reflecting people’s attitude towards it. It is through his characters that the earth becomes spiritualised. One thing is clear, as represented, for instance in the Stalker’s monologue in Stalker, as he buries his hands in the earth and nestles his face into the grass of the ‘zone’. Tarkovsky does not excessively highlight the physical matter of the earth as a spiritually charged substance, instead it is human reunion with the earth at the moment of hubris, humbling and renouncement of superiority that gives the earth its spiritual power and