The ruins of history

Abstract

What is the essential validity of Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky’s work for contemporary cinema? It is the fact that the symptoms of the moral disease of our civilization denounced by Tarkovsky have intensified rather than reduced as the years have passed. Tarkovsky’s heroes are the poor and the sick, children and mad people: spiritual orphans who carry the signs of martyrdom. Yet their very fragility becomes the source of their salvation as they seek spiritual fullness through the abolition of history. For contemporary man has become dispossessed of tradition, a situation that has been characterized by Walter Benjamin, and latterly by Giorgio Agamben, using images from the art of, respectively, Paul Klee and Albrecht Dürer. In contemporary culture there is a contradiction between art and history, and this contradiction is the essential theme of Tarkovsky’s work.