The present volume approaches the works of Soviet director Andrej Tarkovskij (1933-86) as one of the most radical attempts to translate the sacred into images through film. The starting point of this study is an examination of "Sculpting Time", an essay on film aesthetics that the Soviet director wrote a few months before his death. Tarkovskij intreprets cinema as the art of temporal images. The duty to preserve such temporality makes it possible to identify some poietic rules of composition that are different from those that the cinema has often borrowed from other arts.
Tarkovskij's approach must be contextualized within the Russian religious tradition. The distinction between temporal and literary images emerges as a version, applied to film, of the dualisms characteristic of Russian religious thought, which has often articulated its identity in ways that are oppositional to Western philosophy. The temporal image is that which preserves life as an event (in contrast with the notion that would nihilistically want to anticipate it). Like an icon, the temporal image has the function of translating the otherness of God into image, through Christ.
By analyzing the most significant scenes of some of Tarkovskij's movies, the central chapter of this volume discusses the relationship between technique and the sacred, starting from two apparently heterogeneous approaches: on the one hand, the film aesthetics theories (e.g., Benjamin, Bazin, Schrader) that address the mechanical nature of this medium and the possibility of preserving ethical respect toward the reality it represents, whose otherness in relation to the perceiving subject must be respected; on the other hand, the orthodox tradition (e.g., Florenskij, Sergej Bulgakov) that, on the contrary, interprets the sacred image as a privileged opening to the sacred which is ascetically realized by the artist-spectator, but which is made possible only by divine grace.
The closing chapter focuses on a close analysis of the movie Stalker (1979), where Tarkovskij's goal of creating "film icons" becomes particularly clear. Originally conceived as a science-fiction movie, it turns into a rendition in images of the spiritual journey of the three types of the saint, the artist, and the scientist towards the "Zone", a place that is beyond any definite representation but that, at the same time, blurs into the reality of our everyday world; a paradoxical place which also recalls in disturbing ways the Soviet lager.