Author(s): Jacob Carr
Mentor(s): Kyle Bishop
Institution SUU
Over the course of his less-than-three-decade career Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky made films spanning a variety of genres. Notably, in a time when Soviet filmmaking was primarily focused on historical and military dramas, Tarkovsky produced a small handful of science fiction films that made waves in both the Soviet Union and internationally. Solaris (1972), his first science fiction film, is rightfully lauded as one of the great sci-fi masterpieces of world cinema and studied as such. However for all the praise directed at Solaris’s use of genre cues and imagery, Tarkovsky’s later science fiction endeavors – Stalker (1979) and the less “futuristic” but equally speculative The Sacrifice (1986) – have primarily been critically evaluated on their philosophical merits with the genre studies approach taking a back seat to exploration of their allegorical importance. Though a philosophical analysis of these films can be enlightening, I wish to reorient these films as important within the science fiction canon rather than simply as impressive art films. In this presentation I will seek to approach Stalker and The Sacrifice from a genre standpoint with a particular focus on the way each film presents apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and pre-apocalyptic space from a decidedly Soviet point of view, and I will examine the way the characters and the camera move through these spaces. In my presentation I will utilize the theoretical lens of film image theory, to reveal the anti-Soviet ideologies inherently embedded within Tarkovsky’s cinematographic images and the visual rhetoric of how these ideologies are presented. Through this framework I will contextualize Tarkovsky’s apocalyptic space and show how the presentation of space and place in these films offer a subtle yet scathing critique of the Soviet Union and the state of the world in which the director lived.