ABSTRACT
Even art films are not necessarily expressions of philosophical stances. In their way of representing a certain relationship between humans and the physical world, however, Tarkovsky's films are. Moreover, his films are philosophical not in the banal sense that they evoke “philosophical” ideas. They are philosophical in the very particular sense that they can be interpreted adequately against a specific philosophical background that is deeply rooted in Russian culture and of which most of Tarkovsky's films, in more than one respect, can be considered as another manifestation. Tarkovsky inserts himself into a cultural tradition of Russian Christian philosophy, and his films can be considered as a series of cinematic treatises on the question of how this tradition can be continued or revitalized in the civilization of the late twentieth century. In a unique way in the history of cinema, Tarkovsky does not merely develop a particular form or launch a particular idea; his seven long feature films can be lined up as various stages of the evolution in a particular train of thought. He was also among those rare filmmakers who did not take on a fashionable anti-intellectual mask by claiming that he was unable to comment on his own films. He seized every occasion to talk and write about the ideas developed in his films. So in many ways he claimed a theoretical status beside his filmmaker-artist status. In this essay I will follow the line of development of a certain idea central to this philosophical tradition: the construction of the person. I will compare the films of Tarkovsky with the ideas of Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) to show that Tarkovsky was indeed under the philosophical influence of Russian Christian Personalism, and that his films represent a particular renaissance of this thinking in a period in which these ideas were clearly unwelcome in the Soviet Union. Tarkovsky's films, of course, cannot be reduced to an adherence to personalist philosophy. This is only one aspect of Tarkovsky's work, but an important one, and this will be the subject of this essay.
