To Melt the Mirror and to Sculpt the Image. Tarkovsky, Agriculture and the Transformation of Landscape

Abstract

In her book The Cinematic Footprint (2012), film studies scholar Nadia Bozak proposes an analysis of the cinematographic production of images based on the consumption of energy and matter resources upon which it depends. From this point of view, this article examines three scenes from the filmography of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. By inquiring about the material conditions of his production, a field of interactions beyond representation between image and landscape transformation is brought to the foreground.

Tarkovsky's work is then analyzed in this text from the relationships established throughout the 20th century between image, extractivism and plant growth. In particular, the examined sequences will be related to agrarian colonization programs, precision agriculture practices and reforestation techniques such as seed bombardment. The contrast between the extractivist nature of these cases and the character of "vegetable cinema practice" with which Tarkovsky's cinema has been described (Uhlin 2015) invites us to rearticulate the difference between image and plant growth in terms of the so-called elemental media approach introduced during the last decade in the domain of media theory.