Deleuze and Tarkovsky : the time image and post-war Soviet cinema history

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) is remembered as one of Russia's most influential and celebrated filmmakers. Over the course of his career he released seven feature films: Ivan’s Childhood (1962); Andrei Rublev (1966, USSR release 1971); Solaris (1972); Mirror (1975); Stalker (1979); Nostalghia (1983); and The Sacrifice (1986). Drawing on a history of post-war Soviet cinema, this thesis brings his films into contact with the concepts outlined in Gilles Deleuze’s two radical books on film: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Deleuze's Cinema books provide a system of classifications – what he calls a taxonomy or geology – of cinematic images. While their primary focus is on Western-European and American cinema, this thesis re-conceives Deleuze’s approach to film outside of that narrow context. My approach is informed by the specific historical, cultural, and industrial contexts of Tarkovsky's films, establishing the first sustained encounter between Deleuze and post-war Soviet cinema. In doing so, I offer a fresh perspective on Deleuze’s cinema concepts by re-conceiving the division between his 'movement-image' and 'time-image' in the context of the post-war Thaw, the development of the Soviet space programme, Stagnation, and the escalation of nuclear threat following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.