Aleksei Balabanov: Brother (Kino Sputnik 5)

Abstract

illuminating it through the work of Deleuze and Bergson on duration, memory and the filmimage, with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy, specifically his notions of intertwining/chiasm and the flesh of the world. The inclusion of these three philosophers, among others, enhances the enquiry into the different ways in which the film achieves transcendence. Starting with the film’s final dream scene, Efird explores the instability and fluidity of subjectivity as it interacts with temporality, spatiality and memory – in essence demonstrating the ubiquity of intersubjectivity as that of a primal intercorporeality. This intercorporeality, or ‘interpenetration’ (141), is shown to exist not just between the different characters, but also between them and the material and natural worlds, between their actual and virtual realities and, further, between personal and historical fields. The text itself in this chapter is a profound meditation into the diverse ways in which Tarkovsky’s camera makes visible the realms of an invisible, pre-verbal, all-encompassing state that is best captured by notions such as transcendence and the absolute. Throughout the book, Efird burrows into the sinews of the film, painstakingly attending to how the film-maker ‘attempts to create a kind of aperture into the Absolute through a seemingly paradoxical concentration on the physical world’ (137). How deliberate was Tarkovsky in rendering to film the deeper structures, meanings and relationships that Efird’s book posits and explores? Whatever the answer, this text elucidates much that frequently remains absent from analyses of Ivan’s Childhood and, in the process, reveals something crucial about the complex interlacing of temporality, subjectivity, memory and experience – within and beyond the film. Furthermore, it addresses with fierce commitment the ways in which ‘eternity opens through the material reality of the present moment’ (140) in Tarkovsky’s work.