An Ecocritical Revaluation of the Cinematic Time-Image: Tarkovsky’s Solaris

Abstract

This article undertakes an ecocritical revaluation of the cinematic time-image through a consideration of Andrei Tarkovsky’s concept of time-pressure developed in his book Sculpting in Time. Responding to Adrian Ivakhov’s proposal for a film theory capable of redeeming the perceptual continuum of the human and the other-than-human threatened by ecological catastrophe, the article proposes a revaluation of the material reality of the film-world of Tarkovsky’s film Solaris insofar as it makes real connections with nature as a complex whole, through the dissipating potentials of entropy. Drawing on Tarkovsky’s ideas and filmic practice, I define time-pressure as an image of time traversing its own becoming, forming a naturalistic time-image in a becoming-whole that includes an image of the whole opening to the Beyond: the absolute otherness beyond the frame. In contrast to Gilles Deleuze’s a-synthetic time-image (Cinema 1, Cinema 2), which remains cut off from real connections, Tarkovsky’s naturalistic time-image is able to account for real connections as a revaluation of cinematic perception shifting from anthropo-cinematic to ecocinematic seeing.