Icons and film imagery

The schism between Rome and Byzantine not only divided Eastern and Western Christendom, but also gave birth to very different conceptions of images in the West and the East. And this has also had quite a momentous impact on secular art and culture. Andrej Tarkovskij’s film Andrej Rubljov about the great icon painter who lived in a 15th century Russia ravaged by war, poverty and the plague, reveals elements of ‘spiritual cinema’. In this film, he develops the notion that the metaphysical is incarnated in a saintly image into a concept of the transcendence of the concrete in film imagery and sound. Tarkovskij’s films result in a practice of film art that is not so very different from Master Eckhart’s and Johannes Damascenus’ conception of painting or from Taoist thought.

7 p.m.

Talk:Dr. Hans-Joachim Schlegel, film historian and theoretician, head of the interdisciplinary symposia at the Wiesbaden goEast film festival, Berlin

Film

Andrej Rubljov

D: Andrej Tarkovskij,USSR 1966, 182 min.