Lyrical Vision: The Cinematic Aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky

This dissertation explores Andrei Tarkovsky's aesthetics, his "cinematics," a concept meant to evoke poetics, but firmly grounded in film form. That is, the study investigates not just Tarkovsky's engagement with issues of film form, but also why that engagement was so important for him and what it implies about the nature of the cinema. In examining this concept it also investigates how it is possible to seriously consider a film as poetic or lyrical, adjectives frequently attached to Tarkovsky. Each of Tarkovsky's seven features is examined in relation to camera movement, editing, performance or issues of narrative. Film theory, particularly that of Siegfried Kracauer, Sergei Eisenstein, David Bordwell and Tarkovsky himself are also examined in an effort to contextualize Tarkovsky in formal history.;Part One begins by examining the issue of voice as it pertains to cinematic narrative. Looking at Tarkovsky's first and final films, it becomes clear that Tarkovsky stripped narrative down over the course of his career. His films still offer distinct excesses of detail that serve as a signature. Part One concludes by examining Tarkovsky's use of actors and to what end. Paradoxically, by denying the inner depth of character in performance, the camera is able to reveal it in time.;Part Two explores Tarkovsky's understanding of the shot as the basic unit of cinematic rhythm and the moving long take as the key device in Tarkovsky's cinematics. Tarkovsky's camera movements are responsible not only for the sense of the shot, but that thus time is most forcefully captured by the cinematic apparatus. Contrasting Tarkovsky's theorizing with that of Eisenstein teases out how rhythm may in fact be created in shooting and not editing.;Part Three returns to issues of narrative in an attempt to come to terms with the lyrical qualities of Tarkovsky's cinema. As Tarkovsky frequently linked the cinema to the chronicle, an examination of the commonalities of the two media via the writings of Dmitrii Likhachev reveal an unlikely affinity. This affinity---a commitment to the fact of an event over its potential narrative significance---also links the cinema to the lyric poem.