Alessio Scarlato

Abstract

This paper goes over Tarkovsky’s cinema throught three spectres: Stalin, the Mother, the Apocalypse. The vision of these three spectres allows Tarkovsky to cheris the memory of martirs and victims of totalitarian power giving him in the meanwhile the opportunity to investigate the obsessions that move his gaze. Traces that tell the invisible side of the History, secret images that show the deep reasons of narrative and component mechanisms in some of his works (in particular, The Mirror, Stalker, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice). The three spectres are confronted with similar, but opposite, figures in Eisenstein’s cinema.

Alessio Scarlato is the author of the following volumes: La Zona del Sacro. L’estetica cinematografica di Andrej Tarkovskij (The Zone of the Sacred. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Cinematographic Aesthetics) Preprint, 2005; Robert Bresson. La meccanica della grazia (Robert Bresson. The Mechanics of the Grace), Ente dello Spettacolo, 2006; L’immagine di Cristo, le parole del romanzo. Dostoevskij e la filosofia russa (The Image of the Christ, the Words of the Novel. Dostoevsky and the Russian Philosophy), Mimesis, 2006; 20 gennaio 1942. Auschwitz e l’estetica della testimonianza (20 January 1942. Auschwitz and the Aesthetics of the Testimony), NEU, Roma, 2009; he is the co-author of the volume, Splendore e miseria del cinema. Sulle Histoire(s) di Jean-Luc Godard (Splendour and Misery of Cinma. About Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s)), Luigi Pellegrini editore, 2010, along with Luca Venzi and Alessia Cervini.