Corporeality and Transcendence: Physicality, Suffering, and Eroticism in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev

This essay explores the relationship between the notion of corporeality in its various connotations, notably its aesthetic aspects, and the iconography of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966). The focus on the individual that struggles to achieve the desired transcendence through both artistic production and the gradual development of a conscious poetic relationship to everyday life has interesting philosophical connotations: our focus is not as much on the spiritual aspects of this exploration, as in the corporeal, sensual element that is carefully linked with natural environment in Tarkovsky’s narratives. In Tarkovsky’s films, and Andrei Rublev in particular, the desired transcendence is achieved through the flesh, through the focus on the human body. In this respect, phenomenology proves to be more than a tool for reading the film: the relationship between the present (difficult to approach) and the past (both collective, manifested in culture, and personal, approached through memory) lies at the heart of the film. The relationship between such philosophical concerns and the iconography of the film, the reconstruction of a medieval time, notably depicted as direct and approached through the senses rather than distant like an ideological construction, will be explored through the lens of poetry, perceived as a way to approach everyday life and an almost fetishistic visual and narrative emphasis on a physical violence, the other face of sensuality.