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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1454-2487

Abstract

In an era increasingly defined by acceleration, fragmentation, and commodification, the act of watching cinema has become subject to the same regimes of optimization that govern nearly all other domains of life. Streaming platforms quantify attention and the rhythms of visual consumption seem to be calibrated for distraction, rather than immersion. As film theorist Jonathan Beller stresses, in the contemporary attention economy, spectatorship itself becomes a form of labor enlisted into the machinery of value extraction. Within this cultural (and ocularcentric) regime to engage with the cinematic oeuvre of Andrei Tarkovsky is a radical counter-practice. Operating in the liminal space between narrative and oneiric experiences, his films evoke durational poetics and spiritual themes, decelerating the image and de-automating vision. Rather than functioning as vehicles for plot, they stage a form of cinematic asceticism which, as critic Catherine Fowler observes, “refuses to deliver.”

In this essay, I propose to examine the spiritual dimension of Tarkovsky’s cinema through the conceptual prism of numen - a term that, in its classical understanding, designates an impersonal sacred force that permeates and animates the world. By invoking the notion of numen, I seek to articulate how Tarkovsky’s films evoke a sense of transcendence that is neither dogmatically religious nor overtly theological, but rather immanent, residing in the textures of matter, memory, and time. His cinema becomes a site where the sacred is experienced as a subtle vibration within the fabric of the visible, a force that discloses itself through light, gesture, and duration.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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30

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