Over at Extravagant Creation, Michael McIntyre has a very interesting post interacting with responses to Bird’s somewhat recent book on Tarkovsky.
McIntyre is a great resource for Tarkovsky scholarship, and is often interested in the lack of well-reasoned religious response to his films, asking this time around:
Where can one find books or articles that take seriously this obvious connection between Tarkovsky and the Russian religious philosophers of the Silver Age, that study it in depth? Believe me, I have looked for them, at least among publications in English. Perhaps I’ve just overlooked them? The book I’ve seen that treats Tarkovsky the most seriously, from a religious point of view, is Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, edited by Gunnlaugur A. Jónsson and Thorkell Á. Óttarsson (the editors, and many of the contributors to this book, are Icelandic). And one of the chapters in this book, the one by Torsten Kälvemark, actually does discuss the Russian religious philosophers. Kälvemark also points the way to a 2001 book, in Russian, by Igor Evlampiev (in English, it would be titled Andrei Tarkovsky’s Philosophy of Art), which Kälvemark says “probably provides the most well-founded analysis of all books published on the philosophical ideas of the filmmaker.”