“‘Everything that is, is light’: Andrey Tarkovsky and experimental film in the US (using the example of Stan Brakhage).” A lecture by Robert Bird

DESCRIPTION

Invited by the classic of American experimental film Stan Brakhage, in 1983 Andrey Tarkovsky visited the Telluride Film Festival (Colorado). Along with a mini-retrospective of Tarkovsky’s pictures, Brakhage’s own new film—Hell Spit Flexion (1983)— was screened at the festival.

Using the opportunity, Brakhage also showed the Russian colleague his other works by projecting them on the wallpaper in a hotel room. Inspired by this experience, he wrote an essay about the seminal (non)meeting with Tarkovsky and the Russian classic’s attitude to experimental film. Based on this story, Robert Bird’s lecture will trace similarities between the practice of Tarkovsky and the evolution of experimental film (from Maya Deren to Nathaniel Dorsky).

ABOUT THE LECTURER

Robert Bird is Professor at the University of Chicago, specialist in the history and theory of twentieth-century Russian literature and film. Author of books about Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov. Bird’s book about the film Andrey Rublev was published in 2005, while in 2008 he released the book Andrey Tarkovsky. The Elements of Cinema. Bird is author of articles on Alexander Sokurov, the aesthetic of the Lenfilm Studios, the video works of Olga Chernyshova, and the paintings of Alexander Medvedkin. In 2017 he participated in the preparation of the exhibition Revolution Every Day at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and contributed to its comprehensive catalogue. He is currently completing the monograph Socialist Realism as a Model and is beginning work on the book Underground: Toward the History of Image-Concept.

HOW TO TAKE PART

Free admission with advance registration.

The talk will be delivered in English with simultaneous translation into Russian.

REGISTRATION