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DELEUZE ON TARKOVSKY: THE CRYSTAL-IMAGE
OF TIME IN STEAMROLLER AND VIOLIN
1 . For the most part, commentaries on the film are confined to larger studies and genera
as in Peter Green's assessment, it is "as a forerunner of the later films and a point of refer
for Tarkovsky's stylistic development" that the film achieves significance (20, 21). This is
to say that the evaluations are negative. Boldyrev, for instance, describes it as a "little mas
piece" (117), and Turovskaya, with cautious enthusiasm, characterizes it as a work "whic
serves to be regarded as an integral part of Tarkovsky's oeuvre" (27). On the other hand, the
most recent monographs on Tarkovsky's work, Nariman Skakov's The Cinema of Tarko
Labyrinths of Space and Time and Thomas Redwood's Andrei Tarkovsky's Poetics of Cine
contain only fleeting references to the short work, nearly ignoring it entirely.
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238 Slavic and East European Journal
2. While they do not attempt to pursue analyses strictly along the lines of Deleuze's theories,
two of the more thorough examinations of time in Tarkovsky's films, Skakov's monograph and
Robert Bird's Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema , acknowledge early on the importance of
the philosopher's ideas in relation to the filmmaker's work and reach conclusions at least par-
tially informed by his writings. In general, there has been little dispute with Slavoj Žižek's ob-
servation that "[pjerhaps Tarkovsky's films are the clearest example of what Deleuze called the
time-image replacing the movement-image" (249), but, with the exception of Anna Powell's
analysis of Stalker (1979) in Deleuze , Altered States and Film , the most informative studies on
the correspondences between Deleuze and Tarkovsky (Mark Riley's "Disorientation, Duration
and Tarkovsky" and Terence McSweeney's "Sculpting the Time Image") deal primarily with
theory and take relatively few examples from the film themselves.
3. It is actually with a quote from Tarkovsky's 1979 article "On the Cinematic Image" (pub-
lished in French translation in 1981) that Deleuze illustrates the emergence of the direct image
of time from the movement-image:
"The time in a shot must flow independently and, so to speak, as its own boss": it is only
on this condition that the shot goes beyond the movement-image, and montage goes be-
yond indirect representation of time, to both share in a direct time-image, the one deter-
mining the form or rather force of time in the image, the other the relations of time or of
forces in the succession of images (relations that are ho more reducible to succession,
than the image is to movement). (1989, 42)
4. Italics in the original. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Russian are my own.
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Deleuze on Tarkovsky 239
representative scenes in the way they are with the films of say Welles or
Resnais. Instead there are interesting but ultimately frustrating descriptions of
the filmmaker's "sodden washed and heavily translucent images" and an in-
triguing, though never fully articulated reference to the "liquid crystal" char-
acteristic of his works (Deleuze 1989, 75). Still, Deleuze effectively clarifies
Tarkovsky's apparent concentration on the shot (as opposed to montage) as
the primary vessel of temporal pressure or force. As he argues, the film-
maker's concentration on the temporal force of a single shot "is only superfi-
cial in appearance, because the force or pressure of time goes outside the lim-
its of the shot, and montage itself lives and works in time" (1989, 42). In fact
montage is critical in establishing various "relations of time," from which the
time-image itself emerges. However, Deleuze does not, in any practical de-
tail, examine the relationship between montage and the distinctive plan -
séquence nor any of the more focused long-takes, arguably the cornerstones
of Tarkovsky's cinematic grammar. It may be true, as McSweeney argues,
that it is with "Deleuze that we find the closest approximation of Tarkovskian
cinematic ideals," but the parallels are often far from perfect and the articula-
tions of the time-image can illuminate only specific, albeit key areas of any
given film (80). The concepts themselves may also demand considerable
modification when applied to developments later in the filmmaker's career.
The crystal-image, a distinct figure for the more general concept of the time-
image in which past and present, virtual and actual coalesce, contains aspects
vital to all of Tarkovsky's work. However, the various layers, circuits, and di-
mensions of time at different stages of crystallization in Steamroller and Vio-
lin will emerge in new forms later with the filmmaker's notorious long-takes,
which Deleuze nearly ignores and which his descriptions may not always be
well equipped to handle.
But despite these lacunae, the mixed success of analyses that have at-
tempted to integrate Deleuze 's ideas on time into considerations of
Tarkovsky's films, and the obvious difficulty of making these works consis-
tently conform to any theoretical standard (often including Tarkovsky's own),
many of the concepts described in Cinema 2 do shed considerable light on
what strikes so many viewers as unique, and often problematic, in all of
Tarkovsky's work. And surprisingly, perhaps nowhere do Deleuze's theories,
particularly those of the crystal-image, conform to Tarkovsky's practice as
closely as they do in Steamroller and Violin.5 This short film provides an ex-
5. As with the time-image, which Deleuze never explicitly defines, the crystal-image is an
often slippery concept that may appear in any number of permutations. In one of the more con-
cise explanations, Felicity Colman describes the crystal-image as one of the central terms for
determining the time-image: "the crystalline image of time, is variously referred to in the cin-
ema books as 'the time crystal', 'the crystal-image', 'seeds of time', 'mirrors of time' and the
'hyalosign', and appear where the expression of time coalesces, and the image both expresses
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240 Slavic and East European Journal
and produces a composite (time-image) of different types of layers of time, and different signs
of time, or crystalline circuits of time" (135-36).
In distinguishing the modern cinema of the time-image from classical cinema, Deleuze de-
scribes an organic regime of the movement-image, which links images together to form a ra-
tional totality of the world. The crystalline regime associated with the time-image, on the other
hand, will frequently de-link images, drawing the fundamental veracity of the narrative and the
world itself into question. As Rodowick explains, "the sensorimotor schema implies a world ap-
prehensible in an image of Truth as totality and identity [...]. In contrast, the direct image of time
presents situations where the problem of time puts the notion of truth into crisis" (84-85).
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Deleuze on Tarkovsky 241
figures in Soviet cinema. The screenplay was co-written with Andrei Koncha-
lovsky, Viacheslav Ovchinnikov composed the score, and Vadim Iusov, per-
haps the most important collaborator given the visual density of the film, han-
dled the cinematography. Iusov, famously, was actually the second choice of
the brash student filmmaker; the job was originally offered to Sergei Urusev-
sky, who shot Mikhail Kalatozov's seminal Cranes are Flying (1957). But de-
spite the obvious influence of Kalatozov's film, as well as Albert Lamorisse's
The Red Balloon (1956), Steamroller and Violin is surprisingly bold in its
originality.6 Deceptively couched in the conventionally Soviet plot of a priv-
ileged young musician learning about life from an upstanding member of the
working class, a relationship conspicuously paralleled with Chapaev (1934)
towards the end of the film, political consciousness and social responsibility
never emerge. Quite the contrary, as Alastair Renfrew writes:
The core significance of The Steamroller and Violin- quite apart from the individual elements
that are predictive of the full-length films that will follow, such as its reliance (insistence) on the
psychological and technical perspective of a child- lies in the way it appears to accept or, in a
sense, inhabit the stylistic and thematic framework of Socialist Realism, thereby re-accentuat-
ing and even subverting it to quite different ends. (102-3)
This "stylistic and thematic framework," as the filmmakers were well aware,
had long devolved into the realm of cliché. Recurring images, particularly the
ubiquitous reconstruction of the city, and the friendship at the center of the
plot, which Josephine Woll aptly labeled "a traditional worker -intelligent
alliance," are easily recognizable constituents in the formulaic chain of Social-
ist Realism (116). If nothing else, the plot is simple and (one would think) po-
litically inoffensive: Sasha, a gifted child plagued by bullies and unsympa-
thetic maternal figures, attaches himself to the charismatic worker Sergei,
spends part of a day learning to drive the shiny red steamroller, having lunch
with his new friend, and sulking when his mother refuses to let him out to see
Chapaev. The re-accentuation recognized by Renfrew arises with the disman-
tling of traditional associations and foregrounding instead objects or images
that, within the context of Socialist Realism, are essentially beside the point.
These movements did not go unnoticed at the time. Prior to release, as Robert
Bird has written, the Artistic Council complained that the film "displayed pro-
found ideological flaws," emerging in both the experimental form and the con-
spicuous disregard for developing the obligatory socialist messages hovering
at the periphery (31). It is not that the work parodies or openly subverts the
cliches to which it alludes: "[t]he problem was instead that his treatment of the
6. Tarkovsky 's early collaborator Aleksandr Gordon, as well as biographer Viktor Filimonov,
asserts that the director, like many other Russian cinéphiles at the time, was particularly inspired
by Lamorisse's work. The influence is apparent not only in the bright red color of the steam-
roller (as well as the numerous balloons appearing at the beginning of Tarkovsky 's film) but also
the evocation of an idealistic world at the conclusion of the film and the development of the
friendship between Sasha and Sergei. See Gordon 126-29, and Filimonov 110.
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242 Slavic and East European Journal
conventional themes and stories of the Soviet system avoided staking out an
explicit position, and this lack of definition was adjudged to be a dangerous
'silence'" (Bird 33).
But while Tarkovsky's incomplete deployment of reflexi vely familiar
tropes (such as the fragmentary May Day banners raised and then ignored
early in the film) and the failure to follow the traditional narrative trajectory
were considered artistic failures by the authorities, it is precisely from within
this deconstruction that the larger concerns of the film begin to emerge.7 The
refusal to meet conditioned expectations at the thematic level is mirrored sty-
listically, where illogical cuts and an unexpected concentration on everyday
objects serves to further remove customary associations, essentially breaking
the established conditions of diegetic reality and habitual patterns of percep-
tion along with ideological or political schemata. Such a disruption of the-
matic and stylistic cliché, according to Deleuze, stimulates active thought and
sets the conditions for the emergence of the time-image, serving "to rarefy the
image, by suppressing many things that have been added to make us believe
that we are seeing everything" (1989, 21). By the same token, this new orga-
nization seeks to restore "the lost parts, to rediscover everything that cannot
be seen in the image, everything that has been removed to make it 'interest-
ing'" (21).8 In Steamroller and Violin , as well as the later productions, this
rarefication or restoration is accomplished in large part by a striking departure
from traditional structures of cinematic subjectivity.
Sasha's pause before the shop window early in the film marks Tarkovsky's
first real endeavor in this area; there is little in his work on The Killers (1956)
and There Will Be No Leave Today (1959) to indicate a course so radically dif-
ferent from the standard (or classic) cinematic practice. As the boy looks into
the glass the camera slowly closes in behind his head, a move the filmmaker
would use throughout his career to initiate fantastic or oneiric sequences, or
simply to emphasize that the narrative is moving into the consciousness of the
character. Here, rather than immediately cutting, the camera swings into
Sasha's line of sight as he steps out of frame to the right. When the cut does
come the boy is then reflected in four small mirrors and looking slightly to the
side, a closer approximation of his gaze into the window. He suddenly looks
7. For Deleuze, where the cliché is "a sensory motor image of the thing" and sets of clichés
act as a kind of adhesive for the continuity and totality of the diegetic world, consciousness of
their use and the refusal to fulfill them (without resorting to parody or engaging in propagation)
marks "one of the five apparent characteristics of the new image" (1989, 20; 1986, 210). It is
also worth noting here that Tarkovsky himself expressed rather early in his career the intention
to break up the "prejudices" and "clichés of thought" surrounding established traditions and
techniques (1967, 69).
8. "Interesting" here in the sense that "we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety,
we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather
what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and
psychological demands. We therefore normally perceive only clichés" (Deleuze 1989, 20).
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Deleuze on Tarkovsky 243
away, a move which would seem to indicate the traditional point/glance shot,
but the succeeding images, which the editing deceptively suggests would be
the point/object shot, are again series of reflections. Multiple images of build-
ings and traffic offer a fragmented, virtual representation of the surrounding
world, a heavily stylized account of Sasha's perception but not, strictly speak-
ing, a subjective one. This becomes clearer as fractured images of a construc-
tion site give way to a woman dropping apples and a woman carrying balloons,
both of whom passed behind the boy several moments earlier as he first
stepped up to the window and could not possibly be seen from his position.
The image of the second woman moving towards the camera merges into that
of a girl, who moves away with a bundle of differently colored balloons.
Though none of these images can be coming from Sasha's point of view, the
kaleidoscopic montage nevertheless ties them to his gaze by inserting several
shots of him looking. The illusion that this is his perception is thus intentional,
but at the same time the shots are not objective in the usual cinematic sense.
Rather, "subjectivity is completely mystified through that practice of false
objectivism," a particular variation of what the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo
Pasolini described as free indirect subjectivity (181). Here, rather than explic-
itly replicating perspective through the traditional point-of-view shot, the vi-
sion, emotions, and interests of the character are described from the position
of a second subjectivity which, in Deleuze 's revision of Pasolini 's concept,
"imposes another vision in which the first is transformed and reflected" (1986,
74). In these circumstances the film does not depict the character's gaze but
rather reshapes or frames it through an autonomous "camera consciousness."
In the shop window sequence this second position does not fully synthesize
two distinct subjective visions but rather, as described by Deleuze, constructs
"a differentiation of two correlative subjects in a system which is itself hetero-
geneous" (1986, 73).9 This technique, "a case of going beyond the subjective
and the objective towards a pure Form which sets itself up as an autonomous
vision of the content" (1986, 74), comes to the fore in a slightly different man-
ner a few moments later as the boy struggles through his music lesson.
Here, in arguably the most fascinating single shot of the film, we initially
see Sasha in a close-up, but, as in the first shot before the window, the cam-
era soon shifts from this objective angle into what would appear to be his line
of sight. After scanning the sheet music in an extreme close-up, the screen
gradually blurs as the boy becomes more and more lost in his playing. The
teacher's demand that he come to himself snaps his attention, along with the
image, back into focus and we find that his gaze has wandered over to a glis-
tening carafe of water, shaking slightly to the movement of the camera. Thus,
within the single shot, we have both an objective angle on the boy and what
9. Pasolini 's descriptions are, as Deleuze notes, adapted from Voloshinov's concept of free
indirect discourse in literature in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
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244 Slavic and East European Journal
10. In fact, as Deleuze suggests in Cinema 2, rather than being simply an aberrant category
within the perception-image, which itself is a kind of subcategory to the movement-image, free
indirect subjectivity may bring into question the veracity of the story and open it to what he
terms "the powers of the false," characteristic of the time-image. See Deleuze 1989, 148-49. In
such situations, "[t]he movement-image has not disappeared, but now exists only as the first di-
mension of an image that never stops growing in dimensions" (1989, 22).
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Deleuze on Tarkovsky 245
larger disjunction between perception and action, one integral to the film's
presentation of non-chronological time.
The sequence at the shop window as well as the shot at the music lesson
herald the breakdown of logical spatiotemporal coordinates and consequently
the semblance of wholeness implied by regular continuity editing and the de-
ployment of stylistic cliché, what Deleuze (following Henri Bergson) labels
the "sensory-motor schema." Together with the shift into a kind of acentered
perception, this collapse is fashioned by the unexpected intrusion of irrational
cuts into the story, which rather than linking successive images together into
a continuous diegetic whole acquire autonomous value as a disjunctive force
of differentiation between them (Deleuze 1989, 213). As multiplied images
flash through the mirrors from indeterminate and, in the case of the woman
with the apples or the girl with the balloons, impossible points behind Sasha,
the boy himself inexplicably and instantaneously changes position several
times over the course of the scene. This discontinuity marks an abrupt depar-
ture from linear causality and with it an even more noticeable break between
perception and action. At varying distances from the window, Sasha is alter-
nately positioned facing it, with his back to it, and turned to the side. The dis-
persive editing, rather than linking the images, creates disruptive interstitial
gaps, which disconnect them into singular blocks of space and time. For
Deleuze the disruption would be the force of time operating within the inter-
val and giving way to aberrant movements and illogical spatial relationships,
amplified in Tarkovsky 's film by the shift into a destabilized perceptual
stance.11 But the experience in this sequence is also magnified by the use of
the mirrors. The lacunary montage of the sequence creates what Deleuze
would describe as "direct presentations of time," in this case juxtaposed pres-
ents conspicuously removed from an empirical chronology. With the mirrors,
however, the depth of the temporal image takes on an additional dimension,
a concentrated circuit of actual and virtual states, which reveals a temporal
process of "differentiation into two flows, that of the presents which pass and
that of the pasts which are preserved" (1989, 98). The virtual, incorporeal but
no less real than the physical, is this preserved past forever expanding from a
point of infinite contraction with the actual in the present, in addition to com-
1 1 . For Deleuze this force of time is the "power of the outside," which replaces the implied
spatiotemporal continuity of the diegetic world in classic cinema with the discontinuity of per-
petual becoming and differentiation: "as long as the whole is the indirect representation of time,
the continuous is reconciled with the discontinuous in the form of rational points and according
to commensurable relations [...]. But, when the whole becomes the power of the outside which
passes into the interstice, then it is the direct presentation of time, or the continuity which is rec-
onciled with the sequence of irrational points, according to non-chronological time relation-
ships" (1989, 181). These irrational points, as Bogue clarifies, "take on the continuity of simul-
taneous presents, coexisting pasts, or metaphoric becomings, and each of the irrational points is
the manifestation of a 'point of the outside from beyond the external world'" (182).
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246 Slavic and East European Journal
12. The general descriptions of the crystal-image (and the overarching time-image) are tied
to the three schémas of memory and perception drawn up in chapters II and III of Bergson's
Matter and Memory : the circuit, the cone, and the event. A fourth schema, the dissymmetrical
jets formed at the point where time splits as it pushes into the future and falls into the preserved
past, is perhaps most relevant to the actual/virtual coalescence and the coexistence of the pres-
ent and the contemporaneous past described in the crystal-image. This schema, as Rodowick
points out (220), is actually drawn by Deleuze from his reading of memory formation in Berg-
son's Mind Energy.
13. As McSweeney points out (87), this may correspond to the actual and the virtual as the
two indiscernible sides of the crystal-image and also an area where Tarkovsky too seems influ-
enced by Bergson's ideas on time and memory.
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Deleuze on Tarkovsky 247
But more importantly for the present instance, water forms the physical and
metaphoric nexus of Tarkovsky's crystalline regime, the key element in a
continuum of images like mirrors and windows, which determines the distinct
characteristics of the film's individual crystalline signs. Of these, Deleuze's
description contains three potentially integrated aspects: "Exchange or indis-
cernibility thus follow each other in three ways in the crystalline circuit: the
actual and the virtual (or the two mirrors face to face); the limpid and the
opaque; the seed and the environment" (1989, 71). Remarkably for a film-
maker whose works seldom match up with theoretical blueprints, Steamroller
and Violin provides compelling examples of all three figures and, each of
them, as in the actual/virtual circuit in the sequence at the shop window, in-
volves water.
14. Duration, as adapted from Bergson, is a key concept throughout Deleuze's cinema books
though, like his philosophy of time, it often seems to rely on elaborations developed in his other
works. As Rodowick explains, this "transcendental form of time" is not quantifiable in discrete
intervals but is "an indivisible, ceaseless, and ever-changing flow" (123). Paradoxically, while
duration is singular and indivisible, as the past pushes into the future the perpetual unfolding of
duration produces a virtual multiplicity constantly changing and in flux. As Deleuze declares in
Bergsonism , however, this multiplicity "is precisely not 'multiple;' it is One" (85). The time-
image "goes beyond the purely empirical succession of time- past-present-future" (1989, xii)
to create an awareness or intuition of duration, "the virtual coexistence of all the degrees of a
single and identical time" (Deleuze 1991, 85).
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248 Slavic and East European Journal
The limpid and the opaque is actually an extension of the actual and the vir-
tual, a figure for the oscillation between virtual obscurity and clear actuality.
As Deleuze describes the event, "when the virtual image becomes actual, it is
then visible and limpid, as in the mirror or the solidity of finished crystal"
(1989, 70). Steamroller and Violin provides numerous distinct examples of
this circuit, which seem to mark deliberate stages in a progression. The first
is from the shot at the music lesson described above. There, where space has
been noticeably flattened and distorted, the image literally does fade into ob-
scurity, balancing in a perceptual limbo between subjective and objective
poles as the details soften. The shift back into focus pulls the image from
opacity, although the spatial distortion of the shot would seem to remain. It is
not by chance, given the later iterations, that this move into actuality, or at
least indiscernibility, from a virtual state occasioned by the music teacher's
admonitions, takes place as the camera focuses on the carafe of shifting water.
In the film's climactic scene, Sasha's impromptu recital for Sergei during
their lunch hour, instances of this limpid/opaque exchange abound. The set-
ting itself is the most typically "tarkovskian" of the film; a dilapidated struc-
ture in the process of reconstruction or disintegration, open to the elements
and filled with pools of water flashing reflected light on the walls. It is a clear
predecessor to the ruined church of Ivans Childhood , Domenico's home in
Nostalghia (1983), and any number of the buildings in Stalker. It is also a
compelling example of Deleuze 's "any-space- whatever," a disconnected or
empty space whose destabilization provides the soil for the emergence of the
purely optical or sound image disconnected with the ongoing action of the
story. This is a concept which covers a rather wide area in Deleuze 's writings
and here resembles perhaps most closely the indeterminate and destabilized
situations he finds in Italian neorealismi "deserted but inhabited, disused
warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruc-
tion" (1989, xi). And it is precisely in this scene that we find the greatest
abundance of these "purely optical situations," where an image is divorced
from the sensory action-reaction patterns of classical cinema and, "instead of
extending into movement, links up with a virtual image and forms a circuit
with it" (Deleuze 1989, 47). As the friends talk and Sasha takes up his instru-
ment attention frequently strays to puddles and small pools of water left by
the earlier thunderstorm. Now, no longer simply the object of the camera's
gaze, water becomes quite specifically the medium of exchange or crystal-
lization. In these reflections we are again given a sense of the indiscernibility
of the actual and the virtual, or perhaps more accurately the emergence of the
actual from the virtual, one made all the more palpable by incessant shifts be-
tween clarity and opacity. For instance, just as the two finish their discussion
of Sergei's smoking habit there is a cut to an inverted reflection of the steam-
roller, dispersed by drops of water falling into the puddle and then resettling
into a clear description. A similarly unmotivated digression occurs just as
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Deleuze on Tarkovsky 249
15. See Johnson and Petrie's discussion of mirrors and non-communication, 224.
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250 Slavic and East European Journal
is ascribed to a logical cause.16 However, the mirror and, especially, water and
the liquid motion across the screen already identify the actual/virtual and
limpid/opaque circuit. The boy in the mirror is the actualization of the virtual
reflection which, as in the scene at the lunch break, fades back into opacity as
the surface of the image is disrupted. Essentially this is a reiteration of the
limpid/opaque circuit now expanded to encompass the entirety of the screen.
And like the earlier figures for the limpid/opaque circuit, it is from this liq-
uid dissolution that the new, clarified image emerges. As before, water reveals
the most contracted actual/virtual circuit in the contemporaneity of the pres-
ent and the past, and functions as a medium of exchange. But now, assuming
the proportions of the screen and thus the totality of the diegesis, it also be-
comes the generative element for a fully new environment. In Deleuze 's
terms, water is the seed that actualizes the new milieu, the third mode of ex-
change in the crystal image: "the seed is on the one hand the virtual image
which will crystallize an environment which is at present [ actuellement ]
amorphous; but on the other hand the latter must have a structure which is vir-
tually crystallizable, in relation to which the seed plays the role of the actual
image" (1989, 74). 17 Here an apparently virtual liquid movement across the
mirror fully absorbs and obscures the actuality of the character. It is as if the
camera now pushes through the liquid surface of the mirror and into an ob-
scure virtuality on the other side of the reflection. This push actualizes a new
world at the point of immediate coexistence between the present and the past
in the mirror and crystallizes sheets of a virtual past, imperfect reflections of
earlier shots in the film, which now break into the present. It is this virtual
past carried throughout the film (but here made explicit) that forms the "vir-
tually crystallizable" structure, activated in this final sequence by the expan-
sion of liquid and reflective properties. The initial moments of the scene, for
instance, quite deliberately reiterate (with noticeable variations) earlier mo-
ments of the film. The movement of the camera into the boy's line of sight as
he turns to the mirror recalls the initial shot of the scene at the shop window,
the waves in the screen bring to mind the puddles at the lunch break, the door
and the descent down the stairs are all conspicuous repetitions from the open-
ing scene of the film. The final shot of the boy chasing and finally joining the
moving steamroller replicates in reverse the earlier reunion of the two friends
after Sasha had become lost in the thunderstorm. In both cases, and in oppo-
site directions, the boy must run across a thin stream cutting diagonally
through the screen to reach his friend, and in both the camera surveys the
16. The shift into an alternate reality, however, may not be clear to every viewer. Bird, for
instance, cites the complaints of at least one Soviet critic who contended viewers would not un-
derstand that the final sequence is actually a dream (31).
17. Deleuze here uses as an example the beginning of Welles 's Citizen Kane in which the ar-
tificial snow from a broken glass globe merges into snow clouds and the word "Rosebud" brings
forth layers of memory and the past (1989, 74).
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Deleuze on Tarkovsky 25 1
same patch of pavement from the same high angle. As in so much of Tarkov-
sky 's later work, the present is always pregnant with the past, which seems to
require only the slightest nudge in order to emerge from obscurity.
The way in which these scenes frame the action of the film looks ahead to
the similarly inflected structure of Ivan's Childhood , which opens and closes
with closely related oneiric sequences and abounds in mirrored images and
movements. But this also suggests that the scope of Tarkovsky's crystal-
image, even in this early work, extends beyond the isolated shot or individual
sequence. The progression through the different modes of exchange and then,
in this final scene, their apparent synthesis into the overarching structure of
the film reveals the work itself as a kind of polygonal configuration whose
different facets may alternately reflect, clarify, or obscure elements at the
point of their emergence or well after they have fallen into the past. The in-
stances examined above function as integrated components of a larger crys-
talline structure built on this indiscernibility, coexistent durations or simulta-
neous "peaks of the present," as well as the reflections of the past we see in
the final sequence. Such a reading would be, essentially, in keeping with a
largely implicit aspect of Deleuze's argument. Ronald Bogue explains: "as
one considers Deleuze's examples, it becomes evident that his object in de-
veloping this triad of actual/virtual, limpid/opaque and seed/milieu is not so
much to describe individual shots and sequences as to treat entire films as
crystals" (124). He does this with Fellini's And the Ship Sails On (1983) and,
to a lesser extent, Herzog's Heart of Glass (1976).
This also returns us to one of the problems of the Deleuze/Tarkovsky rela-
tionship mentioned earlier. For Deleuze, it is not simply individual scenes or
even films that reveal a particular crystalline state. It is in the filmmaker's en-
tire body of work that the idiosyncratic orientation to time fully emerges, and
the philosopher devotes a considerable amount of space to descriptions of the
perfect crystals of Ophiils, the flawed crystal of Renoir, the seed crystals of
Fellini, and the decomposing crystals of Visconti. In his comparatively terse
consideration of Tarkovsky's films Deleuze identifies an attempt to reach the
most fundamental layers of reality, "continued from one film to the next," but
apparently stagnated, at least in Mirror , in a frozen seed as the crystal of time
inevitably "turns in on itself, like a homing device that searches an opaque en-
vironment: what is Russia, what is Russia...?" (1989, 75). The filmmaker is
inevitably handicapped by his monolithic subject and the fluid exploration of
time is forever doomed to opacity by the inscrutability of Russia and the rain-
soaked images. As with his other films of the 1970s, the "crystallizable form
of the universe" is simply unable to emerge from the oversaturated landscape:
" Solaris does not open up this optimism, and Stalker returns the environment
to the opacity of an indeterminate zone, and the seed to the morbidity of
something aborting, a closed door" (75). For all of the respect and enthusiasm
shown Tarkovsky's theories, the overall impression from the films them-
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252 Slavic and East European Journal
Similarly, in Anna Powell's argument for Stalker against the apparent nega-
tivity of Deleuze's assessment it is specifically the liquid, saturated quality of
the crystal, which "escapes opacity to become translucent in a potent cine-
matic expression of spiritual insight" (156).
Despite some rather extraordinary innovations, this may be a point that
Steamroller and Violin never fully reaches, and it is difficult to isolate here the
more overtly spiritual characteristics of Tarkovsky's later films. Nevertheless,
it is precisely an escape from opacity and crystallizations of time we find
throughout this short film and, particularly here in the final moments, we find
moves that do take on a decidedly numinous tone in the subsequent works. As
many of the studies which have considered it are quick to point out, Steam-
roller and Violin is missing some hallmarks of the director's mature aesthetic
and certain aspects often make it difficult to forget that this is a student pro-
duction. Problems, some of which would be only slightly ameliorated in the
later works, are not difficult to find. The acting- even that of the adults- is
sometimes uncomfortably wooden, and the unmistakably chauvinistic im-
pression conveyed through the fleetingly thin female characters quickly be-
comes embarrassing. On a more technical note, camera placement in certain
scenes, such as those in the stairwells or overlooking the Moscow streets, is
unapologetically similar to that of Kalatozov's Cranes are Flying , and at one
point, in an initial shot at the shop window, a member of the crew is momen-
tarily visible in one of the mirrors. Whatever the flaws, however, the short
work is far from derivative or ill-conceived. Completed in 1960, Steamroller
and Violin actually predates or is immediately contemporary with most of the
western European films Deleuze uses to flesh out his descriptions of the crys-
tal-image. It anticipates with remarkable accuracy not only much of what was
to be later consolidated by Deleuze under the description of the time-image,
but crucial elements of Tarkovsky's own theory and practice. Though in cer-
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Deleuze on Tarkovsky 253
tain respects the film remains somewhat immature, the primary building
blocks that have come to define his cinema, such as the innovative manipula-
tion of subjectivity and its connection with a radically different, transcenden-
tal approach to cinematic temporality and the medium's ability to convey an
impression of time's non-chronological flux, have already begun to take a de-
cisive shape.
REFERENCES
Bird, Robert. Andrei Tarkovsky : Elements of Cinema. London, England: Reaktion, 2008.
Bergson, Henri. Mind Energy: Lectures and Essays. Trans. H. Wildon Carr. Westpo
Greenwood Press, 1975.
1991.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge,
Boldyrev, N. Zhertvoprinoshenie Andreia Tarkovskogo. Mo
Colman, Felicity. Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
nesota P, 1989.
1991.
Texas P. 1986.
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254 Slavic and East European Journal
Turovskaya, Maya. Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry. Trans. Natasha Ward. London: Faber &
Faber, 1989.
Voloshinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R.
Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.
Woll, Josephine. Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw. London: I. B. Tauris. 2000.
Žižek, Slavoj. "The Thing From Inner Space." In Sexuation. Ed. Renata Saleci. Durham /Lon-
don: Duke UP, 2000.
Реферат
Роберт Ифрд
Делез и Тарковский: Образ-кристалл времени в фильме Каток и скрипка
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