Sacred Architecture and Sacred Time in Andrei Tarkovsky's Cinema
Sacred Architecture and Sacred Time in Andrei Tarkovsky's Cinema

Summary/Abstract: This article examines how the concept of the “sacred” is constructed in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Stalker (1979) and Nostalghia (1983) not through iconography, but through the materiality of space, the intensification of time, and bodily/sensory experience. The study is based on a comparative case design with qualitative, interpretive, and phenomenological orientations; the scenes were selected based on the criteria of liminality (door, corridor, tunnel), the prominence of long shots and ritual gestures, sonic minimalism (withdrawal of music, ambiance), and haptic cues (texture, humidity, steam). The theoretical framework integrates Eliade's concepts of sacred time/sacred space, as well as the center-threshold, with Bachelard's understanding of poetic/lived space. It also incorporates Deleuze's time-image regime, Schrader's transcendental style, and Sobchack/Marks' haptic visuality approaches. The findings indicate that in Stalker, the collective search is made visible through industrial ruins-nature transitions and threshold typologies, creating a mythical "re-now" mode; in Nostalghia, individual ritual (candle carrying) and public upheaval (square scene) are concentrated on the memory-space axis within structures such as churches, baths, and ruins. In both films, the long take, delayed cutting, and sonic withdrawal transform time into an environment that is directly experienced. The study presents an integrated analytical framework that combines materiality, temporality, and bodily experience to explain the concept of the sacred at the intersection of cinema and architecture.

• Details
• Contents