CHAPTER 3 Does Tarkovsky Have a Film Theory? Sergey Toymentsev TARKOVSKY ’ S CHALLENGE TO FILM THEORY T arkovsky’s cinema often poses a considerable challenge to film studies by blurring the boundaries between subjective experience and objective reality. Widely acknowledged as one of the most technically accomplished representations of dream imagery, his visual language has become a consti- tutive part of cinematic vocabulary in general and is easily recognizable by a range of stylistic characteristics: extremely lengthy tracking shots, decelerated motion, dedramatized action, eerie atmosphere, hallucinatory ambiguity, dis- solution of spatial and temporal continuity, scenes of characters’ levitation, illogical combinations of objects, uncanny non-diegetic film sound, extensive use of natural elements (water, fire, air, earth) that are often combined together within a single shot. The tactile image in his films often exceeds the limits of representation by becoming the direct, non-mimetic expression of a natural and phantasmatic world where a human being is stripped from all the coordi- nates of everyday consciousness and rendered passively drifting through vari- ous dreamscapes. It is one of his highest achievements that in his later films all these oneiric cinematic effects are no longer coded as dreams per se but rather saturate the entire film with a dream-like aura. In Stalker (1979), for example, there is no single traditionally coded dream that could be distinctly separated from daytime reality. In a scene titled “The Stalker’s Dream” in the DVD chapter selection we see the travelers preparing to rest, yet we do not enter their dreams while they are sleeping. What we see instead is the slow camera movement following the flow of water with piles of garbage underneath. In his diary, Tarkovsky refers to this four-minute sequence as a dream. 1 Yet it is not quite a dream since no cut or dissolve marks the transition from external reality