Search Results (3)

This essay examines how Shakespeare’s King Lear and Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia employ fool figures to articulate truths inaccessible through rational discourse. The Fool in King Lear speaks through riddles, songs, and prophecies, revealing uncomfortable realities about power and identity that direct statement cannot safely convey. His performed madness contrasts with Lear’s genuine descent into insanity, yet both states access knowledge unavailable to those maintaining social position and sanity. Tarkovsky’s Domenico embodies the Russian Orthodox tradition of yurodstvo (holy foolishness), performing sacred madness through impossible rituals and apocalyptic prophecy. His mathematical impossibility—“1 + 1 = 1”—expresses spiritual unity that logic cannot grasp. Both figures draw on Plato’s distinction in the Phaedrus between divine madness and human pathology, where four forms of god-sent mania provide superior insight into rational thought. Through Erasmus’s humanist satire and Foucault’s analysis of reason’s violent separation from unreason, the essay traces how Western culture moved from integrating fool-wisdom to confining it as pathology. The protective mechanisms enabling fool-speech—performance frames, liminal positioning, sacred authorization—reveal society’s ambivalent need for dangerous truths. As contemporary culture increasingly medicalizes cognitive deviation, these masterworks preserve essential epistemological functions, demonstrating why certain truths require the fool’s disruptive voice. Full article

This article reconsiders Yasujiro Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (1962) as a cinematic “anti-testament”, a final film that eschews resolution, culmination, or closure in favour of subtle continuity, repetition, and quiet disappearance. Situated between the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware and Western existential philosophy, Ozu’s final work embodies an ethics of impermanence and restraint, where cinema becomes a contemplative practice rather than a narrative of finality. Through formal strategies such as the low “tatami shot,” fixed camera, and elliptical editing, the film materialises time as presence, not progression. Drawing on Heidegger’s conception of aletheia, Cavell’s ethics of acknowledgment, and Tarkovsky’s reflections on haiku, this study argues that Ozu develops a philosophy of parting grounded in repetition, care, and relationality. Rather than a monument to his oeuvre, An Autumn Afternoon offers a visual ritual of transmission, where the invisible dwells within the visible, and the act of letting go becomes cinema’s most philosophical gesture. In doing so, Ozu dissolves the notion of the cinematic testament, transforming it into a meditative cadence of impermanence. Full article

Andrej Tarkovsky is a Russian film author who has indebted the entire world’s cinematography with his cinematic style. His (auto)biography and filmography give us a hint that he was a deeply religious man who believed that art should serve to deepen man’s spirituality. By watching and analyzing the author’s films, we came to the hypothesis that Tarkovsky uses the characters of children to express something supernatural, and therefore, we wanted to explore which narratives and stylistic devices the director uses to give his interpretation of the spiritual and transcendent. Thus, we analyzed nine characters of children that appear in the director’s six full-length feature films: Ivan Bondarev (Ivan’s Childhood), Boriska (Andrei Rublev), Aleksej, Ignat and Asafjev (Mirror), Marta (Stalker), Domenico’s son and Angela (Nostalghia), and Gossen (The Sacrifice). The methods we have used are qualitative content analysis, description, comparison, and synthesis. The characteristics we have noticed in the characters of the children, which could point to the transcendent, are a deep and penetrating gaze, the supernatural powers children use, the mysterious environments they inhabit, the deep influence they have on other characters, asking religious questions, hermit-like loneliness, modest clothes, and allusions to a Christ-like figure. Full article