THE LADDER OF HEAVEN IN CINEMA. KUSTURICA, TARKOVSKY, PARAJANOV
The book continues to explore the aesthetics of sacredness in cinema and in arts, a direction of research which has been started by Elena Dulgheru with her volume “Tarkovsky. Film as a prayer. A poetics of the sacredness in Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema” (Arca Invierii Publishing House, Bucharest, 2002). Three complementary auctorial paradigms, outstanding for the three ways of relating to sacredness in contemporary world (the sacred, as a transcendental and immutable value of the great religions; the relativising or immanent sacred of the freethinkers and agnostics; and the lost or forgotten absolute of the atheists returning to God, respectively) are put together in order to sustain a fundamental ontological, mythical, religious image, which had been ensealed from the very beginning in our collective subconsciousness: the image of the primary blissful topos. Three very different film-makers have been chosen to give substance to these three paradigmas.
“With this new volume, Elena Dulgheru reaffirms her rare and therefore more precious quality: the gift to transform a scholastic tome of cultural history into a passionate lecture, carrying along the lecturer into a surprising spiritual adventure, at the end of which he will be meeting the revelation of an redemptive dimension” (Manuela Cernat).
