Wife, Mother (of God), Metaphor of Transcendence

The Functions of Female Characters in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Films

Abstract

Andrei Tarkovsky’s seven feature films are widely regarded as an artistic unity. This coherence emerges from a dense network of recurring visual, narrative, and musical motifs. One central motif complex, organised around the female protagonists, has not yet been examined in its overall coherence. The central thesis of this article is that Tarkovsky’s heroines simultaneously function as wives, transfigured maternal figures, and embodiments of the existential extreme articulated in each individual film. Drawing on the paradigm of “imagined femininity”, they are related to the idealised image of the Mother of God and its visual representations. In these fictional female figures – which also point back to Tarkovsky’s personal environment – the fundamental oppositions structuring his oeuvre crystallise. As all semantic threads of the films converge and condense within this constellation of motifs, it offers a particularly productive prism for approaching and interpreting Tarkovsky’s work.