Abstract
Philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1930–1990) had multiple connections to the Soviet film industry, including the years he spent lecturing to cinema students in Moscow, and yet his work in this area has thus far been neglected by scholars of philosophy and cinema alike. In this article, I consider Mamardashvili’s most sustained remarks on film, including his use of the metaphor of the movie theatre and his commentary in The Aesthetics of Thinking (Estetika myshleniia) on Vadim Abdrashitov and Aleksandr Mindadze’s The Train Stopped (Ostanovilsia poezd, 1982). Mamardashvili used film as a metaphor for consciousness and described how film constructs an extended, empirical and psychological reality, a new space and time originating in itself, and which, if only for a couple hours, offers the experience of a “different regime of life than the one to which we are accustomed”.
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Notes
On Mamardashvili’s biographical and philosophical connections to the Soviet film industry, and for an expanded version of this article, see: DeBlasio 2019.
See, for instance: Mamardashvili (2000, pp. 4, 8, 11, 13, 84).
For another discussion of thought and thinking in Mamardashvili, see: Van der Zweerde (2006).
Mamardashvili used the same word, struggle (bor′ba) to describe the meta-theory of consciousness, which he referred to as “a struggle with consciousness”. See: Mamardashvili and Piatigorskii (1999, pp. 29, 37).
Nancy Condee has written about the censor’s discomfort with The Train Stopped, which resulted in limited screenings in the Soviet Union (Condee 2009, p. 156, n. 23).
See: Mamardashvili (2000, pp. 71, 88, 89, 140).
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DeBlasio, A. Mamardashvili on film: cinema as a metaphor for consciousness. Stud East Eur Thought 71, 217–227 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-019-09329-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-019-09329-2