Disgelo, purgatorio ed esilio: la Guerra Fredda con gli occhi di Andrej Tarkovskij

The following work aims at analyzing some points of the cinematographic path of the Soviet director Andrej Tarkovskij, intersecting them with his biography and especially with the historical context he inherited. Placing cinema, life and history in a dialectical relationship, the text proposes a horizontal analysis of the director’s works, excluding the major concepts of Tarkovsky’s film theory, in order to address the Cold War as the canvas and matrix of his works. Investigating the moments of greatest crisis between the URSS and the USA and the specter of the atomic weapon in the years immediately following the great world conflict, this essay proposes an analysis of the themes dear to Tarkovsky as a consequence of sensations and ideas closely related to the escalations of the Cold War.