The Ontology of Logogram in Sergei Eisenstein’s and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Philosophy of Film Image

In film theory, in the hermetically academic form to which it has come today, there is a quasi-conciliatory conventionality, according to which any film text finds its ‘legitimate’ place in the catalog of types, genres, movements, historical and cultural contexts. In the spirit of postmodernism, as described by Jean-François Lyotard, mass cinema is no longer the antithesis of cinema-as-art, but yet another ‘kind’ of cinema, etc. This allegedly allows one to think cinema as a totality, albeit diverse, but still united by a certain general principle. Using the example of Sergei Eisenstein’s and Andrei Tarkovsky’s approaches to constructing and understanding the film image, this article shows that it is possible to talk about different cinemas, phenomena which differ not just on the dramatic or aesthetic level, but rather on the ontological one. We use the theme of hieroglyph and the East, which the above-mentioned filmmakers have been addressing in their theoretical works, while understanding it in completely different ways, as a template by which their films are assessed. The differences that appear at the level of interpretation of the hieroglyph allow, in turn, to deduce fundamental differences inherent not only in those specific theorists and practitioners of cinema, but also to outline two essentially contradictory traditions of cinema, one of which, as it seems at the moment, has suppressed and supplanted the other.