ABSTRACT
Building on the analyses and interpretations undertaken in Chapters 2 to 6, this final chapter discusses a number of questions related to music, meaning and interpretation in Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema. Collecting the results and conclusions of these preceding chapters, three broad themes are identified and elaborated upon. Firstly, picking up the thread from the chapter on Solaris (Chapter 2) in which the concept of hermeneutic pliability was developed, the present chapter discusses this concept in relation to Tarkovsky’s cinema as a whole, examining to what extent the malleable diegetic status of the Bach chorale prelude in Solaris also characterizes the music in the other films. Secondly, the chapter develops a more overarching account of how patterns of meaning and representation cluster around different types of music in Tarkovsky’s cinema, focusing in particular on the presence of two recurring representational devices related to music in his films: musical dichotomies and musical syntheses. Finally, the chapter concludes with an argument that purports to show how music is centrally involved in the construction of a “troubled utopianism” present to a greater or lesser extent in all of Tarkovsky’s last five films.
