Mamardashvili on film: cinema as a metaphor for consciousness

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”.