Ecologies of the Wound: Tarkovsky, Godard, and the Image of a Dying World

By Osman Arslan Film History, Cinematography January 10, 2026

Ecologies of the Wound: Tarkovsky, Godard, and the Image of a Dying World

There is a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker that contains the whole of his cinematic theology. In the dilapidated, moss-covered room at the heart of the Zone, it begins to rain indoors. Water drips from a ceiling that isn’t leaking, pooling on a floor already submerged, a quiet, impossible miracle that none of the characters acknowledge. This is not a dramatic event; it is a texture, a state of being. The camera, in its typically geologic patience, simply observes this act of physical grace, this Baptism of a ruined world. Now, place this image beside another: in Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, a man and a woman argue, their bodies rendered in a jarring, technically imperfect 3D. As one character’s eye-line crosses the other, Godard splits the stereoscopic image, commanding the viewer to literally choose which half of the screen to see. The world is cleaved in two, a perceptual violence that mirrors the couple’s emotional schism and, more profoundly, the fractured state of our relationship to reality itself.

These two moments, separated by over three decades and a chasm of ideological and aesthetic difference, seem to represent cinema’s polar extremes: the sacred versus the profane, contemplative immersion versus intellectual assault, faith in the image versus a deep suspicion of it. Yet, I want to argue that they are not opposites. They are, instead, parallel answers to the same unspoken question, one that haunted late twentieth-century art cinema and has now become the central crisis of our own era: what does it mean to witness a world in a state of collapse? Rather than treating Tarkovsky as the spiritual poet of nature and Godard as the corrosive critic of media, this essay argues that both construct cinema itself as an endangered environment under industrial and technological assault. They diverge radically, however, in how they figure nonhuman nature as the only remaining site of resistance. Tarkovsky sacralizes contaminated landscapes through contemplative, durational time, locating a form of wounded holiness in the decay. Godard, in his late, digitally fragmented work, weaponizes sensory overload to reveal that “nature” now survives only in the cracks where human language and our polluted systems of images finally break down. Tarkovsky’s long take and Godard’s shattered montage are not simply stylistic choices; they are rival ecologies of attention, each anticipating the anxieties of the Anthropocene in incompatible but mutually illuminating ways.

Sanctuaries of Contamination

Both filmmakers seek refuge not in a primordial Eden, but in spaces that have been explicitly ruined by human activity. Their sanctuaries are always already contaminated, marked by industry, war, or the detritus of ideology. This move away from a naive pastoralism is what makes their work so prescient. In Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the Zone is a perimeter defined by military force, a space of alleged alien visitation that is, more visibly, a dumping ground of industrial waste. It is a landscape of rusted tanks, discarded machine parts, and mysteriously polluted waters. Yet, it is precisely this state of abandonment and toxicity that allows it to become something else: a quasi-spiritual domain where the laws of physics and logic are suspended. The path to the central “Room,” where one’s innermost desires are supposedly granted, is not a straight line but a confounding, Dostoevskian moral labyrinth.

Tarkovsky’s camera transforms this post-Soviet wasteland into a cathedral. He does not hide the decay; he films it with a painter’s love for texture, finding beauty in the patina of rust and the iridescent sheen of oil on water. Through his signature long takes and slow, exploratory pans, the camera performs a kind of phenomenological blessing, coaxing the viewer to find immanence within the material ruin. The sepia-toned “real world” outside the Zone is presented as a spiritual dead-end, a world of bureaucratic and domestic hopelessness. Only inside the contaminated territory, where one must surrender to an inscrutable, perhaps nonexistent, higher power, does the world return to color and to life. The Zone is therefore a paradoxical refuge, an ecosystem born from catastrophe. It is an environment whose sanctity is guaranteed by its very toxicity, a place where nature, having absorbed our poisons, has become alien, powerful, and divine.

Godard’s late masterwork, Goodbye to Language, offers a twenty-first-century corollary to Tarkovsky’s Zone. Here, the sanctuary is not a militarized territory but the humble space occupied by a dog, Roxy Miéville. The film is a tornado of political aphorisms, historical footage, literary quotations, and abrasive sound-image juxtapositions. It is a world saturated and sickened by human discourse. Within this semiotic chaos, the only moments of peace, of what one might call unmediated truth, are given to the dog. As Roxy wanders by a lake or through a forest, the aggressive 3D often softens, the frantic cutting subsides, and the camera, for a brief moment, simply observes. This is not the Edenic nature of a Disney film. It is a simple, unremarkable patch of European landscape, but it becomes a site of grace because it lies outside the tyrannical realm of human language, which the film’s title bids farewell.

The most profound moments occur when Godard’s technology “fails.” In the celebrated sequence where the 3D planes separate, the viewer is forced to close one eye, choosing which character to follow and thereby admitting the monocular poverty of their own perception. It is only Roxy, the dog, who seems to inhabit the world in its full, undivided dimension. For Godard, the nonhuman reveals itself not through a journey into a sacred zone, but in the moments when our own human-centered technologies of representation malfunction. Where Tarkovsky’s camera sanctifies the ruined landscape through a totalizing, god-like gaze, Godard’s camera finds nature in its own breakdown. The sanctuary is not a place you enter, but a perceptual gap you fall into when the machine of human meaning sputters and dies. Both the Zone and Roxy’s lakeside are ecological thresholds, but one is a site for spiritual trial, the other a space of formal and linguistic collapse.

Rival Ecologies of Time

At the core of this divergence is the filmmakers’ radically different conceptions of cinematic time. Tarkovsky, in his book Sculpting in Time, famously theorized cinema as an art form that captures and molds the very pressure of time’s passage. His films are exercises in durational immersion. He forces us to wait, to watch water drip, to see grass bend in the wind, to feel the minutes stretch into a physical presence. The long, hypnotic dolly shot in Stalker that glides over the submerged objects in the Zone, a watery still life of syringes, icons, and refuse, is not about advancing a plot. It is about creating a temporal ecology. The viewer is asked to inhabit this duration, to let the narrative mind go quiet and allow the senses to attune to the material world. This is an ascetic practice, a training of attention against the impulses of modern commercial cinema. For Tarkovsky, time is the medium through which the world’s soul, its hidden weight and meaning, becomes perceptible. By slowing down, by letting the camera rest on the wounded face of the earth, he suggests we might reconnect with a reality that industrial and political acceleration has sought to erase.

If Tarkovsky’s time is a deep, flowing river, Godard’s is a tsunami of digital debris. His late work, from Film Socialisme to The Image Book, stages an ecological crisis of perception. He bombards the viewer with an unrelenting montage of low-resolution phone footage, archival clips, on-screen text, sudden bursts of color, and abrupt cuts to black. The soundtrack is a collage of overlapping dialogue, musical fragments, and jarring noise. This is not the chaos of incompetence; it is a meticulously constructed representation of a world neurologically damaged by an excess of information. Godard is diagnosing a different phase of our environmental catastrophe: not just the physical pollution of the landscape, which was Tarkovsky’s subject, but the cognitive pollution of the mindscape.

In Goodbye to Language, this fragmentary aesthetic is not merely a critique; it is the film’s environment. There is no stable ground. The very tools of seeing, the digital camera and the 3D image, are shown to be unstable, corruptible, and inherently violent. This is a cinematic world that reflects our own, a world in which, as the philosopher Paul Virilio observed, the logistics of perception have replaced the logistics of transportation. For Godard, we no longer need to travel to see the world; the world, in a degraded, hyper-mediated form, travels to us at the speed of light. His temporal ecology is one of overload and interruption. He does not give us time to contemplate; he shows us a world where contemplation is no longer possible. Where Tarkovsky’s duration offers a potential cure for our alienated state, Godard’s fragmentation is a formal expression of the disease itself. He gives us no quarter, suggesting that to represent our saturated moment with a clean, classical style would be the gravest of lies.

The Sound of Silence, The Cacophony of Speech

This contrasting sense of ecology extends to the filmmakers’ use of sound and, crucially, its absence. Tarkovsky is a master of a silence that is not empty but profoundly full. The soundscapes of Solaris and Stalker are built from elemental materials: the constant presence of water, the sighing of wind, the creak of decaying metal, the distant hum of an unseen technology. This sonic tapestry creates a space where the environment itself seems to speak. Human dialogue is often sparse, philosophical, and swallowed by the immense, breathing quiet of the landscape. Silence in Tarkovsky is hospitable; it is an acoustic clearing in which the characters, and the audience, can listen for something beyond human discourse, what the Sufi poets like Rumi might call the voice of the beloved, found not in a heavenly realm but within the beautiful, broken world. The final sequence of Stalker, where the Stalker’s daughter, “Monkey,” telekinetically moves glasses across a table, is scored only by the rumbling of a distant train and a faint, ethereal strain of music. The miracle happens in an atmosphere of mundane, industrial sound, suggesting that the sacred does not cancel out the profane but inhabits it.

Godard’s films, by contrast, are a war against silence. His soundtracks are fields of battle. Voices interrupt one another, philosophical quotes are rendered as background noise, musical fragments might be brutally cut short by a digital screech. In his late work, silence is rarely a space for contemplation. It is an aggressive act, a rupture, a void. When an argument in Goodbye to Language is suddenly muted, the silence is shocking, a comment on the failure of speech itself. It is a silence of Exhaustion. Godard’s sonic world is one where human language, the very foundation of Western thought and a tool he himself wielded with unmatched brilliance, has become a form of pollution. It is noise that signifies nothing.

This is why the dog is so central. Roxy exists in a world symptoms of sound without language. He hears the world differently. He is deaf to the historical and philosophical baggage that weighs down every human utterance in the film. For Godard, the hope for a renewed connection to the world, to what he calls “nature,” lies in this pre-linguistic state. Where Tarkovsky’s silence is a channel to a metaphysical presence, Godard’s acoustic violence demonstrates that no such channel remains open to us. We have talked the world to death. The only way to hear it again is to witness the total failure of our own semantic systems, to be plunged into a silence that is not serene, but terrifying: the silence of a problem for which we have no more words.

Conclusion: Two Testaments for a Broken World

To place Andrei Tarkovsky and Jean-Luc Godard in dialogue is to witness a conversation between two modes of cinematic testimony, two prophets diagnosing the same planetary illness with radically different instruments. Tarkovsky, the Orthodox mystic working under the shadow of a godless Soviet state, looked upon a world ruined by industry and saw the possibility of a wounded holiness. His long takes and patient gaze are an act of faith, a belief that cinema, by sculpting time, can restore a sacramental relationship to a desecrated reality. His camera offers a form of redemption, arguing that even in our most toxic landscapes, grace persists, waiting only for a sufficiently patient and loving eye. His films are requiems, but they are requiems that hold out the hope of resurrection. They are prayers for a world we have already lost.

Godard, the disillusioned revolutionary working within the decadent heart of Western capital, looks upon a world saturated by images and language and sees no path to redemption, only the necessity of a truthful diagnosis. His late cinema is an autopsy. He dissects the image, shatters syntax, and turns 3D technology against itself not out of nihilism, but out of a fierce, almost Kafkaesque moral honesty. He refuses the comfort of a beautiful, coherent image because he believes such images are now a lie, a tool of the very systems of capital and spectacle that are destroying the planet. His hope, if it can be called that, is smaller and more austere. It is the hope that by relentlessly exposing the sickness of our ways of seeing and speaking, we might glimpse, in the wreckage, a fugitive truth, a moment of nonhuman sanity embodied by a dog, a tree, a simple body of water.

What, then, is their legacy for a cinema that must now confront ecological collapse not as a metaphor, but as an encroaching reality? Tarkovsky’s path offers solace and a model for an attentive, contemplative cinema, yet it risks a certain aestheticism, a turning of catastrophe into a beautiful, tragic object of contemplation. It feels like a language from a more innocent time, before the scale of the crisis became a quantifiable hyperobject beyond the grasp of a single human gaze. Godard’s path is more brutal but perhaps more adequate to our moment of cognitive and political paralysis. It offers no easy beauty, no spiritual catharsis. It simply presents the rubble and forces us to confront our own complicity in its creation. Their works stand as two great, countervailing testaments. One teaches us how to pray in the ruins; the other insists that we first understand how we built them. Perhaps we need both: Tarkovsky’s boundless compassion for the wounded world, and Godard’s merciless critique of the languages that wound it.

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