"This book is beautifully conceived and extremely well written, and will be an indispensable text for scholars in a number of fields, including Slavic studies, film studies, and animal studies. It has the potential--in part due to Tarkovsky''s own reputation and broad reach--to catapult the world of Slavic studies into a central spot in animal studies, a field that has to date by and large ignored the cultures of Russia when it comes to thinking about the animal in human lives."--Jane Costlow, author of Worlds Within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev "Raymond Scott De Luca''s volume offers a profound challenge to our unalloyed admiration for the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and his Soviet antecedents (Eisenstein, Vertov), whose cinema has chosen on-screen animal brutality as commentary on a range of social or philosophical issues. Connecting the political logic between ''arthouse'' and ''slaughterhouse,'' the book raises disturbing questions about the nature of genius when it becomes insistently complicit in cruelty as a component of cinematic talent. After reading De Luca, you cannot watch Tarkovsky the same way again."--Nancy Condee, author of The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema "This rich book provides a fresh perspective on Tarkovsky''s cinema, resituating it within contemporary theoretical frames, such as animal studies and ecocriticism. De Luca confronts the paradoxical cruelty and tenderness that characterizes Tarkovsky''s universe. In his hands, horses, dogs, and birds come into sharp focus as humanity''s powerless victims and faithful companions.

And as despairing witnesses of its fatal mistakes."--Emma Widdis, author of Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917-1940 bout the nature of genius when it becomes insistently complicit in cruelty as a component of cinematic talent. After reading De Luca, you cannot watch Tarkovsky the same way again."--Nancy Condee, author of The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema "This rich book provides a fresh perspective on Tarkovsky''s cinema, resituating it within contemporary theoretical frames, such as animal studies and ecocriticism. De Luca confronts the paradoxical cruelty and tenderness that characterizes Tarkovsky''s universe. In his hands, horses, dogs, and birds come into sharp focus as humanity''s powerless victims and faithful companions. And as despairing witnesses of its fatal mistakes."--Emma Widdis, author of Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917-1940 bout the nature of genius when it becomes insistently complicit in cruelty as a component of cinematic talent.

After reading De Luca, you cannot watch Tarkovsky the same way again."--Nancy Condee, author of The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema "This rich book provides a fresh perspective on Tarkovsky''s cinema, resituating it within contemporary theoretical frames, such as animal studies and ecocriticism. De Luca confronts the paradoxical cruelty and tenderness that characterizes Tarkovsky''s universe. In his hands, horses, dogs, and birds come into sharp focus as humanity''s powerless victims and faithful companions. And as despairing witnesses of its fatal mistakes."--Emma Widdis, author of Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917-1940 bout the nature of genius when it becomes insistently complicit in cruelty as a component of cinematic talent. After reading De Luca, you cannot watch Tarkovsky the same way again."--Nancy Condee, author of The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema "This rich book provides a fresh perspective on Tarkovsky''s cinema, resituating it within contemporary theoretical frames, such as animal studies and ecocriticism.

De Luca confronts the paradoxical cruelty and tenderness that characterizes Tarkovsky''s universe. In his hands, horses, dogs, and birds come into sharp focus as humanity''s powerless victims and faithful companions. And as despairing witnesses of its fatal mistakes."--Emma Widdis, author of Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917-1940 uthor of The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema "This rich book provides a fresh perspective on Tarkovsky''s cinema, resituating it within contemporary theoretical frames, such as animal studies and ecocriticism. De Luca confronts the paradoxical cruelty and tenderness that characterizes Tarkovsky''s universe. In his hands, horses, dogs, and birds come into sharp focus as humanity''s powerless victims and faithful companions. And as despairing witnesses of its fatal mistakes."--Emma Widdis, author of Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917-1940.