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Tarkovsky, as I understand him, is conscious of Platonov’s admonition. He treasured the security of standing firmly on the earth – in social and professional systems, in aesthetic and spiritual tradition, and in the spaces of home and nature; he spoke frequently of representing a stable identity on such earthy bases. But as a filmmaker his central interest and commitment was the role of the image, especially the cinematic image, in mediating this relationship between individual experience and the material world. Language, narrative and the entire imaginary (both of society and the individual) form configurations in which a body can elaborate an identity and join the flow of history; yet Tarkovsky felt that these configurations could be genuine only if they were subjected to the flame of time, which resists fluid representation and disrupts space with unexpected folds. In a complex weave of synchronizations, Tarkovsky sewed the visible world with seams of time, blocking our desire for continuity with a sensorial resistance that foregrounds the material intervention of the medium itself. Ultimately, like the firmament in Flammarion’s woodcut, the screen offers the potential of reconstituting the very conditions of experience, of reconstituting time itself, amidst the crossing of gazes and material forces.