Acknowledgements; Notes on Transliteration; Introduction: The Freest Man in the USSR; Chapter One: Alexander Sokurov’s Demoted (1980): Consciousness as Celebration; Chapter Two: Ivan Dykhovichnyi’s The Black Monk (1988): Madness, Chekhov, and the Chimera of Idleness; Chapter Three: Dmitry Mamuliya’s Another Sky (2010): The Language of Consciousness; Chapter Four: Alexei Balabanov’s The Castle (1994) and Me Too (2012): Kafka, the Absurd, and the Death of Form; Chapter Five: Alexander Zeldovich’s Target (2011): Tolstoy and Mamardashvili on the Infinite and the Earthly; Chapter Six: Vadim Abdrashitov and Alexander Mindadze’s The Train Stopped (1982): Film as a Metaphor for Consciousness; Conclusion: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless (2017): The Philosophical Image and the Possibilities of Film; Bibliography; Appendix