A MAN STANDS in a green field. A wind blows. The man laments the corruption of humanity's spiritual realm and falls over. He dreams about his mother, about the Second World War, and about a hot- air balloon. He wakes up on the wet wooden floor of a mysterious house, then burns a book of medieval icons. Fade to black.

There, I've just described the entire seven-movie oeuvre of the Russian film-making giant Andrei Tarkovsky - from Ivan's Childhood to The Sacrifice - in a single snappy metaprécis, and with some accuracy. For few film-makers have worked so consistently with the same tropes and symbols, and the same level of woozy ambiguity, sometimes to mesmerising effect, and sometimes not. While, more importantly, no other film-maker has been so lauded and so adored for this very same dependency on stylistic rigour and moribund nuance.

It's a situation that won't be altered by two impeccably erudite tomes. Robert Bird's academic meditation and Nathan Dunne's edited essay collection are both engrossing examples of the “Tarkovsky Effect” in action. Closely mirroring the style of the movies under discussion, and without traditional film theory standards such as genre, narrative and performance to analyse, the authors opt for non-chronological associative approaches.

Thus Bird adopts four elemental headings: “Earth, Fire, Water and Air”, and within that he breaks his analysis down farther into chapters such as “Space”, “Imaginary” and “Sensorium”. Dunne, meanwhile, collates his essays under the seemingly less adventurous sections such as “Art and Nature” and “Music and Modernity,” and yet these too, when broken down, contain some post-structuralist corkers such as “Virtualisation of Self and Space in Tarkovsky's Solaris.”

What is it about Tarkovsky that drives mere mortals into paroxysms of prolixity? I suspect that it is because his movies are so suggestive, so open-ended and so laden with unexplained symbol that they provoke an eruption of possible meanings and alternate explanations.

Bird's text is often guilty of the latter offence, at one stage describing the estimable director's methods thus: “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.” Yes, and he filmed it quite nicely too.

Dunne's collection, typically, boasts a more varied approach, with voices as disparate as Jean-Paul Sartre (his lengthy letter in defence of Tarkovsky is published here) and the Hollywood director Marc Forster. His essay What would Tarkovsky do? is an intelligent yet thankfully conversational account of the influence that films such as Mirror and Nostalgia have had on his own directorial output in movies such as Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland.

Most anomalously, Dunne's collection boasts a dissenting voice in former student Birgit Menzel. Her essay Tarkovsky in Berlin recalls a week-long workshop in 1984, where the director was rightly probed about, among other things, the gender bias in his movies (the men are always philosophers, the women mothers, wives, etc). Tarkovsky, apparently, lost his temper and raged against Western feminism. Admittedly, it's hardly the revelation to destroy a reputation. But in an intellectual climate where the work is so thoroughly worshipped, it's nice to know that the creator was human after all.

Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema by Robert Bird
Reaktion Books, £15.95

Tarkovsky edited by Nathan Dunne
Black Dog Publishing, £29.95

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