Film as a form of art constructs particular forms of subjectivity and relates them to the discourse of intelligence – cinema as a metaphor for thought. Badiou sees the purpose of cinema in questioning the image on the basis of the image itself, ‘in the direction of the foundational beyond’ (2013: 201). Aleksandr Sokurov's cinema has often been described as a ‘visual experiment’, ‘non-narrative’ and as a way to ‘challenge that cinema conceived as a method either to capture reality or narrate reality’ (Beumers and Condee 2011: 1). I argue that this is because Sokurov (b. 1951, Irkutsk region) is concerned with different types of reality. One is invisible, and it is a matter of transcendental evocation, guessing and anticipation. The other is visible, but only to the subject itself in the ultimate act of internalising knowledge and experiencing it as a knowledge-world. Badiou gives a description of such knowledge-worlds at the end of Logic of Worlds: ‘Three operations effectively suffice for all the types of appearing or all the possibilities of differentiation (and identity) in a determinate world: minimality, conjunction and the envelope. Or the inapparent, co-appearance and infinite synthesis’ (2009: 452). Badiou outlines the logic which determines a world irrespective of any subject, a knowledge-world in my terminology: ‘The transcendental that is at stake in this book is altogether anterior to every subjective constitution, for it is an immanent given of any situation whatsoever’ (2009: 101). Such a knowledge-world may exist when the subject is turned into an object of ‘the transcendental indexing’ (Badiou 2009: 101), in the ultimate attempt to differentiate between ontology and appearance. Sokurov's interest in the issue of transcendental ontology is evidenced in his citing Caspar David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea (1808–10) as a source of inspiration for his 1997 Mother and Son and other films, whereby the painting ‘in the vein of a metaphysics of absence, effectively lets man in his insignificance vanish in front of the grandness and immeasurability of nature’ (Hänsgen 2011: 51). Sokurov often demonstrates his preoccupation with these concerns when he works with a subjectivity appearing in a world constructed of its own ontology. Sokurov never reduces one to another and instead engages in the retroactive act of re-assembling knowledge-worlds as matters of relation and intentionality.