"Sculpting in Time", Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was a Russian filmmaker and film theorist. His most famous films are Andrei Rublev (1966), a biography based on the life of the medieval Russian painter, the puzzling, poetic and highly personal The Mirror (1975) and the introspective science fiction art dramas Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979). Due to constant obstructions by the Soviet authorities, who regarded Tarkovsky as an elitist, he shot his last two films in Europe, Nostalgia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986), in Italy and Sweden, respectively. His films are characterized by beautiful imagery presented in long takes with a slow and contemplative rhythm, accompanied by dialogues that raise questions in philosophical, theological and psychological levels. On Tarkovsky, acclaimed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman wrote: "When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow?" [1]

Sculpting in Time, published shortly before his death in 1986, reunites Tarkovsky's reflections on the cinematic art. In it, the Russian film director compares the work of the filmmaker to a sculptor who, guided by an inner vision, removes all that isn't essential in a marble block (that is, "time made up of an enormous solid clusters of living facts"), creating a finished piece of art. Tarkovsky defends that a filmmaker must convey the feelings he experienced and his vision of the world through imagery force, and that the main purpose of art is explaining human existence. Or, as he writes, at least propose the question.

Excerpts:

"What is the essence of the director's work? We could define it as sculpting in time. Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and, inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is not part of it—so the film-maker, from a 'lump of time' made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image."

"Think of Mandelstam, think of Pasternak, Chaplin, Dovzhenko, Mizoguchi and you'll realise what tremendous emotional power is carried by these exalted figures who soar above the earth, in whom the artist appears not just as an explorer of life, but as one who creates great spiritual treasures and that special beauty which is subject only to poetry. Such an artist can discern the lines of the poetic design of being. He is capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life."

"The point is that it is no good by-passing the difficulties and bringing everything down to a simplistic level; therefore it is crucial that mise en scène, rather than illustrating some idea, should follow life—the personalities of the characters and their psychological state. Its purpose must not be reduced to elaborating on the meaning of a conversation or an action. Its function is to startle us with the authenticity of the actions and the beauty and depths of the artistic images—not by obtrusive illustration of their meaning."

Link to the complete book in PDF:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UCINDVIMUGIK99gkC3cycuQ0v1WIT60z/view?usp=sharing

Andrei Tarkovsky

[1] Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern (Penguin Books Ltd, 1987), translated by Joan Tate, p. 80.