Andrey Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky The Great Russian Filmaker Discusses His Art

Sculpting in Time

Ivana Varesko

Will, feeling, emotion - these remove obstacles from between people who otherwise stand on opposite sides of a mirror, on opposite sides of a door.

My most fervent wish has always been to be able to speak out in my films, to say everything with total sincerity and without imposing my own point of view on others.

There's another kind of language, another form of communication: by means of feeling, and images. That is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers.

Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count. 

“For me the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion.” 

I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful and poetic of art forms. 

Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active. He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life, unsupported by ready-made deductions from the plot or ineluctable pointers by the author. He has at his disposal only what helps to penetrate to the deeper meaning of the complex phenomena represented in front of him. 

When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man through his life. - Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

For me the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion.” 

Sculpting in Time quotes

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