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The framework of Andrei Tarkovsky

This presentation is just a compilation of ideas from: Jeremy Mark Robinson, Vida Johnson

and Graham Petrie, Gabor Karsai, Sean Martin, Jaap Mees, Le Fanu, Alan Pavelin,

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Peter Green, Thomas Redwood, Daniel O. Jones, Andras Balint

Kovacs, Peter King, Andrea Truppin, Prakash Kona, Robinson

Filme: Compresorul si vioara, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Andrei Roublev (1966), Solaris (1972),

The Mirror (1974), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), Jertfa/The Sacrifice (1986).

Andrei Tarkovsky - the son of Arseni Tarkovsky, a poet and critic, and Maria Ivanovna,

an actress. father's poems in several of his films.

After his parents divorced, Andrei and his sister Marina were raised by their mother.

Tarkovsky, born in 1932 into the comfortable Moscow household of Arseniy Tarkovsky,

a well-regarded poet of the people, was surrounded by works of classical art, literature,

and music. As a teenager, Andrei spent long hours with his father, listening to Bach,

gazing at books of Russian religious art, and attending to the recitation of his father's

poetry.

From 1951 to 1954 Arabic at Moscow's Institute of Oriental Languages.

Studied geology in Siberia

Soviet State Film School (VGIK) in 1956 at VGIK his teacher was Mikhail Romm

(1901-1971)

In 1959 Tarkovsky made a short television film There Will Be No Leave Today and won a

prize with his diploma work, Steamroller and the Violin (1960).

Ivan's Childhood (1962) - won the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival. A feeling of

loneliness (At the film’s first screening in Moscow in March 1962, Mikhail Romm

famously declared ‘Remember the name: Tarkovsky’)

Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky's next film, won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 1970. The

thinly veiled comment on the situation of Soviet artists was given a limited release in the

USSR in 1971, and was cut for distribution abroad.

Solaris won the Jury Prize at Cannes, but the film had a limited distribution at home.

The Mirror was an autobiographical work, in which Tarkovky used the logic of dreams

and poems

At a meeting of the State Institute of Cinematography and the Union of

Cinematographists, his colleagues condemned his work as 'elitist'. An engineer from

Sverdlovsk wrote in a letter to Tarkovsky: "One can only be astonished that those

responsible for the distribution of films here in the USSR should allow such blunders."

[prostii]

The doom-laden Nostalgia (1983) was made in Italy. Screenplay: Tarkovsky + poet

Tonino Guerra (who collaborated with Fellini and Antonioni). Director Sergei

Bondarchuk, prevented it winning the Palme d'or. Nostalgia received the Special Jury

Prize.

In London he directed a stage production of Boris Godunov at Covent Garden.

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The Sacrifice (1986): was shot on the Baltic Sea island of Gotland. Primarily a Swedish

production, the members of the crew included Sven Nykvist and Erland Josephson, both

famous for their collaboration with Ingmar Bergman. Sacrifice received at Cannes the

Grand Special Jury Prize, the International Critics Prize, and the Ecumenical Prize.

During the last years of his life, Tarkovsky suffered from cancer. He died in Paris on

December 29, 1986. Tarkovsky died in 1986 and is buried in Paris = 54 ani! =====================================================================

Ingmar Bergman: Tarkovsky - the invention of "a new language which allows him to

seize hold of life as appearance, life as a dream." T. "the finest contemporary filmmaker."

Kieslowski: “Only one director in the world has managed to achieve that miracle in the

last few years, and that’s Tarkovsky.”

Motto: ‘The artistic image cannot be one-sided: in order justly to

be called truthful, it has to unite within itself dialectically

contradictory phenomena.”

T: audience to absorb the films, in “the way they would look at the passing landscape

through a train window”.

We have forgotten how to relate emotionally to art: we treat it like editors, searching in it

for that which the artist has supposedly hidden… You have to be like a child.

Incidentally, children understand my pictures very well and I haven’t met a single serious

critic yet who stands knee-high to those children when it comes to understanding my

films for what they are.

Movies as art

T: “If a scenario is a brilliant piece of literature, then it is far better that it should remain

as prose.”

“No one component of a film can have meaning in isolation: it is the film that is the work

of art”.

T: “Art is by nature aristocratic, and naturally selective in its effect on the audience.”

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Making his movies: ‘It is obviously a most mysterious, imperceptible process. It carries

on independently of ourselves, in the subconscious, crystallising on the walls of the soul.’

T: "There is only one way of thinking in cinema: poetically"

"In all my films it seemed to me important to try to establish the links which connect

people (other than those of the flesh), those links which connect me with humanity, and

all of us with everything that surrounds us." (Tarkovsky in Sculpting in Time, 1984)

T: His films are about love, and in a sense it is love that lies behind all this.

“Sensul artei este rugaciunea, este rugaciunea mea. Daca aceasta rugaciune, daca filmele

mele pot aduce oamenii la Dumnezeu, cu atat mai bine. Atunci viata mea isi va capata

intregul sens: acela, esential, de a sluji."

"Toate filmele mele, intr-un fel sau altul, repeta ideea ca oamenii nu sunt singuri si parasiti intr-

un univers vid, ci ca ei sunt legati prin numeroase legaturi de trecut si de viitor si ca fiecare

individ innoada prin prezenta sa o legatura cu istoria omenirii in general. Aceasta speranta, ca

fiecare viata si fiecare act are un sens, mareste intr-o masura incalculabila responsabilitatea

individului fata de cursul general al vietii."

[Gibson: “[R]eality does not reside in anything taken by itself. No, reality resides in the

relationship” (107). Newton vs. Leibniz s-t absolute vs. relative]

T: ‘Art must give man hope and faith.’

T: Modern man is spiritually impotent, and that ‘one of the saddest aspects of our time

is the total destruction in people’s awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the

beautiful.

Susan Sontag: Art is so far along the labyrinthine pathways of the project of transcendence

that it's hard to conceive of it turning back, short of the most drastic and punitive "cultural

revolution." Yet at the same time, art is foundering in the debilitating tide of what once seemed

the crowning achievement of European thought: secular historical consciousness.

Inspiration

James Quandt’s essay ‘Tarkovsky and Bresson: Music, Suicide, Apocalypse’ the two

filmmakers and their films can best be understood as a form of conversation between two

friends. ‘The two friends shared cardinal themes—spiritual anguish, the search for grace

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and oblivion, the conflict between faith and the barbarity of the world—and both educed

the mystical from the banal, made the ineffable inhere in the everyday’

Narrative from Tolstoy, Shakespeare and the Dutch painters, Bruegel, Byzantine and

Russian icon painting, from Pushkin to Andrei’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky, from Goethe

to Hoffman.

From Shakespeare and not any modern playwright that Tarkovsky learns how to do

Stalker!

the Bible, William Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoievsky are

favourites Don Qitixote is referenced in Solaris; Fyodor Tyuchev in Stalker; Anton

Chekhov, Dante Alighieri (the Inferno), Dostoievsky (The Devils), Arseny Tarkovsky

and Pushkin in Mirror

In his book, Sculpting In Time, Tarkovsky frequently refers to literary figures: apart from

the ones cited above are Boris Pasternak, Nikolai Gogol + and Hermann Hesse, G W.F

Hegel, Paul Valery, Ernest Hemingway, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Goethe, Dante

Alighieri, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust + Maria Rilke Rilke's mystical

lyricism

Leonardo da Vinci in Mirror and The Sacrifice; Piero della Francesca in Nostalghia and

The Sacrifice; the snowscapes referencing Pieter Brueghel in Solaris and Mirror; part of

Jan van Eyck's Qhent Altar piece in Stalker; Albrecht Diirer's Apocalypse in Ivan’s

Childhood; Vincent van Gogh is alluded to in the face and hands of Gorchakov;

Byzantine icons appear in Mirror, Andrei Roublyov and The Sacrifice; and Andrei

Roublyov has the painter's icons crowning it at the end

Carpaccio (with his frontal viewpoint and others) influences his thinking a scene

About his movies

T: “My movies are Dostoievsky on cinema screen!” T: "I see it as my duty to stimulate reflection on what is essentially human and eternal in

each human soul, and which all too often a person will pass by, even though his fate lies

in his own hands. In the end everything can be reduced to the one simple element which

is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love.

T: "what people are looking for in cinema is a continuation of their lives, not a

repetition…”

Tarkovsky was adamantly opposed to any intellectual interpretation of his films. Films in

general, and his films in particular, are first and foremost an emotional experience.

“Calling themselves intellectuals those writers and scientists. They don’t believe in

anything… They’ve got empty eyes”! Taking this stance even further, in Nostalghia the

character Domenico shouts at a passive crowd before committing suicide: “What kind of

a world is this when it’s a mad man who tells you that you should be ashamed of

yourselves”? In Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice, it is the protagonist Alexander who

laments his own lifeless intellectualism: “I studied philosophy, the history of religion and

aesthetics. And by the time I finished I’d dug myself into a hole”

scripts and films would be constantly changing as Tarkovsky’s understanding grew

as to what each scene or film required.

Before and during shooting, the script was then rewritten on a daily basis, with Misharin

feeling that ‘Tarkovsky knew what he wanted but was unable to articulate it.’

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He was fanatically involved in all aspects of production, having the last word on set

design, costume and choice of location.

'A group of soldiers is being shot for treason in front of the ranks. They are waiting among the puddles [pools] by a

hospital wall. It's autumn. They are ordered to take off their coats and boots. One of them spends a long time

walking about among the puddles, in his socks which are full of holes, looking for a dry place to put down the coat

and boots which a minute later he will no longer need'.

====================================================================

Belief, picture, image

Belief is a theme central (his movies not “religious movies” but “spiritual movies”)

Tarkovsky goes literally by the observation that the language of spirit is in the very

nature of things. The miracle is a Joycean epiphany that is “invisible” for all practical

purposes. The image stands at the borders of the invisible:

To achieve life breathing through the frame, Tarkovsky films motion:

grass, trees, clothes blowing in the breeze and (so often) running water.

The soundtrack emphasizes motion: dripping, creaking, rustling, the

noises of nature on the move, a world that never keeps still. Even when

Tarkovsky’s frame seems to be static, the soundtrack evokes motion.

Robert Bresson wrote: “to TRANSLATE the invisible wind by the

water it sculpts in passing.” This is precisely what Tarkovsky tries to

do: to depict the invisible by showing what it touches and moves. The

invisible in Tarkovsky’s philosophic cinema is the spiritual, the divine,

the unknown and unknowable. So he depicts a group of trees and then

has the wind rustle the leaves.

Eliade: “It is true that the theology of ‘the death of God’ is extremely important, because

it is the sole religious creation of the modern Western world. What it presents us with is

the final step in the process of desacralization.” (1984, 151) It is this global

desacralization that Tarkovsky's sacred cinema explores, coming down on the side of

mystery and interiorization. And in The Sacrifice Tarkovsky used the reality of nuclear

war as an equivalent or embodiment of desacralization on a global scale.

In the most archaic phases of culture, to live as a human kind was in itself a religious

act, since eating, sexual activity, and labour all had a sacramental value. Experience of

the sacred is inherent in man's mode of being in the world (Eliade 1984, 154)

undergo = sufere

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T: "Dostoevsky wants to believe in God but cannot ― the relevant organ is

atrophied." ---- He has a fascination for states of mind that are complex, undecided,

dialectical: the very opposite of doctrinal and ideological.

After reading Tolstoy’s Letters: "I do believe God will not abandon me." His mother’s

death becomes an occasion for an affirmation of the immortality of the soul and the

comfort of the resurrection: "Goodbye, no, not goodbye, because we shall meet again, I

am convinced of that!"

The difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxism

Tarkovsky’s preference for Byzantine artists and for artists of the “Northern

Renaissance” rather than the Italian tradition because of cultural connections: Russian

icon painting is a tradition rooted in Byzantine icon painting.

Art: Difference Renaissance (Italians)-Northern Europe: “The appeals that artists like

Van Eyck or Vermeer make are to the individual eye, not to the common gaze of a

convoked audience, as Michelangelo’s are…”

One is not supposed to get something different from the Sistine Chapel ceiling than one’s

neighbor. Spectacle invites collective experience. The Sistine Chapel ceiling is an

opportunity for a communal event. It is loud and bombastic…. One is not supposed to get

something different from the Sistine Chapel ceiling than one’s neighbor.

vs.

a Rembrandt portrait has to be taken personally. It invites the viewer to go inside …

self-reflection

By contrast Renaissance painting and the earlier Dutch masterworks of Van der Weyden

and Van Eyck is iconological – everything in the picture has a denotative meaning.

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Sec 16, 17 Dutch painting: Hooch and Vermeer. → The movement of light or the

suggestion of movement that has infinite psychological [religious] connotations.

During the Renaissance, Italians: Greek ideals of proportion and perspective

vs.

Painters in Flanders, the Netherlands and Germany: accurately paint light. van Eyck,

van Dyck, de Hooch and Vermeer: accurate representation of reality, few would call what

they did “imitation” … since they concerned themselves primarily with light instead of

naturalistic modeling, linear perspective and volumetric configuration.

Pavel Florensky: Renaissance as a formal, rather than a spiritual pursuit. …vs. “truth to

perception” is subjective rather than objective [and formal]

Tolstoy: If art can save the world it can do so only person by person and not en masse.

Tolstoy gets this from his understanding of Christianity, which is, of course, anti-

institutional and deeply individualistic.

Orthodox religion: Contemplating natural and human beauty brings man close to the

perception of divinity. The icon = concentrated form of this relationship. The icon = an

image, a “window” to the divine world through beauty = the iconostasis

Iconostasis = in the church, profane space separates from sacred space, the sanctuary that

remains invisible for the believer is like a big screen through which man achieves visual

contact with the divine world. The visual contact is indirect and is mediated by the

believer’s imagination, prodded by his or her contemplation of beauty. This is how time

becomes an important factor of visual perception. The viewer needs time to see

“through” the object. The object’s beauty only helps the vision’s transcendence into

the divine world.

Tarkovsky common with Renaissance artists: he works from nature

About sacred space

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Faith is an affirmation of the miraculous – that which is ‘invisible’ and ‘everywhere’

at any point in time

The experience of color in T requires attention to subtlety and slight movements of

light and shifts of color. (Tarkovsky’s color symbols do not announce themselves with

tympanis and trumpets as do Spielberg’s and Sirk’s.)

T does not share the concern of the modern artist to put something new in the world.

Cognitive ambiguity = Shift the viewer's attention from the representational to the

transcendental [and transcendent] meaning of the recorded event

T: Two directors (1) those who attempt to present the world that surrounds them-the real

actual world that you see with your eyes. (2) those who are concerned with presenting

their internal selves. . . . These are the poets: Dovzhenko, of course; Bergman, Bunuel,

Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Vigo, Bresson. When they make films, they express themselves

internally. No one else could make that particular film. . . . But you must understand that

artists really never talk about themselves directly. No real artist does. Even when he talks

about himself, he doesn't talk about himself-or he wouldn't be a great poet. A great poet,

whether talking about himself, or talking about the community, is always addressing

larger questions.

The story is transcended by the kinesthetic impact capable of generating (here Tarkovsky

cites Thomas Mann) "something spiritually broader and more universal than mere facts,

an entire world of feelings, thoughts, and visions embodied within it."

T: Film is narrative.

T: Speaks negatively of purely abstract art and of the avant-garde in general (though he

mentions Cezanne, van Gogh and Picasso in positive contexts).

Symbol vs. imagine and light

T: 'The fewer symbols the better! Symbolism is a sign of decadence' [missing

imagination]

When asked, for instance, about the unexplained reappearance of the Holy Fool at the end

of Andrei Rublev when she is seen sane and richly dressed, Tarkovsky: ‘Let them make

of it what they will.’

Tarkovsky was frequently asked what his films meant, and he would often reply that

they meant nothing other than what they were.

'The symbol itself must be transparent to transcendence' (Campbell); for T sense of

transparency by using glass, mirrors, surfaces, water and translucent forms

An artist, it could be said, needs a minimum of philosophy and a maximum of "negative

capability" (Keats’s term, to describe Shakespeare).

Not symbols, but images. “An image has an unlimited number of possible

interpretations.” However, T: The Zone, while being just ‘a zone’, also symbolised the

trials and tribulations of life itself, while the watering of the tree in The Sacrifice ‘for

me is a symbol of faith’.

And then again, a film, like a painting, exists at a certain level beyond dialogue altogether

― beyond discourse. The image, you could say, is inherently ambiguous: that is what

makes it so fascinating… there is always a residue of pure imagery that is ultimately

"just there" and beyond interpretation.

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T: ‘The image is indivisible and elusive, dependent upon our consciousness and on the

real world which it seeks to embody.’

T: “Only the film as a whole could be said to carry, in a definite sense, an ideological

version of reality”.

Tarkovsky was adamantly opposed to any intellectual interpretation of his films. Films in

general, and his films in particular, are first and foremost an emotional experience.

Tarkovsky himself claimed that in none of his films is anything symbolized. The Zone in

Stalker is simply a zone, he wrote in Sculpting in Time, (2) only to describe the Zone as

life itself through which man has to pass. "Art symbolizes the meaning of our

existence".

Frame for frame, the pictures are like carefully composed paintings, with almost

imperceptible movements and subtly changing light…

The essence of an image cannot be described in words, because it always

incorporates infinity. [Brancusi]

Andrei Tarkovsky's use of the camera recalls Michelangelo Antonioni's: both use precise,

static camera as well as slow tracking shots; both have a lightness of touch

Tarkovsky's slow motion is softly poetic, stemming from his lyrical view of life + long

shots + cool objectivity + slow tracking shot, often crabwise (i. e. , parallel to the subject)

+ Changing from colour to black-and-white (as in Mirror and Nostalghia) indicates a

movement from one world, one mental state, one perception, to another. + T: black-

and-white closer to how perception works in real life, how colour isn't, really noticed in

real life, but colour films artificially attract attention to themselves

Tarkovsky rarely blocked his scenes in a conventional way.

'The moment in which light comes is God' (CG Jung)

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Japanese Art (example of universality for T.)

Haiku poetry targets a space that is simultaneously commonplace and strange (like

Tarkovsky's films)

Refused to privilege Christianity above other rival creeds. → A distinctive flavour of

China and the East: of Lao Tzu, Kenko, the "Indian" cosmic consciousness of

theosophists like Gurdjieff. Sages of India, China and Japan + Hermann Hesse and Carlos

Castaneda (who floated on similarly "non-European" waves of thought)

Similar cu Japanese haiku – The last sequence of “Sacrifice”: the child, tree, sea - The

beauty of the image (so pregnant with peace and farewell) derives from the sense we get

that there’s at once too little and too much going on in it ― it’s like a mysterious line

from a poem we love that obstinately clings onto its strangeness.

It is analogous to Japanese printmaking in which a tiny human figure is sometimes just

barely discernible in a nature scene.

Tarkovsky was especially drawn to the internal logic of Japanese haiku, wherein three

very different images are combined to form a whole much larger than the parts. Ex:

Kris Kelvin among the vegetation. He does not act, but stands passively as if he were part

of the scenery. Tarkovsky then cuts to a patch of weeds swaying beneath the water. The

camera zooms in very slowly for approximately half a minute on this subject, with the

singular sound of running water on the soundtrack.

These images from Stalker and Solaris suggest the dissolution of the human character in

nature, as Tarkovsky shows the potential for a single human being to be transformed into

a part of a larger whole.

There are no easy explanations to these images, but they seem to point to an

interpenetration of the seen and unseen worlds, visible manifestations of the spiritual

battles that are continually being waged around us.

For Hollander the foundation between internal and external movement is the difference

between representation of light and perspectival realism.

The frequent ‘still lives’ in the films – the tea cups on the table in the rain in Solaris, the

comb and Bible in Nostalgia, the mirror, cup and stereo in The Sacrifice to name but

three – also echo the painterly device of the memento mori, objects which serve to remind

the person contemplating the painting that life is transitory.

=====================================================================

Time, memory, dreams

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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'Time' is the element which imagination (dreams) needs in order to leave the

domain of the abstract!

“For the first time in the history of the arts, in the history of culture, man found the

means to take an impression of time.”

T: “Time is a condition for the existence of our ‘I’ ”

The uniqueness of cinema as an art is that it is capable of ‘sculpting in time.’

T: ‘Time, printed in its factual forms and manifestations: such is the supreme idea of

cinema as an art.’

Time - not as an objective reality. It is not the job of cinema to represent on celluloid

the “actuality of time” that exists in the world separately from humanity.

The dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image is rhythm expressing the course of

time within the frame.

Transfer the same idea to the main lines and contours, they do not denote, represent, or

symbolize emotion (or emotions); they are efforts to convey emotion directly,

unmediated by plot or narrative and character in the usual sense.

=

Since he records nature directly, Tarkovsky’s interest in nature is quite different: he does

not worry that the image looks like nature; he tries to have the time in the shot feel like

nature!

How place is always a place in time and how this creates the significance of memories

of a particular place: Mirror (1974) deals with exile across time: loss + attempt through

memory to regain what is lost. But it is also the attempt of an artist to recreate the deeply

felt personal sensations and feeling of a particular time and space [home] which, for him,

appears to be significant in determining the pattern of his life. (Mirror went through 22

different versions before it the final edit was allowed to be released)

Bachktin (for literature) about “chronotope” = Time-space [Kant + Einstein + the “I”]:

‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically

expressed in literature’. … ‘Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically

visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot

and history’. …Our sense of self, or our history, is also our sense of time and place,

and this is always specific.

T and the notion of returning (space or time?) (returning through internalization)!

We are forced to look at ourselves, as if we were standing before a mirror: Green (1993),

it is used as ‘the metaphorical looking-glass that provides man with a reflection of

himself. In its surface, time is refracted; and it is a transitional device through which

one may pass to other worlds, other states of consciousness’.

Some things are better felt rather than analysed. There are some things that are immune

to critique and rational argument, but respond rather to more base and unconscious

stimuli. Ex: Dwelling, as a private activity. We do not tend to analyse how we live,

whilst we are doing it. We do need even analyse our memories, but instead relive them.

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Places just are; their meaning - from simple presence. Our dwelling - a seamless

continuum of presents linked to the past and future. It holds our memories and our hopes

and dreams for the future + our present activities.

[Dwelling (space-time + memories and dreams) + dacha → Allienation (the loss of

innocence…) vs. Recover of innocence, childhood, time = Paradise (“home”) = Eternal return

(“Sacrifice”)] + Lev Tolstoy: Christianity is not belief in God but belief in Man. (Solaris)

Complementarity: 3 heroes from “Stalker” = One person = History of humanity (Dostoievsky)!

+ women-man]

Rhythm

T: rhythm does not exist in regard to any 'normal' or 'non-normal' time. It exists

independently, creating its own rhythm and 'feeling'.

T: 'Rhythm' as a temporal quality has not been produced through montage but that it is a

kind of rhythm of non-rhythm, producing a very original quality of cinematic time:

'Rhythm, then, is not the metrical sequence of pieces; what makes it is the time-thrust

within frames.’

Construction of space must be related to time. … everything in flux so that the viewer

must keep readjusting. static, the viewer is allowed, even provoked, to see new-ness at

each moment.

Time = Past + future → Nature of memory; Past and future = Imaginative events, not

measurements of objective time

Memory constitutes our very existence, even our personality.

T: ‘In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more reliant

than the present.’ Our very identity is our past, or, as Alfred Whitehead stated, we live

in our past.

T: As we return to our past cause and effect may, in a moral sense, be linked

retroactively. [Solaris]

Dreams

The 'logic of dreams' is, like ostranenie in formalist film theory, a matter of time. …

'Dreams' are a matter of time - this does not imply making a given piece of reality

strange by embedding it in another level of time.

[Defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение) is the artistic technique of forcing the

audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance

perception of the familiar. Dada, postmodernism, epic theatre, and science fiction]

No clear difference between reality and dreams for T.

Boris Uspensky's def. of interior-exterior points: 'The external point-of-view, as a

compositional device, draws its significance from its affiliation with the problem of

ostranenie or estrangement. The essence of the phenomenon resides primarily in the

use of a new or estranged viewpoint on a familiar thing . . . The thing is 'made strange'

by looking at it from the outside. The object of everyday life becomes an object of

aesthetic interest because an author looks at it.

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Tarkovsky's expressions do not represent the 'real', nor do they symbolize the 'unreal'.

Rather, they remain in the domain of the 'improbable' between symbolization,

representation, and estranged expressions = 'strange' character

Concept of time possesses a basically non-structural quality. [time is abolished]

The time of the dream is produced through experiences coming to us through memory:

… no temporal structure.

T: 'how did this day imprint itself on our memory'? …this memory comes to us 'as

something amorphous, vague, with no skeleton or schema. Like a cloud'. The vagueness

of these memories is a vagueness of time, meaning these memories lack a 'skeleton' in

the form of an abstract temporal structure.

'The logic of the dream': every scene produces its own temporal laws, its own time = its

own 'time truth'.

A rhythm of time is not produced through a scene's logical relationship with other scenes.

The temporal laws of the scene are absolutely 'true' in the sense that they are absolutely

'necessary' in regard to the material itself.

T: Artistic expression 'has to come from inner necessity, from an organic process

going on in the material as a whole'. The organic whole of the material from which this

necessity arises is not the abstract, structural, organism of a film that has been produced

by montage. It is an organic whole formed by artistic necessity, an 'inner necessity',

arising out of the 'inner dynamic of the mood of the situation'. 'The dream’, as a

phenomenon of cinematic time, arises out of this 'inner', 'temporal' necessity, since any

'time pressure must not be gained casually'. Distortions of time as they appear in the

cinematic dream must be moulded according to this necessity; they should not be

introduced as 'technical' time shifts destined to underline, for example, the plot of a story.

In this sense dreams are a matter of 'sculpting in time'.

T: 'sometimes the utterly unreal comes to express reality itself', aesthetic of 'making

things strange' that develops and at the same time overcomes the principle of ostranenie

The time of the dream communicates reality as something 'unreal' which nevertheless

affects us at least as harshly as reality itself

Gaston Bachelard: 'Dreams' must be a kind of 'paste'. The organic state of the paste is not

represented by a stable and abstract structure. The paste is thoroughly concrete, in the

same way that the 'paste of dreams' has no abstract temporal frame: it is time through

and through and also thoroughly real.

No hard line between inside and outside. One learns about the inside from carefully

studying the outside.

The complex color coding and structuring of these dreams, memories and visions is

largely responsible for the immediate effect that the films have on the perception of the

viewer.

‘The artistic image cannot be one-sided: in order justly to be called truthful, it has to

unite within itself dialectically contradictory phenomena.’

T: “The inner world we try to reproduce on screen; not just the author’s inner world,

but what lies within the world itself, what is essential to it and does not depend on us.”

The essential nature of a thing is always internal, inside the thing

14

Conscious-unconscious, subjective-objective

Borders between conscious and unconscious experience are uncertain…. representing

different states of consciousness.

Experience of living involves the entire psyche; both conscious and unconscious aspects

are equally important.

“Truth to perception” is subjective rather than objective [kant]

Thematic symbols of the dream world - represented by audio-visual means -----

“ineffability" impossible to convey verbally: rain, fire, fog, wind, and earth are

experienced on the screen as cinematic phenomena rather than perceived as a natural

power.

Film, like a painting, exists at a certain level beyond dialogue altogether ― beyond

discourse. The image is inherently ambiguous…

Elements + music, sounds, words

4 elements: water, earth, fire, air + animals (dog, horse, birds) + mirrors, home, space-

time, dreams, etc. [→ MOVIE = WORLD = LIFE, mundane-transcendental-

transcendent]

Implicit to wine, bread and oil were obvious religious overtones. Other objects (water

jugs, candles, bowls, books, dead gamne, fish, birds, etc.) were incorporated in

mythological or Biblical depictions, or formed the basis of “still lifes” and represented

certain ideal qualities. Bowls, towels, fish, for example, were symbols of water; candles

or conflagrations, of fire. The four elements were in turn tokens of other qualities,

water representing purification; fire, light and (divine) enlightenment

The generation of sounds, the quality of the camerawork, lighting and choreography,

and the dramaturgical use of certain characters all serve to illuminate areas that are not

otherwise expressed in the pictures or dialogue.

Water

T: "There is always water in my films. I like water, especially brooks. [rivers] The sea is

too vast. I don't fear it; it is just monotonous. In nature I like smaller things. Microcosm,

not macrocosm; limited surfaces. I love the Japanese attitude to nature. They concentrate

on a confined space reflecting the infinite. Water is a mysterious element... because of its

structure. And it is very cinegenic; it transmits movement, depth, changes. Nothing is

more beautiful than water."

T: ‘Water is very important, [It] is alive, it has depth, it moves, it changes, it reflects like

mirror.’

It is so static yet so mobile the flowing water dissolves the colours, washes out the

actualities and the outlines no hard-edged --- image blur and deliquesce, to melt at the

edges [water → dream]

15

[One has to “feel”/live the rain integrated in a scene, not to give it a meaning as an individual

process]

→ Water + light = life + belief

Fire, rain, wind, rivers - these are the cosmic, powerful elements

"Reach into our innermost feelings, to remind us of some obscure memories and

experiences of our own, overwhelming us, stirring our souls like a revelation that is

impossible to interpret in any particular way.''

Films is to reconstruct, recreate life: to let the grass sway, let the water flow, let the

wind blow; these things are recorded. → Journey is more important than the

destination!

T: in Stalker the dog was ‘just a dog’, (it also acts as a mediator between the worlds of

dreaming and waking)

Sounds

Debussy’s insistence that music doesn’t represent emotion, music is itself emotion.

In his later films, Andrei Tarkovsky develops a compelling language based on sound's

potential for ambiguity and abstraction. He probes sound's ability to function both

literally - attached to an object - and abstractly, independent of any recognizable

source.

Tarkovsky's use of sound permits his film to travel smoothly through multiple and

equally weighted layers of experience. These layers flow simultaneously through one

another without the rigid hierarchy that separates most filmic world into "reality" and

"fantasy".

His films are full of big spaces; they are spacious, for two reasons: (1) His use of off-

screen sound, and particularly sounds which enlarge the sense of space (2) the lack of

chatter [talk], of dialogue Tarkovsky's films have long chunks of silence, or a very few

sounds, and these long passages are not kitted out with music, deliberately ambiguous

“His sounds destabilize; they make the coherent and comfortable seem suddenly strange

and disorienting” parallel sound to interweave reality, dream, memory and fantasy

The sound of water suggests a “transcendent, unlocated space”, a place that has

always been there, like the invisible, sacred inner world = religious states of being

16

Another technique: suddenly a loud burst of noise to disrupt a lengthy stillness. Ninth

Symphony ---- T learned this principle from Beethoven. This aural shift will likely cause

a visceral reaction of the viewer. … Extreme contrast creates a very useful tension.

“Noises must become music.” Robert Bresson

[Try to relate, dialectically, all elements (dichotomies): sacred-profane, space-

time, life-death, light-dark, home-abroad, image-words, conscious-

unconscious, subjective-objective, sounds-silence, etc. → Movie “as an object”

or Movie = LIFE]: =====================================================================

=====================================================================

Susan Sontag: “The aesthetics of silence”

[Silence = The “ineffable"]

Motto: “Not only does silence exist in a world full

of speech and other sounds, but any given silence has its

identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound.”

As the activity of the mystic must end in a via negative, a theology of God's absence, a

craving for the cloud of unknowingness beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond

speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the "subject" (the "object,"

the "image"), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence.

17

Struggle between spiritual integrity and of the creative impulses and the distracting

"materiality" of ordinary life.

Silence is the artist's ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from

servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist,

arbiter, and distorter of his work.

Jasper Johns: "Already it's a great deal to see anything clearly, for we don't see anything

clearly." + the wish to attain the unfettered, unselective, total consciousness of "God."

Silence also exists as a punishment — self-punishment, in the exemplary madness of

artists (Holderlin, Artaud) who demonstrate that one's very sanity may be the price of

trespassing the accepted frontiers of consciousness; and, of course, in penalties (ranging

from censorship and physical destruction of art-works to fines, exile, prison for the artist)

meted out by "society" for the artist's spiritual nonconformity or for subversion of the

group sensibility.

dual character of language — its, abstractness, and its "fallenness" in history

A prerequisite of "emptying out" is to be able to perceive what one is "full of," what

words and mechanical gestures one is stuffed with.

John Cage: "there is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that

makes a sound." + "Silence" never ceases to imply its opposite… [Eliade’s sacred and

profane paradox]

Language is experienced not merely as something shared but something corrupted,

weighed down by historical accumulation.

Modern art thus transmits in full the alienation produced by historical consciousness.

vs.

Art that is "silent" constitutes one approach to this visionary, ahistorical condition.

[This is the reason for T to introduce dreams…]

Traditional art invites a look. Art that's silent engenders a stare. [gaze] In silent art,

there is (at least in principle) no release from attention, because there has never, in

principle, been any soliciting of it. A stare is perhaps as far from history, as close to

eternity, as contemporary art can get.

Plenitude — experiencing all the space as filled, so that ideas cannot enter — means

impenetrability, opaqueness. For a person to become silent is to become opaque for

the others → Many interpretations of his silence!

… silence always points to its own transcendence — to a speech beyond silence.

One use for silence: certifying the absence or renunciation of thought + (apparently

opposed) use for silence: certifying the completion of thought.

Silence is equated with arresting time ("slow time") …consciousness purified of

contaminated language

Art expresses a double discontent. We lack words, and we have too many of them.

Consciousness, experienced as a burden [weight, trouble], is conceived of as the

memory of all the words that have ever been said.

Rilke: the redemption of language (which is to say, the redemption of the world

through its interiorization in consciousness) is a long, infinitely arduous task. Human

beings are so "fallen" that they must start simply, with the simplest linguistic act: the

naming of things. [thus becoming Gods, paradoxically!!]

18

For the contemporary appeal for silence has never indicated merely a hostile dismissal of

language. It also signifies a very high estimate of language — of its powers, of its past

health, and of the current dangers it poses to a free consciousness. [again the paradox of

language!]

The distinction between true and false experience, true and false consciousness is also

denied: in principle, one should desire to pay attention to everything.

Such art → Establishing great "distance" (between spectator and art object, between the

spectator and his emotions). But, psychologically, distance often is involved with the

most intense state of feeling, in which the distance or coolness or impersonality with

which something is treated measures the insatiable interest that thing has for us.

The narratives of Kafka and Beckett seem puzzling because they appear to invite the

reader to ascribe high-powered symbolic and allegorical meanings to them and, at the

same time, repel such ascriptions. [paradox] The truth is that their language, when it is

examined, discloses no more than what it literally means. The power of their

language derives precisely from the fact that the meaning is so bare. The effect of such

bareness is often a kind of anxiety — like the anxiety one feels when familiar things

aren't in their place or playing their accustomed role. !!!

One may be made as anxious by unexpected literalness as by the Surrealists' "disturbing"

objects and unexpected scale and condition of objects conjoined in an imaginary

landscape. → That problem is, in principle, an unresolvable one.

Poetry, being an art, … express an experience which is essentially ineffable; using

language to express muteness. In contrast to prose writers, poets are engaged in

subverting their own instrument: and seeking to pass beyond it.

To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of

“meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any

other.)

Arnold Gehlen - “Imagini ale timpului” (anii ’50) Deosebirea dintrea aparenta si realitate devine ea insasi o aparenta; in fata naturii sau in

fata tabloului, este ca si cum temporalitatea spatiala a platosei existentei ar fi explodat.

Brutala repliere spre inauntru, dibuirea dupa sistemul de referinte …

“Unificarea particularului cu universalul domina echivalenta ambelor aspecte ale vietii”

(Hess).

Kandinsky: “Marile sentimente ca teama, bucuri, tristetea etc. nu-l vor mai interesa pe

artist. El va incerca sa trezeasca sentimente mai fine, mai inefabile, sentimente si emotii

care realmente sunt atat de subtile, incat limbajul nostru nu le-ar putea exprima”

Sistemul de referinta al artei; subiectivitatea reflectata; arta nu vrea sa instruiasca, sa tina

in fata ochilor, sa prezinte, sa imite sau orice altceva, ci sa provoace trairi si anume pe

cele care sunt singurele posiblie astazi: acelea care se traiesc pe ele insele.

Starea suspendata a sufletului si dezavantajul ei, amutirea

Pictura a pornit pe drumul lung al pipairii subiectivitatii, in toate aspectele ei.

Subiectivitatea care ajunge la incertitudine (de fapt suntem permanent in aceasta stare)

Un spirit care acorda azil realitatilor subterane, o liniste patrunzatoarea a finalului, dar

intr-o splendoare luciferica

Valabil pt arta [dar mai ales pt filosofia ultimul secol]

19

Librariile noastre contin inca aceeasi literatura ca aceea din anii douazeci, muzeele

aceleasi tablouri si totusi lipseste esentialul: vigoarea cu care toate acestea au fost traite.

Chiar si astazi exista numeroase puncte de vedere, dar ele nu mai tulbura pe nimeni,

fiecare poate sa-si pastreze si sa-si rumege ce-i al sau; si in sfarsit se constata ca

‘nihilismul’ constase in faptul ca – in marea cacofonie simfonica – fiecare instrumentist

luase pe celalalt in serios. [Marea cacofonie: filosofia ultimului secol]

In aceste lucruri nu mai exista nici maretie, nici timbru placut, nici delicatete, nici macar

brutalitate. Nimic din bunii tragatori si impuscaturile dupa omoplat, peste tot amprente

spirituale de cerneala, inspiratie imbatranita si uzata; revolutia a devenit monotona.

[Rusia si estul Europei, serviciile secrete si masele vs. Andrei Tarkovski, creatorii]

ucigatoarea vointa de a actiona prin masivitate cand incepe sa se caste brutalitatea

exagerata la maximum

Barbarie banala, in fata careia noi insine stam stingheriti.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBZsj8FPSbo

Catren

Paharul de cristal cînd cade jos Știe să moară-n țăndări lungi, frumos,

Împrăștiind tăioase curcubeie pe covor.

Vai, numai eu nu mă pricep să mor… Emil Brumaru