Andrei Tarkovsky/ "Sculpting in Time"

Andrei Tarkovsky/ "Sculpting in Time"

(1) "He who works with his hands is a labourer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands, his head and his heart is an artist." ~ Francis of Assisi

(2) Tarkovsky: Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.

(3) Film is fast as light, as thought. Tarkovsky follows Nietzsche's advice for philosopher on slow reading. He arrest the diabolical speed and here come the poetry. What does poet do with the language? He breaks "natural" linguistic links and instantaneous understanding. In movies we are used to totalitarian rule of action, film is the changes (motion pictures). What if we would take on nature of media?

(4) "The greatest achievement of human genius is that man can understand things, which he can't imagine," said Soviet physicist Lev Landau. You see on the screen the process of mind at work, something impossible! It's a drama of conscience live! Of course, my friends, film is about invisible, what else? That how it became art.

(5) The Film Image: Tarkovsky begins the chapter by acknowledging that a concept like "artistic image" could never be "expressed in a precise thesis, easily formulated and understandable". And that is precisely the point. For him, the potential of cinema lies in the unique ability of the "film image" to communicate Truth more effectively (or affectively) than language. The image is able to reveal the totality of the universe and allows the viewer to experience simultaneously complex and contradictory feelings.

(6) Time, Rhythm and Editing: "Sculpting in time" is Tarkovsky's metaphor for the construction of a film's rhythm. Notice that the emphasis is put on time and rhythm, rather than on editing, which Tarkovsky considers little more than an assembly process. This distinction clearly separates him from his Soviet predecessors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, whose experiments in montage Tarkovsky refers to as "puzzles and riddles," intellectual exercises that require too little of the audience.

Instead, he writes, "rhythm is the main formative element of cinema". He uses a short film by Pascal Aubier to illustrate his point. The ten-minute film contains only one shot: the camera begins on a wide landscape, then zooms in slowly to reveal a man on a hill. As the camera gets closer, we learn first that the man is dead, then that he has been killed. "The film has no editing, no acting and no decor," Tarkovsky writes. "But the rhythm of the movement of time is there within the frame, as the sole organising force of the — quite complex — dramatic development". Like the Aubier example, Tarkovsky's films are marked by long takes (most notably in the bookends of "The Sacrifice") and slow, beautifully choreographed camera movements.

(7) Images: Expressionistic camera angles, most notably in Ivan's more terrifying dream sequences. Striking but occasionally heavy-handed symbolism, such as that beautiful cross amid the bombed-out landscape. Most memorable images are those that display Tarkovsky's emerging aesthetic: the slow tracking shots through the birch forest, the close-ups of Ivan, the use of found footage, the final fantasy sequence. [Ivan's Childhood - 1962]

(8) "I am radically opposed to the way [Sergei] Eisenstein used the frame to codify intellectual formulae. My own method of conveying experience to the audience is quite different... Eisenstein makes thought into a despot: it leaves no "air," nothing of that unspoken elusiveness which is perhaps the most captivating quality of all art..." — Andrei Tarkovsky.