The framework of Andrei Tarkovsky

(compilation realized by Gabriel Vacariu)

Despre calauza din “Calauza”, in Tarkovsky’s words "to make people feel the measure of things".

Tarkovsky declara ca nimic nu este simbolizat in filmele sale.

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

[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]

· [Movie: Gabriel Vacariu despre Solaris (2013) at http://youtu.be/3Y5b__Q5iL8]

· 7 films [writer Boris Pasternak predicted T will make 7 filmes. T: “Only seven?” Pasternak amended, "But they'll all be good!"]

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.

· 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."

· 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.

· 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.

“…I always thought it important – to the extent human spirit is indestructible – to show matter, which is subject to decay, destruction – as opposed to spirit which is indestructible.” (T)

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.”

· 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.’

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

Tarkovski about himself

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

· Time is the most important aspect of the film medium, because "it is inherent to cinema. . . . It pulsates through the blood vessels of the film, making it alive through various rhythmic pressures rendered obliquely in order to suppress the "dramatic" meaning of the event, while getting the viewer involved with meanings hidden beneath the narrative level. Encouraged to search for something beyond the image as an analog of reality, allowed to ponder upon the presented events/objects, the viewers engage in their own reflection upon what they perceive on the screen.

· "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. [“Perhaps to love is to learn to walk through this world.” Octavio Paz --- Calauza!1]

· “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."

· 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. "Dostoevsky wants to believe in God but cannot ― the relevant organ is atrophied."

· 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.

· Scripts and films would be constantly changing as Tarkovsky’s understanding grew as to what each scene or film required.

· He was fanatically involved in all aspects of production, having the last word on set design, costume and choice of location.

Sources of inspiration

· 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, 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

'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”).

· T: the language of spirit is in the very nature of things… 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. [Antonioni]

· 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)

· 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.

· 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

!!

· 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.)

· Cognitive ambiguity = Shift the viewer's attention from the representational to the transcendental [and transcendent] meaning of the recorded event

· T: Two directors (1) Present the world that surrounds them-the real actual world that you see with your eyes. (2) Present their internal selves. = Poets: Bergman, Bunuel, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Vigo, Bresson. When they make films, they express themselves internally… But you must understand that artists really never talk about themselves directly… A great poet, whether talking about himself, or talking about the community, is always addressing larger questions.

· 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).

· Andrei Rublyov: a daydream of Calvary that is noticeably similar to Bruegel’s painting of the same subject.

· Carpaccio was an Italian, but the aspect of his work that T draws our attention to is more akin to the Netherlandish tradition.. the greater truth is in Carpaccio’s work, suggesting in fact that Raphael means to deceive the viewer.

· Berdyaev’s description of Raphael as “the most impersonal artist in the world,” and as an artist who “displays great virtuosity without any original substance”…

· There is no more striking similarity in their works than in the way T and Bruegel meditate upon nature.

Symbol vs. imagine and light

· Matisse … to a woman who complained that a painting of his didn’t look like a woman, because the proportions were wrong: “You are mistaken madam, for this is not a woman after all, it is a painting.”

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

· I am interested not in symbols, but in 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.

· T: ‘The image is indivisible and elusive, dependent upon our consciousness and on the real world which it seeks to embody.’

· The essence of an image cannot be described in words, because it always incorporates infinity. [Brancusi]

· 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's camera movement reflects -in cinematic terms- the rhythmic pulsation concealed beneath the outside appearance of reality, provoking a strong emotional response, as well as contemplation. At the same time, the impact of this and similar movements is at once sensorial and emotional, as the pace of the tracking is either synchronized or desynchronized with the rhythm of spoken text, the musical accompaniment, and the thematic aspect of the action.

· Whenever the motion on Tarkovsky's screen is decelerated, the action acquires a strong emotional impact, especially in nostalgic recollections, nightmares, and fantasies (e.g., the flying birds in The Mirror) = making the viewers aware of the passage of time and its rhythmic pressures = beneath the image's representational aspect where numerous layers of ineffable transcendental signification can be found.

· Art must transcend and not merely record the outside world. For him, the camera is an explorer rather than an observer.

· … rejecting facial expression as a way of conveying ideas, T attempts to "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.'’

· But each of these thematic symbols of the dream world is represented on the screen by audio-visual means that make their "ineffability" impossible to convey verbally: Tarkovsky's rain, fire, fog, wind, and earth are experienced on the screen as cinematic phenomena rather than perceived as a natural power.

· 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…

· 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

· “You have to neutralize color, to modify its impact on the audience. If color become the dominant dramatic element of the shot, it means that that the director and camera-man are using a painter’s methods to affect the audience. Vs. today: color photography will be warring against the expressiveness of the image.” (T in Sculpting 138)

· The effect of color should be neutralized by alternating color and monochrome sequences, so that the impression made by the complete spectrum is spaced out, toned down” (138). T equated this monochrome effect (ultimele 3 filme) cu scenelel “spiritual”. (Hollander mentioneaza ca Rembrand foloseste chiaroscuro “pt a invoca sufletul”.

· In Nostalghia: relatia ambigua vis-realitate pregateste tranzitia dintr-o lume in alta.

Japanese Art (example of universality for T.)

· 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

· Haiku poetry targets a space that is simultaneously commonplace and strange

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

· It is analogous to Japanese printmaking in which a tiny human figure is sometimes just barely discernible in a nature scene.

· T 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.

· These images from Stalker and Solaris suggest the dissolution of the human character in nature, as T 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.

· 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: the inner journey through the time-space continuum

· T’s art is not a representation of the subject, but the relation object-subject (artist).

· T sincerely believed that he had a special role to play in the history of art.

· T creates “dream films”

· '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, T’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.

· 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. (Whitehead: 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

· '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.

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

· T'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 [creaza mai multe interpretari]

· Concept of time possesses a basically non-structural quality. [timpul este suspendat]

· 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 - 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! [esenta lucrurilor la Brancusi]

Conscious-unconscious, subjective-objective, particular-universal

· 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…

· It is only through the particular and specific that the universal is revealed.

· “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” (Sculpting 159).

· T goes to his personal depths in order to find universal humanity. T’s films make the time for precisely this thinking and feeling.

· The shift in perspective emphasizes the dual nature of a reflective surface. A mirror is a means of self-evaluation and self-exploration, but it is also a projection of a surface appearance. Here T shows that there is no hard line between inside and outside.

· Memories, dreams, and waking perceptions all exist in the same temporal plane…

Elements (apa, pamant, foc, aer)

· 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

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]

[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! (Plato teaches is that Truth can never be directly experienced. The Ideal can never be actualized. The One can never be sensible.)

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

Sounds + music

· “Noises must become music.” (Robert Bresson)

· Debussy: Music doesn’t represent emotion, music is itself emotion.

· In his later films, T 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).

· last 3 films: long periods of silence through which faint sounds and soft voices momentarily manifest, echo, and then disappear back in the quiet. This is how he makes the passage of time feel so visceral. It can’t be done with appeals to sight only. Our eyes are too used to being open and observant all the time. (Stalker, Nostalghia and Offret, are lessons in listening.)

· If these shots were totally without sound, they could easily seem dull. But if they have sound, just a few carefully selected sounds that are subtle and quiet, the scene comes to life, and the viewer has to be ever attentive to information from two different senses instead of just one.

· T'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".

· Films - full of big spaces; 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 T'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

·

· 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.

T and Women

· T: The director’s task is to recreate life: its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen – even if no everyone finds that truth acceptable.

· The Bible sets the forces of good and evil against one another through the allegorical figures of the Virgin Mother and the Whore… this binary as a Janus-faced femininity and he exploits the tension in Offret, endowing his Maria with the qualities of both biblical Mary figures.

· Stalker, Nostalghia, Offret …

· T says as much in his diaries, “What is the purpose of Woman? Humiliation in the service of Love.” (89) ---- misogyny, and the critic can neatly conclude that T hates women.

· T is probably not a feminist… Characters in a T film are never right or wrong in any strict sense.

· In Nostalghia: discutia preot si Eugenia: This scene, however, like so many other of T’s, functions effectively only by virtue of its ambivalence and not by the rightness or wrongness of either character’s viewpoint.

· T’s notions of complementarity.

Documentar 1983:

· T declara: ii datoreaza totul mamei lui care a avut o viata f grea.

· Siberia: cea mai buna perioada a vietii. (la 20 de ani) + studii pian si scoala de arta din Moscova, mama lui a vrut sa faca arta, copilaria ramane intotdeauna cel mai bun timp al nostru: immortal si slab, daca simt ca imi pierd copilaria, atunci totul e pierdut; fara copilarie, nu as fi facut nimic in cinema; Sartre la venetia; cinema = my life; “Cred ca numai poetii vor ramane in istoria cinema-ului”, exista o lege: autor cinema este facut din poeti, marii regizori sunt poeti. Poet = care isi creaza lumea lui fara sa reproduca realitatea din jur; A rubliov: artistul exista pt ca lumea nu e perfecta. Altfel, nu ar exista. arta s-a nascut tocmai datorita lumii imperfecte.

· Solaris: om in conditii inhumane. De ce sa exploram universal cand nu ne cunoastem pe noi? Tiberian a murit de rusine nu de frica. Asta e singura traire carea salveaza omul. Memoria emotive, nu cunoasterea. Cunoasterea nu ne face fericiti, dimpotriva. Vs copil fara cunoastere… plantele percep lucrurile. Nu le intelegem pt ca nu credem in natura, in noi insine. Suntem pe fuga mereu… nu avem timp sa gandim. Vreau sa imi apropii natura emotional si contemplative. Nu incerc sa o rationalizez. Eu percep ca un copil sau un animal nu ca un adult care trage propriile concluzii. Pt tineri: invata sa iubesti solitudinea, sa fii mai mult singur cu tine insuti, imi plac copii mult si animalele. Sunt inocenti. Dar omul care poate allege intre bine sir au, invata sa minta, pt el crede ca va fi mai bogat si mai fericit astfel. Visurile mele sunt color. Intotdeauna. Defectul meu: impacienta, nerabdarea. Nu sunt tolerant. Nu imi place sa rad. In lumea asta nu e loc de ras. Ma simt vinovat cand rad. Nu pot sa imi revad filmele. E precum unul care isi citeste jurnalul scris cand era mic, plin de ganduri immature. Astept sa visez cand eram copil…cand eram fericit fiindca totul era posibil…19 variante la Oglinda.

· 1.10.00

Conclusion

· When he spoke about faith and spirituality T did not have in mind Church doctrine.

· Christianity is our mythology. It is the imaginative groundwork of the Western cultural tradition. Nearly every one of our great artist works within a Judeo-Christian idiom.

· Whether their works deal explicitly with Biblical characters and stories, as do the majority of paintings from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century; whether they suggest specifically Christian morals, as do the majority of all novels and poems written before the twentieth century; whether they ostensibly indict faith like a Bunuel or a Dali; or whether they champion faith through totally abstract means like a Rothko or a Brakhage, most western artists are implicitly or explicitly talking about Christianity.

· Even in the last century when the older arts of painting, musical composition, architecture, poetry and literature each moved away from Christian subjects and attracted fewer and fewer Christian practitioners, the cinema was dominated by believers of all stripes. From Murnau and Dreyer to Bresson, T and Rossellini to Sokurov and Angelopoulos, many of our great filmmakers are Christians making what they believe to be Christian films.

· In Western Christianity values are definite; they are attained by either/or propositions, by choices between good and evil. What values can be certain in such deliberately ambivalent works of art as T’s films?