Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema

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Andrey Tarkovsky, the genius of modern Russian cinema—hailed by Ingmar Bergman as "the most important director of our time"—died an exile in Paris in December 1986. In Sculpting in Time, he has left his artistic testament, a remarkable revelation of both his life and work. Since Ivan's Childhood won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962, the visionary quality and totally original and haunting imagery of Tarkovsky's films have captivated serious movie audiences all over the world, who see in his work a continuation of the great literary traditions of nineteenth-century Russia. Many critics have tried to interpret his intensely personal vision, but he himself always remained inaccessible. I wanted those who saw it to be directly affected by Alexander’s state, to experience his new life passing through the distorted time of his perception. That may be why the fire scene lasts a full six minutes, the longest scene in the history of cinema; but, as I say, it could not have been done any other way. I felt the weight of Tarkovsky’s words as I immersed into listening of this new album. They were instantly present in a way David and his friends cleverly wrapped music sounds of Stalker and The Mirror together with some kind of dystrophic interpretation of Pasternak’s poem Night, to let us uncover what can really be felt underneath. Process enabled only by force of passion exclusive to the deepest human emotions. These are not meant to be contemplated or understood – rather it’s an invitation to spread your arms, open your heart and allow to be overtaken. For me, the true, the only music has always existed in the sounds of nature: The harmony of the wind in the trees, the rhythm of the waves of the ocean, the timbre of the raindrops, the breaking branches, the impact of stones, the different animal cries are for me the real music […].

If this word “music” is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. How many words does a person know?' she asks her mother. 'How many does he use in his everyday vocabulary? One hundred, two, three? We wrap our feelings up in words, try to express in words sorrow and joy and any sort of emotion, the very things that can't in fact be expressed. Romeo uttered beautiful words to Juliet, vivid, expressive words, but they surely didn't say even half of what made his heart feel as if it was ready to jump out of his chest, and stopped him breathing, and made Juliet forget everything except her love? El hecho referido es el siguiente: Su actor fetiche, Anatoli Solonitsin, con quien trabajó en casi todas sus películas, murió de cáncer, y a él mismo le dará cáncer después. Tal como el protagonista de Sacrificio, un hombre que tiene cáncer y para recobrar su salud hace un pacto con una bruja. Para Tarkovski, este acto poético es una anticipación a la realidad que solo puede ser explicado a través de la cualidad mistérica del arte. Esto lo sella con una cita de Pushkin en la que sentencia que "un artista verdadero es, en contra de su voluntad, un profeta". Está claro que su idea sobre el arte es algo que traspasa a la materia y al propio hombre.He is against montage theory and believes that to be true to the essence of cinema is to leave everything formally within the frame and attempt to capture time in the film image the way that it exists in real life, thus making "rhythm" and not editing the main formative element of cinema. Y respecto a ello, a lo material, al materialismo (visto desde la filosofía, y desde la cultura de masas y el consumismo), Tarkovski, que salió de la URSS en 1983, se sitúa en un espacio cuasi paria al criticar a ambos sistemas, aunque no los nombre. No nombra al Capitalismo y al Comunismo, pero sí habla de Occidente y su materialismo (lo cierto es que también critica a ese cine comprometido y político de la URSS con el que no quería tener nada que ver), y cree que la materia amenaza con devorar el espíritu del hombre. También equipara el avance de la tecnología con esa pérdida de espíritu (de ahí que esté relacionado con la introducción de este texto, en el que hablo de la entrada de la tecnología en los dosmiles, cosa que de alguna manera Tarkovski predijo, pese a que murió en los aún analógicos ochentas). Para Tarkovski el cine comercial no tiene valor alguno más que como fuente de generación de dinero y según su idea, el artista no está ahí por enriquecerse. Su visión del arte es totalizadora y metafísica (en el sentido no-místico, sino de trascendencia de lo humano): el arte es lo que salva al hombre de la pérdida de su espíritu. "Y por eso, quizá realmente consista el sentido de la existencia humana en la creación de obras de arte, en el acto artístico, ya que este no posee una meta y es desinteresado". I tend to approach the world at an emotional and contemplative level. I don't try to rationalize it. I perceive it as an animal or child can do - not as an adult who draws his own conclusions.” was a bare response of Andrei Tarkovsky when asked what was his attitude to the world. David Kollar's guitar is marked with AT initials along with the title of one of the most significant European movies - "Stalker".

Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all. Wishart’s piece playfully oscillates between its departure point of everyday experience (two clinking glasses) towards a more imaginary and dream-like, yet nevertheless physically ‘real’ world that is created by the original sound’s transformation into others. Time, printed in its factual forms and manifestations: such is the supreme idea of cinema as an art, leading us to think about the wealth of untapped resources in film, about its colossal future.

My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him. — Tarkovsky He believes the actor shouldn't have any unconscious knowledge of how a scene will unfold but act naturally as if it were real by being given only the necessary information, and allows the actor to have autonomy without restricting their freedom of expression. He thinks a good actor isn't merely understandable but is truthful. I am interested above all in the character who is capable of sacrificing himself and his way of life—regardless of whether that sacrifice is made in the name of spiritual values, or for the sake of someone else, or of his own salvation, or of all these things together. Such behaviour precludes, by its very nature, all of those selfish interests that make up a ‘normal’ rationale for action; it refutes the laws of a materialistic world view. It is often absurd and unpractical. And yet—or indeed for that very reason—the man who acts in that way brings about fundamental changes to people’s lives and to the course of history. The space he lives in becomes a rare, distinctive point of contrast to the empirical concepts of our experience, an area where reality is all the more strongly present. For Tarkovsky, the greatest challenge associated with developing a script is maintaining the integrity of the film’s inspiration — “it almost seems as if circumstances have been deliberately calculated to make [the director] forget why it was that he started working on the picture” (125). For this reason, he argues that the director must also be the writer, or he must develop a partnership that is founded on complete trust. The majority of this section is devoted to The Mirror — Tarkovsky uses it as a case study of his method. Fascinating reading. The Film’s Graphic Realisation My hope is that those readers whom I manage to convince, if not entirely then at least in part, may become my kindred spirits, if only in recognition of the fact that I have no secrets from them. — Tarkovsky

I will expound developments I made while reading the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s poetic accounts, and they will collectively be an indirect review in the process...Pero ahí estaba Tarkovski con su Espejo, con su Stalker, con su Sacrificio, y ahí estaba yo, luchando contra ese tiempo extenuante para intentar ver aquello que él veía en el arte. En pequeñas salas de cine o funciones improvisadas incluso en monitores de TV, funciones a las que no acudía nadie. Esto debido en gran parte al contexto cultural del país en el que estoy. Pero todo esto puede parecer una labia innecesaria que nada tiene que ver con el libro que reseño aquí, sin embargo, tiene mucho que ver. Andréi Tarkovsky fue un poeta, escritor, actor y director de cine ruso en tiempos de la Unión Soviética y se convirtió en uno de los influyentes más grandes de la historia del cine, con tan solo haber filmado siete largometrajes a lo largo de toda su vida. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky sets down his thoughts and his memories, revealing for the first time the original inspirations for his extraordinary films—Ivan's Childhood, Andrey Rublyov, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, Nostalgia, and The Sacrifice. He discusses their history and his methods of work, he explores the many problems of visual creativity, and he sets forth the deeply autobiographical content of part of his oeuvre—most fascinatingly in The Mirror and Nostalgia. The closing chapter on The Sacrifice, dictated in the last weeks of Tarkovsky's life, makes the book essential reading for those who already know or who are just discovering his magnificent work. He believes editing and assembly disturb the passage of time and gives it something new, thus distorting time can give it a rhythmical expression (Sculpting in time). Slovak experimental guitarist / composer David Kollar emerges as one of the most intriguing figures on the European Avant-Garde / Jazz scene in the last decade. His utterly unique approach both to the guitar as an instrument and the contemporary improvising / compositional idioms are fascinating and completely innovative.

Ese apego a reproducir la realidad pero a través de la poética de la imagen que también rechaza la pirotecnia, el artificio, el símbolo y la interpretación unívoca propuesta por el director, busca un impresionismo cinematográfico en el que incluso el color resulta un problema, ya que para la época, el trabajo con el color en el cine aún no llegaba a un nivel técnico óptimo y seguía resaltando como una estética incontrolable por encima del fondo y la profundidad del sentido de la imagen. Por ello Tarkovski proponía el uso de colores apagados y neutros, e incluso, asegura que el blanco y negro es la representación de la realidad más fiel, pues anula la necesidad del escoger un color por encima de otro y de darle un sentido a la gama de colores que en la vida real no existe porque es fortuita. The book has commentary on each of his 7 major feature films, and his complex relationship with the Soviet Union. The final chapter, a discussion of his film The Sacrifice, was dictated in the last weeks of his life. Attempts to harness such a poetry of observation among twentieth-century audiences have, however, not been without friction in either film or music. Tarkovsky repeatedly points to the difficulties that his audiences had with giving themselves over to the poetic logic of raw observation, instead latching onto symbolism and trying to identify hidden meanings in his films that, often to their surprise, were never consciously placed there by its author. ​50​ A similar discourse unfolds around twentieth-century experimental music practices. John Cage responded to the frustration that audiences expressed about their inability to decipher a composition’s ‘meaning’. ​51​

These words could be interpreted as a rejection of the use of music in film altogether. In contrast to such a reading, however, I will argue that Tarkovsky’s vision of an “organisation of sounds and noises” exhibits remarkable parallels to larger developments in musical aesthetics of his time. In the form of fixated and sometimes manipulated everyday sounds, music is literally woven into Tarkovsky’s films and “available to the ear that wishes to perceive it”. ​3​ As such, the clinking glasses in The Sacrifice and Stalker, the singing shower in Mirror (1975), or the ubiquitous sounds of dripping water in his films reflect a plurality of concurrently developing musical practices. I love cinema. There is still a lot that I don't know: what I am going to work on, what shall I do later, how everything will turn out, whether my work will actually correspond to the principles to which I now adhere, to the system of working hypotheses I put forward. There are too many temptations on every side: stereotypes, preconceptions, commonplaces, artistic ideas other than one's own. And really it's so easy to shoot a scene beautifully, for effect, for acclaim . . . But you only have to take one step in that direction and you are lost.