Sculpting in Time — Andrei Tarkovsky on Art, Cinema and Society

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Sculpting in Time — Andrei Tarkovsky on Art, Cinema and Society

“Society seeks stability, the artist—infinity”

Andrei Tarkovsky (1987)

The living laws of cinema

Perhaps one of the most difficult things to express in words is the impressions and feelings that stirs inside us when we look at artworks in their various forms. The patterns and programs they activate inside our brains often dance beyond the reaches of our systems for language. I think this is why the words we use to describe art can sometimes appear contrived and hollow to others. Words and sentences cannot convey all of one’s soul to another in totality.

What’s more, as the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky explains in his wonderful book, Sculpting in Time, artistic creation does not abide by immutable laws. Rather, it is “a living process” that shifts with the sands of time and culture—a deep entity that “demands a capacity for direct observation of the ever-changing material world.”

The logic of poetry

So is there anything we say about the underlying nature of artistic creation and expression? Reflecting on his own craft, Tarkovsky believes that there is, for whatever reason, something fundamentally and “extraordinarily pleasing” about the “logic of poetry”—the nonlinear threads that bind our past, present, and future together. 

Memories are an excellent example of this. After all, “people’s memories are precious to them”, Tarkovsky writes. So “it is no accident that they are coloured by poetry.” It follows that if some scene or setting resonates deeply with the author because it brings associations from the distant past back to him or her, then there is a good chance that it will leave a similar impression on some others as well. 

It goes without saying, of course, that the author or filmmaker must be careful with reconstructing such associations. “Usually the poetry of the memory is destroyed by confrontation with its origin”, Tarkovsky explains. “There is an enormous difference”, for example, “between the way you remember the house in which you were born and which you haven’t seen for years, and the actual sight of the house after a prolonged absence.” 

In this way, the power of art and cinema is enhanced not by technical prowess or special effects, but by its strength in psychology. In Tarkovsky’s view, it is this psychology of the mind, the character, and the setting, that remains among the most neglected aspects of filmmaking to this day. No matter how technically perfect your work may be, failure on this front, he adds, “will leave the audience cold.”

Sculpting in time

If you accept memories as one such example of poetic links, then you must embrace time as another as well. For “time and memory”, Tarkovsky writes, “merge into each other, they are like the two sides of a medal.” 

After all, why do people pay good money for cinema? It is true, for one, that people sometimes seek the exotic and exciting to escape the mundanities and familiarities of life, if only for a brief moment.

But at its most distilled, Tarkovsky believes that “what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had.” They go for a “living experience… [that] widens, enhances, and concentrates [their] experience.” In other words, it is the time they seek for many worlds, many lives, and many possibilities.

For this reason, Tarkovsky sees himself as a sculptor not of marble but of time. The job of the filmmaker, he suggests, is to shoot, gather and arrange all of one’s exhibits and frames that make up his or her message, and to prune and shave and discard all the unneeded parts.

Precision in poetry

Indeed, like a surgeon or sculptor, creative expression demands precision. “[But] finding the shortest path between what you want to say or express and its ultimate reproduction in the finished image,” Tarkovsky writes, “[is] the most painful part of creative work.” 

This is also why he is enamored with haikus in Japanese poetry. Indeed, there is something marvelous about the way in which three short but precise sentences or phrases can express a myriad of ideas and feelings about the self and world. 

Rainy days—
silkworms droop
on mulberries.

Mirroring each other:
white narcissi,
paper screen.

Matsuo Basho’s Haikus
(Translated into English)

Beauty in simplicity

As Tarkovsky explains, sometimes the less one says about a subject, the more it allows for others to think. Such a method transforms the onlooker into a participant, inviting discovery, discourse, and the unexpected. The same logic applies not only to poetry, but to art in all its forms. 

As the composer Frederic Chopin once said: “Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” Tarkovsky is reminded likewise of what Vincent van Gogh lettered this to his brother in the late nineteenth century:

“When a man expresses clearly what he wants to say, is that strictly speaking not enough? When he is able to express his thoughts beautifully, I won’t argue that it’s more pleasant to listen to him; but it doesn’t add much to the beauty of truth, which is beautiful in itself.”

Vincent van Gogh (1884) in Andrei Tarkovsky. (1987). Sculpting in Time. (Translation by Kitty Hunter-Blair)  

Art as personal truth

If we move beyond subsistence and commerce, the spiritual goal of art then, Tarkovsky argues, is to express our own personal truth—to find meaning in the knots and tangles of life. Like a scientific endeavor, artistic creation is very much a process of discovery, recombination, and assimilation. 

“In science man’s knowledge of the world makes its way up an endless staircase and is successively replaced by new knowledge, with one discovery often enough being disproved by the next for the sake of a particular objective truth. An artistic discovery occurs each time as a new and unique image of the world, a hieroglyphic of absolute truth.” 

Andrei Tarkovsky. (1987). Sculpting in Time. (Translation by Kitty Hunter-Blair)

For this reason, Tarkovsky does not associate artistic greatness with method. Rather, he is interested in how “unswervingly” the artist commits to her own ethical ideals, and how strongly she is able to wring and evoke this from her work, imperfections and all.

Indeed, one does not become an artist, Tarkovsky reminds, simply by attending college or by rubbing shoulders with prominent people. “A masterpiece only comes into being when the artist is totally sincere.”

It is also for this reason, he adds, that many films and fashions grow outdated quickly. Too many people spend their waking lives trying to be contemporary when it is untrue to who they really are.

“You have to work out your own position, your individual point of view… and keep this before you, like the apple of your eye…”

Andrei Tarkovsky. (1987). Sculpting in Time. (Translation by Kitty Hunter-Blair)

A ceaseless tension

Masterpieces are not predestined creations. Even the scenario in filmmaking “is a fragile, living, ever-changing structure”, Tarkovsky writes. And despite his experience, the director himself admits to filming in “constant anxiety” with each movie, for he is never certain that his work will amount to anything worthwhile. Still, he persists. 

Of course, the artist knows that she should not base her achievements on how much applause or income she generates. The viewer, after all, can be a most fickle and unpredictable creature. Yet the artist cannot help but wonder what her audience might make of her efforts. As Tarkosvky notes, this is “the very heart of the problem… a relationship fraught with tension.”

“A text is always taken selectively by the reader, who relates it to the laws of his own imagination. A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”

Andrei Tarkovsky. (1987). Sculpting in Time. (Translation by Kitty Hunter-Blair)

Freedom and dependence

However, Tarkovsky is equally skeptical of artists who boast that they create only for themselves and for no one else. Because while art is indeed a mode of self-expression, “self-expression is meaningless unless it meets with a response.”

There is forever a great amount of “mutual dependence” between the artist and her audience. What the viewers can experience and internalize is constrained by the boundaries of their personal histories and predispositions. It follows that the meaning and reality we share must be caged in similar fashion. “An artist is never free”, Tarkosvky writes. She creates not only for herself, but for others as well.

“People are not alone and abandoned in an empty universe, but are linked by countless threads with the past and the future; that as each person lives his life he forges a bond with the whole history of mankind.”

Andrei Tarkovsky. (1987). Sculpting in Time. (Translation by Kitty Hunter-Blair)

Art as metalanguage

In this way, “the great function of art is communication”, writes Tarkovsky. “Art is a meta-language.” So the greatest artists must be those who understand the ins and outs of this universal mother tongue. They speak through canvas or film, carving invisible inroads into the minds and lives of others. And while their works are sometimes meandering, sometimes obscure, the final effect is nonetheless erudite.

Devoid of spirit

But if we turn now to present times, we see that there is a problem. Tarkovsky laments that art is drowning in an ocean of arbitrary opinion and “hackneyed ways of thinking.” Worse still, the capitalist machine, with its invisible hand, has turned “the celluloid strip [into] a commodity.”

Perhaps the situation is emblematic of our broader social condition. While people boast about our progress in industry and technology, they would be wrong to claim that the same is true for ethics, metaphysics, and our cultural enlightenment. Indeed, a downtrodden Tarkovsky has this to say about the “great tragedy” of our times:

“For the moment we are witnessing the decline of the spiritual while the material long ago developed into an organism with its own bloodstream, and became the basis of our lives, paralysed and riddled with sclerosis… It is clear to everyone that material progress doesn’t in itself make people happy, but all the same we go on fanatically multiplying its achievements… We recognise this and yet we can do nothing to stop it happening… We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention… It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.”

Andrei Tarkovsky. (1987). Sculpting in Time. (Translation by Kitty Hunter-Blair)

Piercing the surface

Still, Tarkovsky is a pragmatic man. He understands that filmmaking, much like the rest of art and culture, is in its infancy. He hopes that cinema might grow and mature as a medium for exploring and confronting our deepest and most profound questions; and that we might somehow restore our sense of personal responsibility, and find a “true balance between the spiritual and the material”.

While we can hope, all us too can play in its undertaking. Not necessarily as a creator, but certainly as an observant onlooker, a careful listener, and unprejudiced thinker. We have come to see that art can be a torturous process, bronzed in constant tension and anxiety. But the end product can be the most wonderful and unexpected of collaborations between the artist and her audience. Extending beyond the surface of description, it is indeed a language that pierces the depths and secrets of our psychology—forever an element of the self and society.

Wake, butterfly—
it’s late, we’ve miles
to go together.

Matsuo Basho’s Haikus
(Translated into English)

Sources and further reading