As much a poet as a film-maker - in spirit at least - Tarkovsky is arguably alone in having created a body of cinematic works which can stand amongst the greats of literature. His films are dominated by images of astonishing beauty, meditatively manipulating time and space, laced with the hauntings of memory and nostalgia, the reality of dreams and dreams of reality, reflections upon the soul, eternal conflicts of man and the terrifying spiritual power of nature. There is a sense upon the viewing of a Tarkovsky film that he is providing a bridge between yourself and the divine.
My main inspiration for this thread is the fact that there are people on this board who would get much out of these films, and may not know them.
"Art is as a mountain: there is a peak and surrounding it there are foothills. What exists at the summit cannot by definition be understood by everyone."
"The world created by an artist is as complex as the world that surrounds him."
"Only one journey is possible: the journey within. We don't learn a whole lot from dashing about on the surface of the Earth. Neither do I believe that one travels so as to eventually return. Man can never reach back to the point of origin, because he has changed in the process. And of course we cannot escape from ourselves; what we are we carry with us. We carry with us the dwelling place of our soul, like the turtle carries its shell. A journey through all the countries of the world would be a mere symbolic journey. Whatever place one arrives at, it is still one's own soul that one is searching for."
"I am convinced that "time" in itself is no objective category, as "time" cannot exist apart from man's perception of it. We do not live in the "now." The "now" is so transient, as close to zero as you can get without it being zero, that we simply have no way of grasping it. The moment in time we call "now" immediately becomes the "past," and what we call the "future" becomes the "now" and then it immediately becomes "past." The only way to experience the now is if we let ourselves fall into the abyss which exists between the now and the future.
I think cinema is the only art that operates within the concept of temporality. Not because of its developing in time; there are also other art forms that do so: ballet, music, theatre. I mean `time' in he literal sense of the word. What is a take, from the moment we say `action' till the moment we say `stop'? It is the fixing of reality, the essence of time, a way of preserving time which allow to roll and unroll it forever. No other form of art can do that. Cinema is a mosaic made of time."
"A typical person is not able to express a universal view of the world. It's impossible for him to do so, his vision will always remain fragmentary. A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message. A man passes another man by, he looks at him but he cannot see him. Another man will look at the same person and he will smile unexpectedly. The stranger has provoked an explosion of associations in him. It's similar with art. A poet takes a small fragment as a starting point and turns it into a coherent whole. Some consider this process boring. These are people who want to know about everything in minutest detail, like accountants or lawyers. But show a toe sticking out of a hole in a sock to a poet and it is enough to produce image of the whole world in him."
