Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.

Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count.

ALL ART, OF COURSE, IS INTELLECTUAL, BUT FOR ME, ALL THE ARTS, AND CINEMA EVEN MORE SO, MUST ABOVE ALL BE EMOTIONAL AND ACT UPON THE HEART.

For many years I have been tormented by the certainty that the most extraordinary discoveries await us in the sphere of time . We know less about time than about anything else

The beautiful is hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth, for whom it is contra-indicated. But the profound lack of spirituality of those people who see art and condemn it, the fact that they are neither willing nor ready to consider the meaning and aim of their existence in any higher sense, is often masked by the vulgarly simplistic cry, 'I don't like it!', 'It's boring!' It is not a point that one can argue; but it like the utterance of a man born blind who is being told about a rainbow. He simply remains deaf to the pain undergone by the artist in order to share with others the truth he has reached.

AN ARTISTIC DISCOVERY OCCURS EACH TIME AS A NEW AND UNIQUE IMAGE OF THE WORLD, A HIEROGLYPHIC OF ABSOLUTE TRUTH. IT APPEARS AS A REVELATION, AS A MOMENTARY, PASSIONATE WISH TO GRASP INTUITIVELY AND AT A STROKE ALL THE LAWS OF THIS WORLD-ITS BEAUTY AND UGLINESS, ITS COMPASSION AND CRUELTY, ITS INFINITY AND ITS LIMITATIONS.

Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual.

Little plots and stories, acted out and screened, can't possibly be called cinema. They have nothing whatever to do with cinema. A cinematographic work is above all a work which would not be possible in any other art form. In other words. it can be created by means of cinema, and cinema alone

Art is a meta-language, with the help of which people try to communicate with one another; to impart information about themselves and assimilate the experience of others. Again, this has not to do with practical advantage but with realising the idea of love, the meaning of which is in sacrifice: the very antithesis of pragmatism. I simply cannot believe that an artist can ever work only for the sake of 'self-expression.' Self-expression if meaningless unless it meets with a response. For the sake of creating a spiritual bond with others it can only be an agonising process, one that involves no practical gain: ultimately it is an act of sacrifice. But surely it cannot be worth the effort merely for the sake of hearing one's own echo?

All of us are infected today with an extraordinary egoism. And that is not freedom; freedom means learning to demand only of oneself, not of life and others, and knowing how to give: sacrifice in the name of love.

IN CINEMA IT IS NECESSARY NOT TO EXPLAIN, BUT TO ACT UPON THE VIEWER'S FEELINGS, AND THE EMOTION WHICH IS AWOKEN IS WHAT PROVOKES THOUGHT.

It is a mistake to talk about the artist looking for his subject. In fact, the subject grows within him like a fruit and begins to demand expression. It is like childbirth. The poet has nothing to be proud of. He is not master of the situation, but a servant. Creative work is his only possible form of existence, and his every work is like a deed he has no power to annul. For him to be aware that the sequence of such deeds is due and ripe, that it lies in the very nature of things, he has to have faith in the idea; for only faith interlocks the system of images for which read system of life.

Cinema is a very difficult and serious art, it requires sacrificing of yourself. You should belong to it, it shouldn't belong to you. Cinema uses your life, not vice versa.

I believe in one thing: the human spirit is immortal and indestructible. In the beyond there could be anything, it is of no importance whatsoever. What we call death is not death. It's a rebirth. A caterpillar becomes a cocoon. I think there is a life after death and it is that that is unnerving. It would be so much simpler to conceive of oneself as a telephone cord that is unplugged. Then you could live any way that you wanted. God would have no importance of any kind.

My aim is to place cinema among the other art forms. To put it on a par with music, poetry, prose, etc.

Art could be said to be a symbol of the universe, being linked with that absolute spiritual truth which is hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

Where am I when I'm not in reality or in my imagination?

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.

I have always been interested in a person's inner world. I am interested in man, for he contains a universe within himself; and in order to find expression for the idea, for the meaning of human life, there is no need to spread behind it, as it were, a canvas crowded with happenings. I wanted Nostalgia to be free of anything irrelevant or incidental that would stand in the way of my principal objective: the portrayal of someone in a state of profound alienation from the world and himself, unable to find a balance between reality and the harmony for which he longs, in a state of nostalgia provoked not only by his remoteness from home but also by a global yearning for the wholeness of existence. I wanted to pursue the theme of the "weak" man who is no fighter in terms of his outward attributes but whom I none the less see as a victor in this life.

What will our children be like ? A lot depends on us. But it's up to them as well. What must be alive in them is a striving for freedom. That depends on us. People who have been born into slavery find it hard to lose the habit.

No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision, and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time.

Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It's ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience.

A child doesn't have to be a prodigy. The only thing that matters is that he should't become 'stuck' in childishness

I think in fact that unless there is an organic link between the subjective impressions of the author and his objective representation of reality, he will not achieve even superficial credibility, let alone authenticity and inner truth.

Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

All that I wanted was to tempt into life things that wanted to come out of me.

I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you're by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone – as it seems to me – is in danger.

But how can I put a name to what it is that I want? How am I to know that I really don't want what I want, or that I really don't want what I don't want? These are intangibles that the moment you name them their meaning evaporates like jellyfish in the sun.

I'VE NOTICED, FROM MY EXPERIENCE, IF THE EXTERNAL, EMOTIONAL CONSTRUCTION OF IMAGES IN A FILM ARE BASED ON THE FILMMAKER'S OWN MEMORY, ON THE KINSHIP OF ONE'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE FABRIC OF THE FILM, THEN THE FILM WILL HAVE THE POWER TO AFFECT THOSE WHO SEE IT.

The meaning of religious truth is hope

The Stalker seems to be weak, but essentially it is he who is invincible because of his faith and his will to serve others.

Perhaps cinema is the most personal art, the most intimate. In cinema only the author's intimate truth will be convincing enough for the audience to accept.

An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty

I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.

The only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.

A child doesn't have to be a prodigy. He has to be a child. The only thing that matters is that he shouldn't become 'stuck' in childishness.

I am convinced that any attempt to restore harmony in the world can only rest on the renewal of personal responsibility.

Happy is not the right word. This world is not a place where we can be happy. It wasn't created for man's happiness, though many believe this is the reason of our existence. I think we are here to fight, so that good and evil can clash within us, and good may prevail, thus enriching us spiritually. It's difficult to say whether we are happy or not: it doesn't depend on us… There are times when one regrets being born, but life also gives us surprising things that, alone, are worth living. The issue of happiness doesn't exist for me: happiness as such doesn't exist.

If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique. The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each time he hopes, though in vain, to achieve an exhaustive image of the Truth of human existence. The quality of beauty is in the truth of life.

Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be ... I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.

I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's "symbolism". Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.

IN THE CINEMA A DIRECTOR EXPRESSES HIS INDIVIDUALITY FIRST AND FOREMOST THROUGH HIS SENSE OF TIME, THROUGH RHYTHM. RHYTHM GIVES COLOUR TO A WORK BY DISTINGUISHABLE STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS. RHYTHM MUST ARISE NATURALLY IN A FILM, A FUNCTION OF THE DIRECTOR'S INNATE SENSE OF LIFE AND COMMENSURATE WITH HIS QUEST FOR TIME.

When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction ( ... ) no effort on their part.
What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

We all either underestimate each other, or else exaggerate each other's virtues. Very few people are capable of assessing others as they deserve. It is a particular gift. In fact I would even say that only the great are capable of it.

An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false.

One woman sent me on a letter written to her by her daughter, and the young girl's words are a remarkable statement about artistic creation as an infinitely versatile and subtle form of communication:
'...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?
There's another kind of language, another form of communication: by means of feeling, and images. That is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers. Will, feeling, emotion - these remove obstacles from between people who otherwise stand on opposite sides of a mirror, on opposite sides of a door.. The frames of the screen move out, and the world which used to be partitioned off comes into us, becomes something real... And this doesn't happen through little Audrey, it's Tarkovsky himself addressing the audience directly, as they sit on the other side of the screen. There's no death, there is immortality. Time is one and undivided, as it says in one of the poems. "At the table are great-grandfathers

Why do I feel this alone? Basically, because I've always been alone. I've always been alone. And alone I'll be. It's about time I become aware of it and never forget it.

I see it as my duty to stimulate reflection on what is essentially human and eternal in each individual soul, and which all too often a person will pass by, even though his fate lies in his hands. He is too busy chasing after phantoms and bowing down to idols. 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. That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor which determines the meaning of a person's life. 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.

Unspoken feelings are unforgettable.

If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.

Art is by nature aristocratic, and naturally selective in its effect on the audience. For even in its 'collective' manifestations, like theatre or cinema, its effect is bound up with the intimate emotions of each person who comes into contact with a work. The more the individual is traumatised and gripped by these emotions, the more significant a place will the work have in his experience.
The aristocratic nature of art, however does not in any way absolve the artist of his responsibility to his public and even, if you like, more broadly, to people in general. On the contrary, because of his special awareness of his time and of the world in which he lives, the artist becomes the voice of those who cannot formulate or express their view of reality. In that sense the artist is indeed vox populi. That is why he is called to serve his own talent, which means serving his people.

MORE CONSISTENTLY THAN EVER I WAS TRYING TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT CINEMA AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ART HAS ITS OWN POSSIBILITIES WHICH ARE EQUAL TO THOSE OF PROSE. I WANTED TO DEMONSTRATE HOW CINEMA IS ABLE TO OBSERVE LIFE, WITHOUT INTERFERING, CRUDELY OR OBVIOUSLY, WITH ITS CONTINUITY. FOR THAT IS WHERE I SEE THE POETIC ESSENCE OF CINEMA.

In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.

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 not everyone finds that truth acceptable. Of course an artist can lose his way, but even his mistakes are interesting provided they are sincere. For they represent the reality of his inner life, of the peregrinations and struggle into which the external world has thrown him.

My purpose is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness.

THE ARTISTIC IMAGE IS ALWAYS A METONYM, WHERE ONE THING IS SUBSTITUTED FOR ANOTHER, THE SMALLER FOR THE GREATER. TO TELL OF WHAT IS LIVING, THE ARTIST USES SOMETHING DEAD; TO SPEAK OF THE INFINITE, HE SHOWS THE FINITE.

An artistic image is one that ensures its own development, its historical viability. An image is a grain, a self-evolving retroactive organism. It is a symbol of actual life, as opposed to life itself. Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential for the affirmation of life.
Whatever it expresses - even destruction and ruin - the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith.
Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is
optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.
And so there can never be optimistic artists and pessimistic artists. There can only be talent and mediocrity.

What nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment it is nothing.

Art would be useless if the world were perfect.

One doesn't need a lot to be able to live. The great thing is to be free in your work. Ofcourse it's important to print or exhibit, but if that's not possible you are still left with the most important thing of all
being able to work without asking anybody's permission.

I felt all the time that for the film to be a success the texture of the scenery and the landscapes must fill me with definite memories and poetic associations

My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be

I love your eyes, my darling friend, Their play so passionate and bright'ning, When a sudden stare up you send, And like a heaven-blown lightning, It'd take in all from end to end But there's more that I admire: Your eyes when they're downcast In bursts of love-inspired fire And through the eyelash goes fast A somber, dull call of desire..

The death of childhood is the beginning of poetry.

He, who doesn't know why he lives, cannot feel love for people or for life itself. I don't love myself enough, so I don't love people enough. One of my major defects is impatience: I try to get rid of it, but i can't. I am not tolerant enough for my age. I suffer for this, because i can't approach people with sympathy. They annoy me.

I know only one thing. when i sleep, i know no fear, no, trouble no bliss. blessing on him who invented sleep. the common coin that purchases all things, the balance that levels shepherd and king, fool and wise man. there is only one bad thing about sound sleep. they say it closely resembles death.

Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I'd say that film is the sculpting of time.

Never trouble anyone else with what you can do yourself

The film [Stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.

If we succeed with something, that is only because others are in need of what e have produced. And the more success we have with something, the more people require that we express it. So it goes without saying, as a result of this we in principle never win out, others win. We always lose

A film in cinema is what in theatre would be realism - and vice versa.
In cinema - as in life - the text, the words, are refracted in everything
apart from the words themselves. The words mean nothing
words are water.

Man is made up of opposing characteristics. History demonstrates vividly the fact that it always moves in the worst possible direction. Either man is not capable of directing history, or else he does direct it, but only by pushing it down the most terrible, wrong path there is.
There is not a single example to prove the opposite. People are not capable of governing others. They are only capable of destroying. And materialism - naked and cynical - is going to complete the destruction.
Despite the fact that God lives in every soul, that every soul has the capacity to accumulate what is eternal and good, as a mass people can do nothing but destroy. For they have come together not in the name of an ideal, but simply for the sake of a material notion.
Mankind has hurried to protect the body (perhaps on the strength of that natural and unconscious gesture which served as the beginning of what is called progress) and has given no thought to protecting the soul.
The church (as opposed to religion) has not been able to do so. In the course of the history of civilization, the spiritual half of man has been separated further and further from the animal, the material, and now in an infinite expanse of darkness we can just make out, like the lights of a departing train, the other half of our being as it rushes away, irrevocably and for ever.
Spirit and flesh, feeling and reason can never again be made one. It's too late. For the moment we are crippled by the appa

The image in cinema is based on the ability to present as an observation one's own perception of an object

I have always liked people who can't adapt themselves to life pragmatically.

Art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

Man has, since the Enlightenment, dealt with things he should have ignored.

The artist has a duty to be calm. He has no right to show his emotion, his involvement, to go pouring it all out at the audience. Any excitement over a subject must be sublimated into an Olympian calm of form. That is the only way in which an artist can tell of the things that excite him.

Although the assembly of the shots is responsible for the structure of the film, it does not, as is generally assumed, create its rhythm; the distinct time running through the shots makes the rhythm of the picture, and the rhythm is determined not by the length of edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them. The pieces that 'won't edit', that can't be properly joined, are those which record a radically different kind of time

My objective is to create my own world and these images which we create mean nothing more than the images which they are. 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. It is actually much simpler than that, otherwise art would have no meaning. You have to be a child - incidentally children understand my pictures very well, and I haven't met a serious critic who could stand knee-high to those children. We think that art demands special knowledge; we demand some higher meaning from an author, but the work must act directly on our hearts or it has no meaning at all.

We have forgotten to observe. Instead of observing, we do things according to patterns.

Going through old papers I came across the transcript of a university debate on Rublyov. God, what a level. Abysmal, pathetic. But there is one remarkable contribution by a maths professor called Manin, Lenin Prize winner, who can hardly be more than thirty. I share his views. Not that one should say that about oneself. But it's exactly what I felt when I was making Andrey. And I'm grateful to Manin for that.

"Almost every speaker has asked why they have to be made to suffer all through the three hours of the film. I'll try to reply to that question.
It is because the twentieth century has seen the rise of a kind of emotional inflation. When we read in a newspaper that two million people have been butchered in Indonesia, it makes as much impression on us as an account of our hockey team winning a match. The same degree of impression! We fail to notice the monstrous discrpancy between these two events. The channels of our perception have been smoothed out to the point where we are no longer aware. However, I don't want to preach about this. It may be that without it life would be impossible. Only the point is that there are some artists who do make us feel the true measure of things. It is a burden which they carry throughout their lives, and we must be thankful to them.

History is not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul

Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could listen to them properly, cinema would have no need for music at all.