Happy birthday, Andrei Tarkovsky! Here are some quotes from the filmmaker:
“Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”
“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
“An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”
“[W]riting which links images through the linear rigid logical development of plot […] usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience to some abstract notion of order. And even when this is not so, even when the plot is governed by the characters, one finds that the links which hold it together rest on a facile interpretation of life’s complexities.”
“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.”
“It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.”
“My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware the beauty is summoning him.”
“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
“What is art?…Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that nonetheless reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.”
“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.”
“One doesn’t need a lot to be able to live. The great thing is to be free in your work. Of course 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.”
“If a writer, despite his natural gifts, gives up writing because no one will publish him, then he is no writer. The artist is distinguished by his urge to create, which by very definition is a concomitant of talent.”
“Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.”
“There are people who want to know about everything in the 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 an image of the whole world in him.”
“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.”
“Never try to convey your idea to the audience—it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.”
“My objective is to create my own world, and these images which we create mean nothing more than the images which they are.”
“Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.”
“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.”
“We are talking here about the future: about the lives of people in the world without wars, without social oppression, without national inequality, without suppression of human’s abilities. In other word, it is about the future that we all call Communism. We strive to imagine (and show to the viewer) the reality of the 21st century—the life of future humans developing, solving their difficulties and problems but being already on the new levels of cognition and morality. But the foundation of that future is being laid now. We strive to represent the future people as vivid and free, in the unity of their joys and cares, poetry and prose of their life. We are in no way satisfied with the primitive and unconvincing image of ‘people of the future,’ which can be observed in some works of literature and cinema. At the same time, we consider our work to be polemical with the many books and movies produced by the bourgeois world, which tend to see the future in an apocalyptic or technocratic way, affirming a sort of disbelief in the strength and capabilities of a human being.”
“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.”
“I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.”
“Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful.”
“If there are some who talk the same language as myself, then why should I neglect their interests for the sake of some other group of people who are alien and remote?”
“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.”
“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.”
“Suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how without it, should we be able to ‘fly upwards.'”
“Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act?”
“For me, the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged by an overriding passion.”
“Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken the wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for his own sake. What purports to be art begins to looks like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalized action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in an artistic creation the personality does not assert itself it serves another, higher and communal idea. The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of human calling.”
“The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act.”
“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.”
“An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty.”
“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.”
“What is the essence of the director’s work? We could define it as sculpting in time. Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and, inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is not a part of it—so the filmmaker, from a ‘lump of time’ made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image.”
“Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.”
“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.”
“The whole concept of the avant-garde in art is meaningless. I can see what it means when applied to sport, for instance. But to apply it to art would be to accept the idea of progress in art; and though progress has an obvious place in technology—more perfect machines, capable of carrying out their functions better and more accurately—how can anyone be more advanced in art? How could Thomas Mann be said to be better than Shakespeare?”
“No one component of a film can have any meaning in isolation: it is the film that is the work of art. And we can only talk about its components rather arbitrarily, dividing it up artificially or the sake of theoretical discussion.”
“The man who has stolen in order never to thieve again remains a thief. Nobody who has ever betrayed his principles can have a pure relationship with life. Therefore when a film-maker says he will produce a pot-boiler in order to give himself the strength and the means to make the film of his dreams—that is so much deception, or worse, self-deception. He will never now make his film.”
“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.”
“Objectivity can only be the author’s and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel.”
“What is Bresson’s genre? He doesn’t have one. Bresson is Bresson. He is a genre in himself. Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Dovzhenko, Vigo, Mizoguchi, Buñuel—each is identified with himself. The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb. And is Chaplin comedy? No: he is Chaplin, pure and simple; a unique phenomenon, never to be repeated.”
“Never try to convey your idea to the audience—it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.”
“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.”
“A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts—for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.”
“Everything is conditioned by necessity of one kind or another; and if it were actually possible to find a person in conditions of total freedom, he would be like some deep water fish that had been dragged up to the surface. […] And the longer I live in the West the more curious and equivocal freedom seems to me. Freedom to take drugs? To kill? To commit suicide?”
“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.”
“Freedom is inseparable from conscience. And even if it is true that all the ideas developed by the social consciousness are the product of evolution, conscience at least has nothing to do with the historic process. Conscience, both as a sense and as a concept, is a priori immanent in man, and shakes the very foundations of the society that has emerged from our ill-conceived civilization.”
“It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people’s ideas.”
“One can only be staggered by the hubris of modern artists if we compare them, say, to the humble builders of Chartres Cathedral whose names are not even known. The artist ought to be distinguished by selfless devotion to duty; but we forgot about that a long time ago.”
“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 symbolizes the meaning of our existence.”
“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.”
“We know perfectly well that neither love nor peace of mind can be bought with any currency.”
