Sculpting in Time by Andrey Tarkovsky

First published:Die versiegelte Zeit, 1986 (English translation, 1986)

Type of work: Film criticism

Form and Content

This penetrating essay on filmmaking is a serious examination of cinema as art. Reflecting the author’s philosophy, Sculpting in Time is a powerful plea for honesty, faith, and individual expression in an art form too long identified with literature, from which it is often adapted, or mass consumerism, which it often reflects. Tarkovsky discusses this subject from the perspective of his own films, which have had deep influence on filmmaking in the West but which have been little understood by bureaucrats in his native land.

His films include Ivanoro detstvo (1962; Ivan’s Childhood), Andrey Rublyov (1969), Solaris (1972), Zerkalo (1974; The Mirror), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983; Nostalgia), and Offret (1986; The Sacrifice). As a student at the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, Tarkovsky, with Andrey Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, made two films in 1959; one of these won first prize in the New York Students’ Film Competition. Ivan’s Childhood, a surrealist depiction of a young boy during wartime, won the Golden Lion Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1962 and other awards at film festivals in Acapulco and San Francisco. The film about Andrey Rublyov, the saintly medieval icon painter, received a prize at the Cannes International Film Festival, as did Solaris, a psychological exploration of man’s reactions to scientific achievements in space.

The author reveals his own artistic growth by recognizing the dimly perceived ideas set forth in his early films, ideas which prompted Soviet cinematic bureaucrats to limit the number of his creations. They regarded his films as too subjective and puzzling for Soviet patrons. (Interestingly, that was precisely the reaction of Western audiences.) Denied the freedom to make films the way he wanted, he was persuaded finally to seek residence abroad. During the filming of Nostalgia in Italy in 1982, he made the decision not to return home.

With the help of Olga Surkova, the work of Tarkovsky is reconstructed from diaries, conversations, lectures, and notes over a period of a generation. Some repetition and lack of organization are evident. Consisting of nine chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion, the book deals with topics such as the relationship between film and poetry (Tarkovsky quotes freely from the works of his father, the poet Arseny Tarkovsky), the director’s freedom to alter a script, the distinctions between art and science and between film and literature, the connection between art and religious faith, and the importance of human memory. The author discusses his principles for the selection and retention of actors and describes his favorite and not-so-favorite performers. Tarkovsky also addresses the role of time, rhythm, editing, and cinematic music. He is not at one with Sergei Eisenstein, who regarded editing as the creative essence of filmmaking. To Tarkovsky, each frame suggests rhythm, a movement in time. The importance of editing is that it enhances the art of what the camera has already produced. The process does not create art. Above all, Tarkovsky stresses the responsibility of the director to be true to himself, not to the demands of the mass audience or the state.

Tarkovsky decided to write this book to clarify his artistic vision both for the East and for the West. The book was published in the West in the year of Tarkovsky’s death; thus, it constitutes a kind of testament to his career. In fact, the chapter on his last film, The Sacrifice, was dictated during the final weeks of his fatal illness.

Critical Context

The theory of cinema found in these pages represents the culmination of an aesthetic movement begun by Ingmar Bergman and supported by Federico Fellini, following the production of his Le notti di Cabiria (1957; The Nights of Cabiria). Bergman’s preoccupation with religious belief and Fellini’s trenchant critiques of material values via his surrealist techniques in Giulietta degli Spiriti (1965; Juliet of the Spirits) and later films launched a movement that enjoyed critical favor for a generation. Tarkovsky especially liked the Spanish work of director Luis Bunuel. He liked Bunuel because films such as Viridiana (1961) were protest films devoid of political ideology.

Like Bergman, Fellini, and Bunuel, Tarkovsky swam upstream against the tide of popular filmmaking. Ironically, his style was more acceptable in the West during the 1960’s, when his own films were limited in distribution. Having emigrated to the West in the 1980’s, he made it his candid mission to help rescue filmmaking from the crass materialism of capitalism, yet by then, the aesthetic movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s was yielding to a new realism. His own films never received the acclaim of those of other radical directors, partly because of the limited distribution of Soviet films and partly because of the waning of that style. Hence, through Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky seeks to explain his type of art to a generation unacquainted with it.

Bibliography

Birkos, Alexander S. Soviet Cinema: Directors and Films, 1976.

Green, Peter. “Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86),” in Sight and Sound. LVI (Spring, 1987), pp. 108-109.

Insdorf, Annette. “Faith in Movies,” in The New York Times Book Review. XCII (September 20, 1987), p. 20.

Kennedy, Harlan. “Tarkovsky: A Thought in Nine Parts,” in Film Comment. XXIII (May/June, 1987), pp. 44-47.

Montagu, Ivor. “Man and Experience: Tarkovsky’s World,” in Sight and Sound. XLII (Spring, 1973), p. 89.