Andrei Tarkovsky
You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like they see.
Memory is a spiritual concept.
Andrei Tarkovsky
This is the first in a series. The intent is simple. I want to take apart not the work of the people I admire but the way they see. Imitating someone’s films is easy. You add long takes, find a misty garden, lower the music. But that is wearing a man’s coat and mistaking it for his spine. What matters is the spine under the coat, the angle the world is seen from, the angle that makes those images necessary rather than decorative.
I begin with Tarkovsky for one reason. Among filmmakers, almost no one wrote down how they saw as plainly as he did. He left a book, Sculpting in Time, and a journal he titled, himself, Martyrology. So we do not have to guess at how he looked at the world. We can start where he told us.
Rain is rain
Most writing about Tarkovsky enters through the wrong door. It reads his images like a dictionary. Water means this, fire means that, the horse is innocence, the house is the soul. This reading is comforting because it turns everything into a solvable puzzle. It is also the exact thing Tarkovsky fought hardest against.
He said so directly in an interview. The rain in Solaris is not a symbol. It is only rain, rain that at a certain moment carries a particular meaning for the character.(1) Elsewhere he was blunter. “I am an enemy of symbols,” he said, because a symbol is a narrow thing, a single fixed meaning packed inside an image, made to be decoded.(2) He preferred metaphor, and he stressed the distinction. Metaphor, not symbol. A symbol contains a settled meaning. A metaphor is an image, indefinite and inexhaustible, like life itself.(3)
This is the core of how he saw. Tarkovsky did not look at the world to find a meaning hidden behind it. He believed the meaning was already in the thing. To show something was not to convert it into an idea but to trust it enough to leave it alone. In Sculpting in Time he writes, of the audience, that you should never try to convey your idea to them, that it is a thankless and senseless task, and that you should show them life and let them find the means to assess it within themselves.(4)
This is worth slowing down on, because it is the key to everything else. To see like him means first to stop translating. To see a Tarkovsky image rightly is to resist the urge to render it into another language.
Time is the material, not the backdrop
Tarkovsky’s most foundational instinct concerns time. Most of us live time as a background. Events happen inside it. He saw time as a substance to be carved. This is why he defined the director’s work as sculpting in time. As a sculptor cuts the excess from a block of marble, the director cuts the unnecessary from a block of time.(5)
His long takes, then, are not decoration. They are a moral position. He did not think editing creates rhythm. He thought rhythm comes from the pressure of the time already running through the frame.(6) To leave a scene uncut was to respect the duration of a lived moment, to refuse to chop it into meaningful pieces and think on the viewer’s behalf.
He did not separate time from memory either. For him the past was not lost. In a sense it was more real, more stable, than the present.(7) When he refused to tell Mirror through linear logic, the principle underneath was one he had stated plainly. Memory is a spiritual concept.(8)
An honest aside is needed here, because the principle of this publication is that admiration must not blind. Scholars often explain Tarkovsky’s sense of time through Henri Bergson’s idea of durée, the difference between lived, flowing, qualitative time and measured, divisible, intellectual time.(9) The resemblance is striking. But the evidence suggests Tarkovsky never read Bergson. His name appears nowhere in the diaries, the book, or the interviews.(10) So what we have is not an influence. It is a rhyme. An artist’s way of seeing can ring at the same pitch as a philosopher he never read. This is one of the cleaner proofs that originality is a myth, and it has to be shown honestly, by leaving it as it is, not by inventing a false lineage.
Spirit against matter
Tarkovsky’s stance toward life begins with a sharp diagnosis. Modern man stands at a crossroads. He will either live as a blind consumer, subject to the endless multiplication of technology and goods, or he will look for the road to spiritual responsibility.(11)
His view of consumer culture was merciless. In Sculpting in Time he writes that modern mass culture, aimed at the consumer, a civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls and cutting them off from the fundamental questions of their existence.(12) In the diary the diagnosis goes further. Mankind has rushed to protect the body and never thought to protect the soul. And he arrives at one sentence. Everyone can be saved only if each saves himself.(13)
This was a deep pessimism about collective history. “Art cannot teach anyone anything,” he wrote, “since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.”(14) But notice where the pessimism leads. It does not end in passivity. It ends in individual responsibility. He had given up on history as a whole, not on the single human being.
Where this current comes from is no mystery. Dostoevsky first. For years Tarkovsky wanted to film a life of the writer, and The Idiot. The state film authority blocked both, and that blocked passion eventually fed Stalker.(15) The struggle of spirit and matter, the individuality of salvation, the suspicion of Western rationalism, all of it is inherited from Dostoevsky. Late in life he also took up Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, saying Steiner offered a worldview that explains everything, or almost everything.(16)
Art as service, not self-expression
For Tarkovsky the artist was not a hero. He was a servant. The poet has nothing to be proud of, he writes. He is not master of the situation but a servant.(17) The artist spends his life trying to pay for a gift handed to him as if by a miracle.(18) In creation the personality does not assert itself. It serves a higher, shared idea.(19)
He defined the aim of art in an unusual way too. Its function was not to spread ideas or set examples. The aim of art, he wrote, is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow the soul and make it capable of turning toward good.(20) Its precondition was faith, so much so that he could write that an artist who has no faith is like a painter born blind.(21)
So what is art? He does not answer flatly. He asks whether it is good or evil, from God or from the devil, whether it could be an image of social harmony and whether that might be its function. Then comes the sentence that surprises most. Like a declaration of love, the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life, love and sacrifice.(22)
The root of this servant-artist idea is in the Russian Orthodox icon tradition. Tarkovsky’s model of the artist was the icon painter, self-effacing, refusing to put his name forward, opening a window onto the sacred. That is exactly the subject of Andrei Rublev. Among his contemporaries the name he returns to most often, and with the fewest reservations, is Robert Bresson. In an interview he narrowed the field further. “I am only interested in the views of two people,” he said, “one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.” The book is more generous than the line, naming Antonioni, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Bunuel among directors who could never be confused with anyone else.(23)
The imperfect world is the condition of art
One of Tarkovsky’s most circulated lines runs like this. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. If the world were perfect, art would be unnecessary, since man would not search for harmony but would simply live in it.(24)
The line is beautiful, and almost everywhere it is pinned to the wrong source. The internet credits it to Sculpting in Time. In fact it is a sentence spoken on camera, in an interview, not in the book.(24) It is authentic Tarkovsky, but it is the voice of the man speaking, not the book. Keeping that distinction is the whole meaning of care here. A true line, in the wrong mouth, is still an error.
The idea sums up his entire way of seeing. Art is a longing born from a broken world. The more hopeless the artist’s version of that world, the more clearly the ideal standing against it has to appear, or, as he put it, life becomes impossible.(25)
Sacrifice, suffering, and the diary he called Martyrology
At the core of Tarkovsky’s moral world is sacrifice. He wrote that modern man does not want to make any sacrifice, though the true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice.(26) He put love in the same register. Love can only be one-sided. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love.(27)
He thought suffering fertile too. Quoting Job, he wrote that suffering belongs to our existence, and that without it we could never fly upwards.(29) In the diaries he named where the torment comes from. We are crucified on one plane, he wrote, while the world is many-dimensional, and we are tormented by our inability to know the truth.(28)
The barest proof of this way of seeing is the name he gave his journal, Martyrology. In 1974 he wrote of the title that it was pretentious and false, but that it should stay, as a reminder of his ineradicable, futile worthlessness.(30) It is the one document that shows a man who held art to be a service measuring his own life as a record of suffering. The diary starts in 1970. Its last entry is 15 December 1986. His final recorded words are these. But now I have no strength left, that is the problem.(31)
This idea of sacrifice draws on Dostoevsky, on rebirth through suffering and the holy fool, on the Orthodox practice of kenosis, or self-emptying, and on Christian agape. Of all his characters, Tarkovsky said he loved Stalker the most, because Stalker held the best part of himself.(32)
Childhood, home, and nostalgia as a state of the soul
The root of Tarkovsky’s vision lies in childhood. The wooden family house in the country, the mother, the absent father. He wrote that the most beautiful memories are those of childhood, but that memory has to be worked on before it can become the ground of an artwork.(33)
He enlarged the word nostalgia past simple homesickness. What he wanted to portray was a man in profound alienation from the world and from himself, in a state provoked not only by his remoteness from home but also by a global yearning for the wholeness of existence.(34)
A detail shows how personal this was. For Mirror, Tarkovsky had the wooden house of his childhood rebuilt on its old foundation, and had the field beside it resown with buckwheat, exactly as in his memory. After finishing the film, he said, he stopped dreaming of his childhood home. The film had discharged the memory.
The source of this current is direct. The poetry of his father, Arseny Tarkovsky. Arseny was one of the major poets of his generation, and his son had his poems recited, in the father’s own voice, in Mirror, Stalker, and Nostalghia. Tarkovsky’s nostalgia did not stay a theme either. In 1984 he left the Soviet Union, never returned, and was buried near Paris. Longing stopped being a subject for him and became a condition.
His stance toward the viewer
Tarkovsky refused to flatter the viewer or explain everything to him. One of his favourite sentences was that a book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.(35) He defined poetry not as a genre but as a mode of perception, an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.(36)
He said the beautiful is hidden from those who do not search for truth. He compared the person who finds art boring and condemns it to a man born blind being told about a rainbow.(37)
His favourite anecdote was this. After a screening of Mirror, while the critics argued over the film, a cleaning woman explained it in a single sentence. Someone fell ill, was afraid of dying, and wanted to atone for the pain of his past. Tarkovsky took it as proof that his art reached the soul directly, without passing through the intellect.
Not the coat, the spine
I do not know whether how Tarkovsky saw can be reduced to one sentence, but it is worth trying. He saw the ordinary physical world, rain, fire, a child’s face, a field moving in the wind, not as a code to be cracked but as already sacred. Time, for him, was not a backdrop. It was the material the soul lives in. Art was not a performance. It was a service. And the root of all of it lies neither in a lone genius nor in some originality fallen from the sky. It lies in his father’s poetry, in Dostoevsky, in the icon, in the Lao Tzu he read through Leskov, in Steiner. In a web of rhymes.
If I wanted to look like him, I would find a misty garden and leave the camera running. If I want to see like him, I have to do something harder. I have to trust a thing enough to look at it without explaining it. Maybe that is the whole of it.
How they saw became how they lived
Here is the thing that turns all of this from a great man’s biography into something that belongs to us as well.
Look again at what Tarkovsky saw. Not his images, the realities he kept his eyes on. A world rushing to protect the body and forgetting the soul. People sedated by what they own. A culture that has, in his words, learnt nothing in four thousand years. The refusal to give anything up. The habit of looking for meaning anywhere except in the thing in front of us. None of this is exotic. These are not a Soviet exile’s private nightmares. They are the ordinary weather of any life, including the one you are living as you read this. He did not see anything we cannot see. He just refused to look away from it.
And then he did the part that matters. He did not stop at seeing. He lived as though what he saw were true. He held that meaning was already in the world, so he made films that refused to explain themselves and accepted being called difficult, obscure, and unmarketable for twenty years. He held that art was a service and not a performance, so he worked under censorship, watched his films get shelved, and kept the same vow anyway. He held that the self is affirmed only in sacrifice, so when it came to it he left his country, his language, and his home, and did not go back. He held that nostalgia was a longing for wholeness, and then spent the end of his life inside that longing with no cure coming. The way he saw and the way he lived were never two things. The seeing was the living. You cannot find the seam where one becomes the other, because there is no seam.
This is the quiet, uncomfortable proposition under the whole essay. We tend to assume the people we admire saw more than we do, that they had some finer instrument, some access we lack. Tarkovsky suggests the opposite. He saw what is plainly available to anyone with the nerve to keep looking, and the whole difference was that he let what he saw cost him something. He let it organise a life. Most of us see clearly and live as if we had not. We notice the same things he noticed and then go on consuming, deferring, protecting ourselves, looking away. The gap between him and us is not in the eye. It is in the distance we keep between what we see and what we do.
So the question this leaves is not how he saw. We have answered that. The question is the one he hands back to anyone who reads him honestly. What are you going to do with what you already see? He is not a man to imitate. He is a man who proves that a way of seeing, taken seriously enough, becomes a way of living, and that this conversion is open to anyone, at any time, for the price he paid, which is the willingness to let your sight change your life.
Notes & Sources
The quotations in this essay come from three principal sources, and the distinction between them has been kept on purpose. There is Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time (translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair), his diaries Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986 (which he titled Martyrology), and various interviews. Which of the three a given line comes from is often confused online, so it is marked throughout.
Interview, Ein Feind der Symbolik (Irena Brežná), 1984. nostalghia.com archive, “Tarkovsky on Symbols and Metaphors.”
Ibid. (same interview).
Interview with Hervé Guibert, Le Monde, 12 May 1983.
Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair.
Sculpting in Time, the book’s title concept and its definition of sculpting in time.
Sculpting in Time. Rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited pieces but by the pressure of the time running through them.
Sculpting in Time, Chapter III, pp. 57 to 58. The past is, in a sense, more real and more stable than the present.
Sculpting in Time, Chapter III, p. 57. “Memory is a spiritual concept!” The sentence stands in a general passage on time and memory, not as a comment on Mirror.
Donato Totaro, Time, Bergson and the Film Theory of Andrei Tarkovsky. See also Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time-image.
The above scholarship notes there is no evidence Tarkovsky read Bergson (no mention in the diaries, the book, or the interviews). Bergson is therefore treated here as a convergent analogue, not an influence.
Sculpting in Time, Chapter Six, p. 218. A similar formulation appears in the diaries.
Sculpting in Time, Chapter II, p. 42. The “civilisation of prosthetics” and modern mass culture crippling the soul.
Time Within Time (Martyrology). “Everyone can be saved only if each saves himself.”
Time Within Time. “Art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.”
Time Within Time and the biographical record. The blocking of The Idiot and the Dostoevsky projects feeding Stalker.
Time Within Time. The note that Steiner offers a worldview that explains everything. In one documentary he also calls himself “almost agnostic.” His faith was not dogmatic but a faith held in a state of search.
Sculpting in Time, Chapter II, p. 43. “The poet has nothing to be proud of: he is not master of the situation, but a servant.”
Sculpting in Time. The artist is a servant trying to pay for a gift given as if by a miracle.
Sculpting in Time, Chapter II, p. 38. In creation the personality does not assert itself but serves a higher, communal idea.
Sculpting in Time, Chapter II, p. 43. “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death...”
Sculpting in Time, Chapter II, pp. 42 and 43. “An artist who has no faith is like a painter who was born blind.”
Sculpting in Time, Conclusion, p. 239. Verified against the printed text. The passage is put as a series of questions rather than a flat answer, and online reproductions commonly drop the closing clause, the one that ties art to love and sacrifice.
Attributed to Tarkovsky (Wikiquote, interview-sourced). “I am only interested in the views of two people, one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.”
Attribution correction. “The artist exists because the world is not perfect... Art is born out of an ill-designed world.” This line is pinned almost everywhere to Sculpting in Time. In fact it is an interview or spoken statement (catalogued under IMDb “Personal Quotes”), not from the book. It is authentic Tarkovsky, but its source is not the book. Verified: the phrase does not appear in the printed text.
Sculpting in Time. The more hopeless the artist’s version, the more clearly the opposing ideal must appear, or life becomes impossible.
Sculpting in Time. Modern man does not want to sacrifice, though the true affirmation of the self is expressed only in sacrifice.
Sculpting in Time, on The Sacrifice. Love can only be one-sided, and less than total giving is not love.
Time Within Time (Martyrology), p. 168. Verified against the printed text. A related line, that a man writes because he is tormented and because he doubts, is widely attributed to Sculpting in Time. It appears in neither the book nor the diaries, and has been removed rather than passed on.
Sculpting in Time, Conclusion, p. 239, quoting Job (”Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upwards”) on the inherence of suffering to existence.
Time Within Time, and Wikipedia, Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986. The title Martyrolog and Tarkovsky’s 1974 gloss on it.
Ibid. The diary’s span from 1970 to 1986, the last entry of 15 December 1986, and the final recorded words.
Sculpting in Time and interviews. Stalker as the character he loved most, holding the best part of himself.
Sculpting in Time. The most beautiful memories belong to childhood, and memory must be worked on before it becomes art.
Sculpting in Time, on Nostalghia, p. 204. Verified against the printed text. Tarkovsky writes that the state is provoked not only by remoteness from home but also by a global yearning for the wholeness of existence, so the homesickness is enlarged rather than denied.
Sculpting in Time. “A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
Sculpting in Time. “Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.”
Sculpting in Time, Chapter II, p. 42. The beautiful is hidden from those who do not seek truth, and the analogy of telling a man born blind about a rainbow.