Andrei Tarkovsky
The Soviet cinema of the mid-twentieth century emerged as a site of intense creative tension, where state ideology and artistic ambition pulled against each other with remarkable force. Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky, born on April 4, 1932, in Zavrazhye, worked within and against that tension across a career that took him from Moscow to Western Europe and eventually to Paris, where he died in late December 1986.
Tarkovsky trained at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences before enrolling at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, where he developed the craft he would practice as a film director, screenwriter, theatre director, and film editor. Working in Russian, he brought to Soviet cinema a sensibility that those institutions had not yet housed. His notable works include Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, Nostalghia, and The Sacrifice — a body of films produced across two decades and, in the case of his final pictures, in exile from the Soviet Union. He also worked as a film actor and is credited as a biographer, indicating a range of engagement with the moving image and with written work that extended beyond the director's chair alone.
His citizenship tells part of the story of his later years: a Soviet citizen by origin, he also held citizenship in Italy and in France, countries where he made films after leaving the USSR. That geographic dispersal across the 1980s marked a distinct phase in his output, one in which the conditions of production shifted even as the films themselves remained recognizably his own work.
Tarkovsky received the Lenin Prize, one of the highest honors awarded in the Soviet Union, a distinction that placed him among figures the state chose formally to recognize. The award stands as a specific, concrete marker of official acknowledgment within a system that his work both inhabited and, by the evidence of his eventual departure, outgrew.
Quotes by Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky's insights on:
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.
Objectivity can only be the author’s and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel.
I am becoming more and more convinced that there is something wrong with the way I live. Something false about everything I do. Even when I want to do something good; I feel that it’s only in order to seem a better person.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A child doesn’t have to be a prodigy. The only thing that matters is that he should’t become ‘stuck’ in childishness.
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.