Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema

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Tarkovsky a través de sus obras, nos hace entender que está al tanto de la intangibilidad del ser humano, el potencial que tiene para experiencias emocionales profundas que no se puede comprender a través de la lógica o la razón, pero que se puede sentir íntimamente. Again we are reminded of the dictum that our life here on earth was made for happiness, and that nothing else is more important for man. And though this could only be true if one were to alter the meaning of the word happiness—which is impossible—neither in the West nor the East (I am not referring to the Far East) will a dissenting voice be taken seriously by the materialistic majority.

Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all.Music used correctly goes beyond intensifying the image by paralleling it with the same idea -- done correctly it transfigures the image into something different in kind. Properly used, music has the ability to change the whole emotional tone of a filmed sequence. El hecho referido es el siguiente: Su actor fetiche, Anatoli Solonitsin, con quien trabajó en casi todas sus películas, murió de cáncer, y a él mismo le dará cáncer después. Tal como el protagonista de Sacrificio, un hombre que tiene cáncer y para recobrar su salud hace un pacto con una bruja. Para Tarkovski, este acto poético es una anticipación a la realidad que solo puede ser explicado a través de la cualidad mistérica del arte. Esto lo sella con una cita de Pushkin en la que sentencia que "un artista verdadero es, en contra de su voluntad, un profeta". Está claro que su idea sobre el arte es algo que traspasa a la materia y al propio hombre. The electronic synthesis of sounds from scratch by means of oscillators, noise generators, and filters afforded twentieth-century musicians another opportunity for the aestheticization of sonic experience. Tarkovsky recognized these “enormously rich possibilities” of electronic music, ​72​ and it is certainly no coincidence that for his films Solaris, Mirror, and Stalker, he ended up working with Eduard Artemyev, a composer who at the time was already very versatile in this medium. A key ingredient that Artemyev contributed to the scores of these films were the sounds created by means of Evgeny Murzin’s photoelectronic ANS synthesizer in Solaris and the EMS Synthi 100 in Stalker. A cinematic masterpiece (and Tarkovsky doubts that cinema, in its relative infancy, has even had a master yet that future generations will look to) is characterized by its organic wholeness, with every element of the picture (sound, acting, lighting, shot selection, etc.) working in perfect harmony. Attempts to harness such a poetry of observation among twentieth-century audiences have, however, not been without friction in either film or music. Tarkovsky repeatedly points to the difficulties that his audiences had with giving themselves over to the poetic logic of raw observation, instead latching onto symbolism and trying to identify hidden meanings in his films that, often to their surprise, were never consciously placed there by its author. ​50​ A similar discourse unfolds around twentieth-century experimental music practices. John Cage responded to the frustration that audiences expressed about their inability to decipher a composition’s ‘meaning’. ​51​

Time, printed in its factual forms and manifestations: such is the supreme idea of cinema as an art, leading us to think about the wealth of untapped resources in film, about its colossal future.If this word “music” is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. In the closing paragraph of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky makes his final appeal, speaking to us as confidants:

Andrey Tarkovsky, the genius of modern Russian cinema—hailed by Ingmar Bergman as "the most important director of our time"—died an exile in Paris in December 1986. In Sculpting in Time, he has left his artistic testament, a remarkable revelation of both his life and work. Since Ivan's Childhood won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962, the visionary quality and totally original and haunting imagery of Tarkovsky's films have captivated serious movie audiences all over the world, who see in his work a continuation of the great literary traditions of nineteenth-century Russia. Many critics have tried to interpret his intensely personal vision, but he himself always remained inaccessible. Por otro lado, este libro es una especie de compendio de su experiencia como director en la creación de sus películas, escrito no linealmente, en un largo espacio de tiempo. Por estas páginas corren sus reflexiones y decisiones profesionales en películas como La infancia de Iván, Solaris, Stalker, El espejo (la más íntima de sus películas, ya que trata sobre sus recuerdos de niñez y juventud), Nostalgia (en la que se mezcla su propia experiencia de nostalgia, pues cuando la rodó, ya había salido de la URSS) y Sacrificio, en la que se da un hecho insólito, cuya explicación gráfica engloba el summum de su pensamiento, aunque no ahonda mucho más y lo deja sujeto a interpretación. Tal como en sus películas.Pero ahí estaba Tarkovski con su Espejo, con su Stalker, con su Sacrificio, y ahí estaba yo, luchando contra ese tiempo extenuante para intentar ver aquello que él veía en el arte. En pequeñas salas de cine o funciones improvisadas incluso en monitores de TV, funciones a las que no acudía nadie. Esto debido en gran parte al contexto cultural del país en el que estoy. Pero todo esto puede parecer una labia innecesaria que nada tiene que ver con el libro que reseño aquí, sin embargo, tiene mucho que ver. Maria is the antithesis of Adelaide: modest, timid, perpetually uncertain of herself. At the beginning of the film anything like friendship between her and the master of the house would be unthinkable—the differences that separate them are too great. But one night they come together, and that night is the turning-point in Alexander’s life. In the face of imminent catastrophe he perceives the love of this simple woman as a gift from God, as a justification for his entire life. The miracle that overtakes Alexander transfigures him. In the twentieth century, however, Western music exhibits an increased interest in an aestheticized perception of everyday sounds as they are. In some but by no means all respects this development can be interpreted as a response to concurrent developments in sound recording and transmission 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. — Tarkovsky And then, in a matter of days, a new house was built, identical to the first. It seemed like a miracle, and proved what people can do when they are driven by conviction—and not just people, but the producers themselves.