Andrei Tarkovsky
Russian · 1932–1986
Visionary director whose poetic explorations of memory, spirituality, and time in films like Stalker and Mirror redefined the language of cinema.
Wikipedia ↗“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as 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.”
Russian
“The image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as in a drop of water.”
Russian
“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically.”
Russian
“The artist exists because the world is not perfect.”
Russian
“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
Russian
“I think that what people need is not a new world, but to be renewed themselves.”
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“No one has ever filmed what happens to a man when he stands face to face with that which cannot be expressed in words.”
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“Time is a condition for the existence of our ego.”
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“What is the essence of the director's work? We could define it as sculpting in time.”
Russian
“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 film-maker, from a "lump of time" made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need.”
“The time in which a person lives gives him experience and material for the expression of his thoughts about the meaning of human existence.”
Russian
“The time in which a person lives gives him experience and material for the expression of his thoughts about the meaning of human existence. It is not simply the material of art, but its very foundation.”
“Life is nothing but a brief interval of time in which we are given to study the spirit through matter.”
Russian