Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema

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Alexander, an actor who has given up the stage, is perpetually crushed by depression. Everything fills him with weariness: the pressures of change, the discord in his family, and his instinctive sense of the threat posed by the relentless march of technology. He has grown to hate the emptiness of human speech, from which he flees into a silence where he hopes to find some measure of truth. Alexander offers the audience the possibility of participating in his act of sacrifice, and of being touched by its results. (Not, I hope, in the sense of that ‘audience participation’ which is all too current among directors in both the USSR and the USA—and therefore also in Europe—and has become one of the two main trends of current cinema: the other being the so-called ‘poetic cinema’ where everything is deliberately made incomprehensible and the director has to think up explanations for what he has done.) In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.” A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he’s worth something. And if I know for sure that I’m a genius? Why write then? What the hell for?” David Kollar and his solo album “Sculpting in Time“ (Hevhetia 2019) – extraordinary guitar player composing/sculpturing extraordinary music with exceptional collaborators: Erik Truffaz and Arve Henriksen (both trumpet), Christian Fennesz (guitar & electronics), Pat Mastelotto (drummer of King Crimson, this time even reading Pasternak´s poem…). This piece of musical art is inspired primarily by the poetics of legendary film director Andrey Tarkovsky in many explicit and implicit levels: nevertheless Kollar´s inclination to his movies (especially Stalker and Mirror) is not either accidental, neither conjectural, but significative. It is connected with inner energy of nostalgia, desire and constant searching for deeper sense of our unpredictable lives. His introspective musical compositions are an expression of questioning our the most hidden, burning existential tensions. Sometimes they sounds conciliatorily, sometimes very disquietly, gradually they will bring you over deeply inside, where you can find maybe something forgotten, but important ultimately evoking unusual catharsis.." Late this evening I looked at the sky and saw the stars. I felt as if it was the first time I had ever looked at them.

La única comunicación adecuada con el espectador es ésta: permanecer fiel a sí mismo. Sin concesión alguna a ese ochenta por ciento de espectadores de cine que, por motivos indescifrables, exigen de nosotros, los directores, que les entretengamos. A la vez, nosotros los directores hemos empezado a despreciar tanto ese ochenta por ciento de espectadores, que estamos dispuestos a entretenerles, puesto que de ellos depende la financiación de la próxima película: una situación sin salida.” But hold on! Even assuming we solve how to maintain long-lasting ecologies in space and get so wealthy the costs of star-flight aren't crippling, you've still got the problem of time. 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. The book's main statement about the nature of cinema is summarized in the statement, "The dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame." It contains a great deal of poetry written by the filmmaker's father Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky along with a fair amount of Tarkovsky's personal writings on his life and work, lectures and discussions during making of Andrei Rublev with a film history student named Olga Surkova, who later became a professional critic and helped in writing of this book.

Il film, quando non è un documentario, è un sogno. E’ per questo che Tarkovskij è il più grande di tutti”. 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. Of course an artist can lose his way, but even his mistakes are interesting provided they are sincere. For they represent the reality of his inner life, of the peregrinations and struggle into which the external world has thrown him.” Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, University of Texas Press, 1988. Ese apego a reproducir la realidad pero a través de la poética de la imagen que también rechaza la pirotecnia, el artificio, el símbolo y la interpretación unívoca propuesta por el director, busca un impresionismo cinematográfico en el que incluso el color resulta un problema, ya que para la época, el trabajo con el color en el cine aún no llegaba a un nivel técnico óptimo y seguía resaltando como una estética incontrolable por encima del fondo y la profundidad del sentido de la imagen. Por ello Tarkovski proponía el uso de colores apagados y neutros, e incluso, asegura que el blanco y negro es la representación de la realidad más fiel, pues anula la necesidad del escoger un color por encima de otro y de darle un sentido a la gama de colores que en la vida real no existe porque es fortuita. When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the 'dirt' of the world. On the contrary! the artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. Substitution... the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.”

What moved me was the theme of the harmony which is born only of sacrifice, the twofold experience of love. It's not a question of mutual love: what nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment, it is nothing.” Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer", the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being” All unabashedly poetic, Tarkovsky’s films encompassed a range of themes, among them, religion and spirituality, science fiction, the artistic enterprise, politics and war, human memory and desire. They were pure pieces of storytelling, untainted by concerns regarding immediate commercial viability. In them, a generous use of natural elements – wind, water, fire – and the practice of long, slow takes came together to create imagery that continues to enthrall and enchant film buffs all over the world. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (1986) by Andrei Tarkovsky translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair (1989, University of Texas Press) El artista no tiene ningún derecho moral para dejarse llevar a un abstracto nivel medio, para hacer que su obra sea más comprensible, más accesible. Esto no acarrearía otra cosa que la decadencia del arte, cuando en realidad esperamos su florecimiento, creemos en las posibilidades potenciales y aún no desarrolladas del artista y también en una elevación de las exigencias del público. O al menos queremos creer en todo ello.”

What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?”

As we shot that scene for the second time, we were filled with apprehension until both cameras had been turned off—one by the assistant camera-man, the other by the intensely anxious Sven Nykvist, that brilliant master of light. Then we all let go: we were nearly all weeping like children, and as we fell into each other’s arms I realised how close and indissoluble was the bond that united our team. David, Eric (2007). " 'Sculpting Time': Russian Filmmaker Sought to Harrow the Soul". Christianity Today (9): 102 . Retrieved 3 March 2019. This LP contains such beautiful music get shivers regularly. David is one of the musicians who is always looking for new forms of music. He is an innovator. Beautiful LP a masterpiece! 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. No human invention has rendered this paradox more pliant than the cinema. That’s what the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (April 4, 1932–December 29, 1986) examined in the last year of his life as he considered the raw material of his art in Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema ( public library).You can also become a spontaneous supporter with a one-time donation in any amount: GIVE NOW BITCOIN DONATION The greatest director and very bad methodologist. He is the only one, there is no one like him and every one who tried to follow his method suffered different kinds of failure. I personally acquainted with people whose whole life collapsed under Tarkovsky's colossus. The scale of his talent and its main feature: ability to erect his own personal life experiences to the scale of something universal, attracts a lot of young filmmakers and they all end up destroying their own talent, just because of that - it is impossible to repeat what Tarkovsky did on screen. To make an impossible thing a life goal... just very unproductive, but he speaks so conclusively and lofty in this book, it even leaves you with feeling, that if you want to be a good director you just don't have another way then follow his method... Para el cineasta, lo que define el montaje ya lo contiene cada escena rodada. El tiempo que transcurre en cada una de ellas determina el tiempo general de la estructura total de escenas en el montaje. Si ambos tiempos no coinciden, la película no funcionará. Esto lo ilustra con una película de Eisenstein, en la que éste quiso reproducir el propio tiempo dinámico de una batalla, pero lo hizo cortando escenas y editándolas una tras otra con velocidad. Según Tarkovski, ello es un fallo, ya que no dejó que cada escena contenga en sí misma el ritmo de la batalla y lo que hizo resultó artificioso y sin sentido. Para él, la escena debe rodarse ya con la intención del montaje y no buscarlo después, más bien, debe hallarse el espíritu de la escena. For Alexander’s little son, as for the witch, Maria, the world is filled with unfathomable wonders, for they both move in a world of the imagination, not that of ‘reality’. Unlike empiricists and pragmatists, they do not believe merely in what they can touch; but with the mind’s eye they perceive the truth. Nothing that they do complies with the ‘normal’ criteria of behaviour. They are possessed of the gift that was recognised in old Russia as the mark of the ‘holy fool’: those pilgrims or ragged beggars whose very presence affected people living normal lives, and whose soothsaying and self-negation were always at variance with the ideas and established rules of the world at large. I felt the weight of Tarkovsky’s words as I immersed into listening of this new album. They were instantly present in a way David and his friends cleverly wrapped music sounds of Stalker and The Mirror together with some kind of dystrophic interpretation of Pasternak’s poem Night, to let us uncover what can really be felt underneath. Process enabled only by force of passion exclusive to the deepest human emotions. These are not meant to be contemplated or understood – rather it’s an invitation to spread your arms, open your heart and allow to be overtaken.