Andrei Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Filmmakers: Sacrifice Yourself for Cinema

Few film­mak­ers have been so often, or so unam­bigu­ous­ly, called mas­ters of the medi­um as Andrei Tarkovsky. In acclaimed pic­tures like The Mir­ror, Stalk­er, and Nos­tal­ghia (find free online ver­sions of his films here), he real­ized his visions with­out com­pro­mise. If you can engage with these visions, watch­ing a Tarkovsky film makes for a cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence with­out com­pare. Geoff Dyer, for exam­ple, one of the direc­tor’s par­tic­u­lar­ly high-pro­file fans, recent­ly pub­lished Zona: A Book About a Film About a Jour­ney to a Room, a vol­ume on noth­ing but watch­ing Stalk­er. If you can’t engage with these visions, you may find watch­ing a Tarkovsky film rough going indeed. (Admit­ted­ly, Nos­tal­ghia’s nine min­utes of can­dle-car­ry­ing requires a cer­tain frame of mind.) But if you make films, you’d do well to con­sid­er Tarkovsky’s meth­ods either way. The clip above from the doc­u­men­tary Voy­age in Time offers some insight into how the man thought about his work.

First and fore­most, he did­n’t think about it as “work,” sep­a­rate from oth­er pur­suits. “It’s not hard to learn how to glue the film, how to work a cam­era,” Tarkovsky says. “But the advice I can give to begin­ners is not to sep­a­rate their work, their movie, their film, from the life they live. Not to make a dif­fer­ence between the movie and their own life.” These words don’t come as a sur­prise from a direc­tor well known for craft­ing deeply per­son­al films, but one sus­pects that cre­ators of any kind all too rarely find it in them­selves to heed them. But Tarkovsky, always described as a thor­ough­ly rig­or­ous man, could have lived no oth­er way. “Cin­e­ma is a very dif­fi­cult and seri­ous art,” he con­tin­ues. “It requires sac­ri­fic­ing of your­self. You should belong to it, it should­n’t belong to you. Cin­e­ma uses your life, not vice ver­sa.” A great demand indeed, but we’d sure­ly have a more inter­est­ing cin­e­ma if young direc­tors accept­ed it. The artis­tic world could use more Tarkovskys.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online

Tarkovsky’s Solaris Revis­it­ed

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Stu­dent Films, 1956–1960

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.