Andrei Tarkovsky – sítöt
Andrei Tarkovsky
tilvitnanir
…ef einhver segir okkur frá æsku sinni og tilfinningum í kringum æskuminningar þá vitum við nóg til að geta gert okkur nokkuð góða mynd af þeirri manneskju. Ef manneskja tapar öllu minni verður hún fangi í sýnis tilveru. Hún tapar sambandinu við tímann og missir samband sitt við umheiminn – með öðrum orðum hún er dæmd til geðveiki.
Sem siðferðisvera er maðurinn gæddur minni sem gefur honum vonbrigði eða óánægjutilfinningu. Minnið gerir okkur særanleg og gegnum það nær þjáningin okkur. (AT)
Þú nærð engum árangri í listum nema þú sért frjáls frá viðteknum hugmyndum. Þú þarft að vinna fram og finna þína eigin stöðu og skoðun – alltaf með skynsemina að leiðarljósi að sjálfsögðu – og halda þér við þetta einsog það sé fjöregg – allan tímann sem þú vinnur að list þinni.
Í túlkun á hugarástandi (leik-)persóna, þá verður að skilja eitthvað eftir sem er leyndarmál.(AT)
Þegar listamaðurinn byrjar sköpun (vinnu) sína þarf hann (hún) að trúa að hann sé fyrsta manneskjan til að gefa ákveðnu fyrirbrigði form. Að nú sé það gert í fyrsta skipti – aðeins hann finni fyrir því og skilji það.(AT)
The artistic image is unique and singular, whereas the phenomena of life may well be entirely banal.
Situation and mood meticulously recorded, achieve an amazingly wide, far-ranging expression. (AT)
Leonardo og Bach sjá heiminn einsog þeir séu að líta hann augum í fyrsta sinn – hafi verið að koma (í hann).
Kvikmynd er meiri en hún er – að minnsta kosti ef það er alvöru kvikmynd. Og það sýnir sig að hún hefur alltaf að geyma fleiri hugsanir og fleiri hugmyndir heldur en meðvitað voru settar í hana af höfundi hennar. (AT)
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Þegar maður gerir raunverulega sitt besta, þá hjálpar Guð til á meðan.
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…ef einhver segir okkur frá æsku sinni og tilfinningar í kringum æskuminningar þá vitum við nóg til að geta gert okkur fullgóða mynd af þeirri manneskju. Ef manneskja tapar öllu minni verður hún fangi í sýnistilveru. Hún tapar sambandinu við tímann og missir samband sitt við umheiminn – með öðrum orðum hún er dæmd til geðveiki.
Sem siðferðisvera er maðurinn gæddur minni sem gefur honum vonbrigði eða óánægjutilfinningu. Minnið gerir okkur særanleg og gegnum það nær þjáningin okkur. (AT)
From AT (he speaks of artistic films – of course)
When a writer and a director have diferent aesthetic startingpoints, compromise is impossible. It will destroy the very conception of the film. The film will not happen.
When such a conflict occurs there sis only one way out: to transform the literary scenario into a new fabric, which at a certain stage in the making of the film will come to be called the shooting script. And in the course of work on this script, the author of the film (not the script but of the film) in entitled to turn the literary scenario this way or that as he wants. All that matters is that his vision should be whole, and that every word in the script should be dear to him and have passed through his own creative experience. For among the piles of written pages, and the actors and the places chosen for location, and even the most brilliant dialogue, and the artists sketches, there stands only one person: the director, and he alone, as the last filter in the creative prosess of film-making.
AT:
…. The cinema, like any other art, is created by the author. What the director can be given by his colleagues in the course of their work is together is inestimable; but all the same it is his conception alone that finally gives the film it´s unity. Only what has been broken down in his subjective, the authors vision will become the stuff of art and will go to make up that distinctive, complex world which reflects a true picture of reality. Naturally his unique position does not lessen the enourmous value of the contribution brought to the work by all the other members of the team; but even in this interdependence on the other’s ideas only actually enhance the work when the director knows how to choose between them. Otherwise the wholeness of the work is destroyed.
AT
(Svona var það fyrir mig)
Touched by a masterpeace, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and it´s beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our soules made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognice and discover ourselves, the unfanthomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.
It is considered that time, per se, helps to make known the essensce of things. The Japanese therefore see a particular charm in the evidence of old age. They are attracted to the darkened tone of an old tree, the ruggedness of a stone, or even the scruffy look of a picture whose edges have been handled by great many people. To all these signs of age the give the name saba, which literally means “rust”. Saba, then, is a natural rustyness, the charm of olden days, the stamp of time. (þetta er ekki rétt orð: saba. Finn það hvergi)
AT again
The true artistic image is always based on a organic link between idea and form. Indeed, any imbalance between form and concept will make the creation of an artistic image impossible, for the work will remain outside the realm of art.
AT
It is a grave, I would ever say, fatal, mistake to try to make a film correspond exactly with what is written on paper, to translat ontothe screen structures that have been thougt out in advance, pruely intellectually. That simple operation can be carried out by any professional craftsman. Because it is a living process, artistic creation demands a capacity for direct observation of the ever changing material world, which is constantly in movement.
AT
A work becomes dated as a result of the concious effort to be expressive and contemporary.
AT
Situation and mood meticulously recorded, achieve an amazingly wide, far-ranging expressio. (…) We are faced with a paradox: the image signifies the fullest possible expression of what is typical, and the more fuly it expresses it, the more individual, the more original it becomes. It is an extraordinary thing this image! (… ) Do Leonardo or Bach mean anything in functional terms? No – they mean nothing at all beyond what they mean themselves; that is the measure of their autonomy. They ss the world as if for the first time, with no experience to weigh them down. They look at it with the independence of people who have just arrived!
AT
…a film is bigger than it is – at least, if it is a real film. And it always turns out to have more thought, more ideas, than were consciously put there by its author.
AT
It is above all through sense of time, through rhythm, that the director reveals his individuality.
AT
The person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world), and becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your “own”, and others remain strangers; and I think this is not only perfectly natural, but, alas, inevitable.
Í túlkun á hugarástandi (leik-)persóna, þá verður að skilja eitthvað eftir sem er leyndarmál.(AT)
Þegar listamaðurinn byrjar sköpun (vinnu) sína þarf hann(hún) að trúa að hann sé fyrsta manneskjan til að gefa ákveðnu fyrirbrigði form. Að nú sé það gert í fyrsta skipti – aðeins hann finni fyrir því og skilji það.(AT)
The artistic image is unique and singular, whereas the phenomena of life may well be entirely banal.
Situation and mood meticulously recorded, achieve an amazingly wide, far-ranging expression. (AT)
Leonardo og Bach sjá heiminn einsog þeir séu að líta hann augum í fyrsta sinn – hafi verið að koma.
Kvikmynd er meiri en hún er – að minnsta kosti ef það er alvöru kvikmynd. Og það sýnir sig að hún hefur alltaf að geyma fleiri hugsanir og fleiri hugmyndir heldur en meðvitað voru settar í hana af höfundi hennar. (AT)
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Fyrir kvikmyndatökumenn
AT
If the camera-man has understood his task anything less than perfectly, then the picture, however brilliantly it may have been filmed in visual and formal terms, will no longer revolve around the axle of its own idea, and in the end it will lack cohesion.
AT
A scenario with literary qualities is only useful as a way of persuading those on whom a production depends of the viability of a projected film. Not that a screenplay itself is any guarantee of the quality of the finished work: we know dozens of examples of bad films made from “good” scenarios and vice versa. And it is no secret that the real work on a scenario does not start untill after it has been accepted an bought; and that this work will involve the director himself in writing, working in close collaboration with his litterary colleagues, channelling their skills in the direction he requires. I am of course talking of what are known as author films.
AT
In the process of developing a script I used to always to try to have an exact pictuere of the film inn mind, even down to the sets (this might have been “setups” in the russian).
Now however, I am more inclined to work out a scene or shot in a very general way, so that it will emerge spontaneously during the shooting. For the life on location, the atmosphere of the set, the actor’s moods, can prompt one to new, startling und unexpected atrategies. Imagination is less rich tahn life. And these daus I feel more and more strongly that the ideas and modds shlould not be all predeterminated in advance. One should be able to depend on the feeling of the scene, and approach with one’s mind open. There was a time when I could not start shooting without having devised a complete plan for the episode, but now I find that such a plan is abstract, and that it restricts the imagination. ( )
…If I “see” anything at all before shooting, if I envisage anything, then it is the inner state, the distinctive tension of the scenes to be filmed, and the psychology of the characters. But I still do not know the precise mould in which it will all be cast. I go on to the set in order to understand by what means the state can be expressed on film. And once tha I have understood that I start shooting.
AT
The picturesque character of the shot, due often enough simply to the quality of the film, is one more artificial element loaded on to the image, and something has to be done to counteract it if you mind about beeing faithful to life. You have to neutralize colour, to modify its impacct on the audience. If colour becomes the dominant elementin the shot, it means that the director and the camera-man are using a painter’s methods to affect the audience.
AT
When I make a film, it is ultimately I who answer for everything, including the actors’ performances.
On Actors and acting
AT
The cinema director is rather like a collector. His exhibits are his frames, which constitue life, recorded once and for all time in myriad well known details, pieces, fragments, of which the actor, the character, may or may not be a part….
( )
Unlike the film actor, every theatre player has to construct his own role within himself, from beginning to end, under the quidance of the director. He has to draw up a kind chart of his feelings, subject to to the overall conception of the play. In cinema such introspective building up of character can never be admissable; it is not for the actor to make decicions about the stress, pitch and tone of his interpretation, for he cannot know all the components which will go up to make the film. His task is to live! – And to trust the director.
( )
By assuming that he knows how the film has to be, the actor starts to playu the ‘end product’ – htat is, his conception of his role; doing so he is negating the very principle of the creation of the cinema image.
( )
Cinema does not need actors to ‘play’. They are unbearable to watch, because we realised long ago that what they were aiming at, and yet they go doggedly on, spelling out the meaning of the text on every possible level. They cannot rely on our understandig by ourselves.
AT
…life doesn’t give us all the same opportunities for developing our aesthetic perceptions. That’s where the real difficulty lies. But it doesn’t help to pretend that the audience is the artist’s ‘supreme judge’. Who? What audience? Those responseble for cultural policy should be concerned with creating a certain climate, a certain standard of artistic production, instead of fobbing audiences off with stuff that is blatantly phoney and unreal, and so currupting their taste invocably.
AT
In order to be free you simply have to be so, without asking permission of anybody. You have to have your own hypothesis about what you are called to do, and follow it, not giving in to circumstances or complying with them. But that sort of freedom demands powerful inner resourses, a high degree of self-awareness, a conciousness of your responsibilities to yourself and therefore to other people.
( )
All of us are infected today with an extraordinary egoism. And that is not freedom; freedom means learning to demand only of oneself, not of life or of others, and knowing how to give: sacrifice in the mane of love.
( )
The Stalker seems to be weak, but essensially it is he who is invinceble because of his faith and his will to serve others. Ultimately artists work at their professions not for the sake of telling someone about something, but as an assertion of their will to serve people. I am staggered by artists who assume that they freely create themselves, that it is actually possible to do so; for it is the lot of the artist to accept that he is created by his time and the people amongst who he lives.
AT
People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his own self-respect, and his capacity to destiguish what matters and what is merely passing.
AT
As to my next film, I shall aim at ever greater sincerity and conviction in each shot, using the immediate impressions made upon me by nature, in which time will have left its own trace.
AT
In the Book of Job it says: ‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upwards.’ In other words suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how, withour it, should we be able to ‘fly upwards’. And what is suffering? Where does it come from? From dissatisfaction, from the gulf between the ideal and the point at which you find yourself? A sense of ‘happiness’ is far less important than beeing able to confirm your own soul in the fight for that freedom which is, in true sense, divine.
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And most important, let them believe in themselves let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. when he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant, but when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.
Úr Stalker eftir eftir Andrei Tarkovsky
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