Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (??????? ??????????? ???????????) (April 4, 1932 - December 28, 1986) was a Russian movie director, writer, and actor. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers of the Soviet era in Russia and one of the greatest in the history of cinema.

Work

Tarkovsky's films are characterised by metaphysical themes, extremely long takes, and memorable images of exceptional beauty. Recurring motifs in his films are dreams, memory, childhood, running water accompanied by fire, rain indoors, reflections, and characters re-appearing in the foreground of long panning movements of the camera.

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Tarkovsky developed a theory of cinema that he called "sculpting in time". By this he meant that the unique characteristic of cinema as a medium was to take our experience of time and alter it. Unedited movie footage transcribes time in real time. (The speedy jump-cutting style that is prevalent in MTV videos and Hollywood movies, by contrast, overrides any sense of time by imposing the editor's viewpoint.) By using long takes and few cuts in his films, he aimed to give the viewers a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship of one moment in time to another.

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Up to and including his film Mirror, Tarkovsky focussed his cinematic works on exploring this theory. After Mirror, he announced that he would focus his work on exploring the dramatic unities proposed by Aristotle: a concentrated action, happening in one place, within the span of a single day. The Sacrifice is the only film that truly reflects this ambition; it is also considered by many to be a near-to-perfect reflection of the sculpting in time theory.

Related Topics:
Mirror - Aristotle - The Sacrifice

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