Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an 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.

Art affirms all that is best in man — hope, faith, love, beauty, prayer…What he dreams of and what he hopes for…What is art?…Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life — love and sacrifice.

Substitution . . . the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.

It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas.

A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts — for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for his own sake. What purports to be art begins to looks like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalized action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in an artistic creation the personality does not assert itself, it serves another, higher, and communal idea. The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of human calling.

My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware the beauty is summoning him.

The whole concept of the avant-garde in art is meaningless. I can see what it means when applied to sport, for instance. But to apply it to art would be to accept the idea of progress in art; and though progress has an obvious place in technology — more perfect machines, capable of carrying out their functions better and more accurately — how can anyone be more advanced in art? How could Thomas Mann be said to be better than Shakespeare?

There was a time when I thought that film, unlike other art forms (being the most democratic of them all) had a total effect, identical of every audience. That it was first and foremost a series of recorded images; that the images are photographic and unequivocal. That being so, because it appears unambiguous, it is going to be perceived in one and the same way by everyone who sees it. (Up to a certain point, obviously)
But I was wrong. One has to work out a principle which allows for film to affect people individually. The 'total' image must become something private. (comparable with the images of literature, painting, poetry, music.)
The basic principle- as it were, the mainspring- is, I think, that as little as possible has actually to be shown, and form that little the audience has to build up an idea of the rest, of the whole. In my view that has to be the basis for constructing the cinematographic image. And if one looks at it from the point of view of symbols, then the symbol in cinema is a symbol of nature, of reality. Off course, it isn't a question of details, but of what is hidden.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could listen to them properly, cinema would have no need for music at all.

Freedom is inseparable from conscience. And even if it is true that all the ideas developed by the social conciousness are the product of evolution, conscience at least has nothing to do with the historic process. Conscience, both as a sense and as a concept, is a priori immanent in man, and shakes the very foundations of the society that has emerged from our ill-conceived civilisation.

If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens.

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.

Our fraught way of life gives each of us a narrowly defined role, creating conditions conducive to developing only those elements in our psyche which allow us to grow within the confines of that role. The other areas of our psyche waste away. Hence lack of contact. Here psychological and social factors combine, and produce fear, distrust, moral baseness and the death of hope.