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Film Theory Meets Physics
A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky’s Theory of Time-Pressure, Part 1: Tarkovsky’s theory of time-pressure as ‘cine-physics’
David George Menard, dg_menar2003@yahoo.com
August 31, 2003
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The purpose of this essay is to offer a Deleuzian
time-image analysis of Tarkovsky’s montage theory of “time-pressure,”
foregrounded against the historical backdrop of Eisenstein’s montage of attractions.
Several films from Tarkovsky’s later work will be examined for montage elements
that support or contravene these theories. The history of the post-Revolution The Russian new wave began during the Post-Stalinist
period, at about the same time as it did in the rest of Europe. It is characterized by films about national history and WWII, social
dramas, and poetic films. The Russian new wave filmmakers are many, among
them, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Paradjanov, Alexei German, Tengiz Abuladze,
Otar Iosseliani, and Nikita Mikhalkov. To speak of Soviet-Russian cinema is
to discuss the achievements of the old and new school of film making, and
one can easily begin by comparing the works and theories of Sergei Eisenstein
and Andrei Tarkovsky. Soviet montage developed after the 1917 Russian
revolution. Sergei Eisenstein is considered, if not the father of Soviet montage,
its most articulate spokesperson. Soviet montage views movement and space
as the distinctive characteristics of cinema as opposed to theater. Montage
defines the way in which images are cut and assembled together. The director
composes separated filmed fragments into a whole and juxtaposes these fragments
into an integral structure to achieve a rhythmical effect. Eisenstein considered
montage as the basis of art cinema (film art). The “montage of attraction”
puts objects, ideas, and symbols in collision to produce an intellectual and
critical response from the viewer. [2] Andrei Tarkovsky is the most celebrated filmmaker
of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s (until his death in Paris on Dec. 29,
1986). He is the patriarch of the contemporary Soviet “poetic film.” Tarkovsky strongly
opposed montage and believed that the basis of art cinema (film art) is the
internal rhythm of the shot. Tarkovsky’s idea of “sculpting in time” proposes
cinema as the representation of distinctive currents or waves of time, conveyed
in the shot by its internal rhythm. Tarkovsky believed the film image not to
be a composite of different shots arranged in a structure within a specific
sequence progressing in time. He reasoned that if the film image is not a
composite then the dominant factor of the film must be its rhythm. Rhythm
is at the core of the “poetic film.” But Tarkovsky’s idea of rhythm is not
that of Eisenstein, instead he envisioned cinematic rhythm as some kind of
movement within the frame, and not as a sequence of shots in time. Hence,
the main characteristic of poetic film is the process of sculpting in time
as opposed to Eisenstein montage of attractions. While Eisenstein’s process
of editing is guided by intellectual and conceptual juxtaposition of images,
Tarkovsky’s time sculpting involves editing techniques which allow spontaneous
unification of the shot as a self-organizing structure. Instead of the interplay
of concepts (Eisensteinian montage), Tarkovsky creates the film image as an
expression of the matter world, or simply the world. For Eisenstein, the concept
dictated the cut; but for Tarkovsky, it is time that rules, dictating the
editing techniques. Therefore, time within the frame expresses something significant
and truthful that goes beyond the events on the screen and those in the frame;
and so, the direct perception of time is like a pointer to infinity (this
approach is quite different to the montage of attraction between shots where
elements in the shot juxtapose concepts, making the viewer produce some intellectual
link). While the montage of attraction produces a burst of meaning, arousing
the viewer with the purpose to suggest specific ideas and concepts, Tarkovskian
time rhythms illustrate a way of seeing life in its essence, life’s movements.
Moreover, this poetic expression of the material world may go beyond the artist’s
intention and be received differently by each viewer. In the Tarkovskian School of film poetics, the filmmaker expresses his philosophy
of life as opposed to creating a new perception of a social reality. More typical than Paradjanov’s treatment
as a film director was the plight of Andrei Tarkovsky [1932 - 1986], the second
major figure from the postwar Soviet cinema during the sixties. [3] Tarkovsky was probably influenced in his decision
to study at the VGIK (Moscow film school) under Mikhail Romm by his father, the
Russian poet Arseni Tarkovsky.
[4] In 1974 Tarkovsky produced an autobiographical
film a la Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), entitled Zerkalo (Mirror),
which was criticized as being labyrinth in form and parabolic in nature. In
1976, he directed an acclaimed stage version of Hamlet in Moscow. Late in the decade, Tarkovsky made Stalker
(1979), an ambiguous allegory of decay shot in Tarkovsky’s Mirror is a philosophically
personal and autobiographical film dealing with memory and temporality. The
concepts of time and remembrance have been the tropes of investigations by
other authors; for instance, Alain Resnais’ Muriel (1963) is a personal
film that explores such issues through the socially changing framework of
French history (circa 1960). Tarkovsky’s Mirror, alternatively titled
Mirror or A White, White Day, delves into the personal histories
of its characters through a kaleidoscopic mesh of interwoven time periods.
In Mirror, history becomes an enigmatic mirror that reflects three
different levels of temporality in which time expresses a sense of universal
oneness. There are three distinctive periods that differentiate time from
an otherwise unified portrayal of the personal history of its principal protagonist,
Alexei, the narrator (voice-over), who is glimpsed only the end of
the film: 1)
the ‘present’ circa 1975, 2)
the ‘past’ of post-WWII (mid-1940s), 3)
and another ‘past’ of pre-WWII (1930s). In Mirror Tarkovsky differentiates
history into temporal categories and integrates within them the personal histories
of the characters to expose the unifying aspects of time. He captures a temporal
oneness through a sensibly oneiric cinematography and carefully structured
mise-en-scéne, especially in its color tones, surface textures, and sound
designs. Moreover, he matches stock footage from these periods with the time
sensibility of his own shots, that is, he cuts documentary footage with the
time-images emerging out from his time-pressure editing. This
type of time-thrust cutting, which he used to make his thesis film
The Steamroller and the Violin (1960) is in contrast to the Soviet
montage style developed by Sergei Eisenstein. This new way of conceptualizing
montage involves the matching of the internal rhythms within the shots with
each other, and it is this new brand of temporal linkage that dictates the
cut (not the concept which dictates the cut in Eisensteinian montage). These
inner rhythms are related to the flow of time, the direct perception of time
that exists and emanates from the shots; and as with any dynamic continuum,
the flow of time carries a temporal mass or momentum, definable by a so-called
“time-pressure,” a hypothetical concept in Tarkovsky’s montage theory
of sculpting in time. [7] Tarkovsky explains that editing cannot be
the dominant structural element of a film, as the protagonists of Soviet montage
cinema (Kuleshov and Eisenstein) maintained in the 1920’s. The film image
comes into being during shooting, and exists within the frame. As Donato Totaro
explains, editing brings together shots which are already filled with time
(1992, 24). The function of editing is to organize the time-images
into a wave structure inherent to film, that is, the time-pressure
wave. Tarkovsky’s concept of time-pressure is like a meteorological
time-front that propagates from shot-to-shot and throughout the film,
or a cardiopulmonary time-pulse that thrust against the arterial walls
of the scenes, bringing temporal oxygenation to the shots and overall meaning
to the film-form. In Tarkovsky’s view, the Eisensteinian theoretical
structure of the montage of attraction, as a form of editing that brings together
two concepts and generates a new, third one, cannot fully explain the nature
of cinema. This view is akin to the inconsistencies that exist in Newton’s law of motions (analogous to Eisenstein’s laws of
montage) in explaining why light bends around the sun or in predicting the
perihelion shift of the orbit of Mercury. Even though Tarkovsky has great
admiration for Eisenstein’s pioneering efforts, the traditional Soviet montage
cinema can only be a subset of a more encompassing grand unified theory of
film. Tarkovsky’s theory derives from the incomplete understanding of time
that exists in Eisenstein’s theory (whose temporal concepts are very similar
to the indirect perception and treatment of time in Newtonian physics). Tarkovsky
hypothesizes that time can be directly perceived in film. He theorizes that
the time-thrust (temporal force or energy) is equivalent to the cinematic
material (filmic matter projected on the screen at the speed of light - analogous
to E = MC2) and therefore it is inherent to every shot. Therefore,
just as Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity reduces to Newton’s
gravitational law of force, as the material velocity becomes very much smaller
than the speed of light; so too does Tarkovsky’s theory of time-rhythm
montage (or sculpting in time) reduces to Eisenstein’s theory of shot-concept
montage, as the division of the sensory-motor link becomes much more rational
than irrational. Tarkovsky believed that film’s ultimate goal cannot be the
interplay of concepts because the film-image, specifically the time-image,
is tied to the concreteness of time and the temporality of matter, reaching
out along mysterious paths to regions beyond infinity. For this reason, the
poetics of cinema, a mixture of base, everyday material substances, is very
much resistant to symbolism (in the Tarkovskian sense). Even though Tarkovsky and Eisenstein appear to have
opposite views on the idea of montage, sculpting in time incorporates
some of Eisenstein’s montage categories (rhythmic, tonal and overtonal) into
its own system of cutting. Eisenstein’s film structure can be described as
an organic form with artificial content while Tarkovsky’s approach is organic
in body, exhibiting the characteristics of a living organism, and thus, it
is essentially natural. Tarkovskian time-rhythm montage is no more than
the natural time variant of the unification of the shots that exists in the
material of the film. It allows the separate scenes and shots to come together
spontaneously, joining up according to their own intrinsic pattern of relationships
and articulations. Retroactively, a self-generating structure forms during
editing because of the inherent material temporality that is caught during
shooting. The grouping of the shots creates the structure of a film, but not
necessarily its rhythm. In a brilliant occasion of praxis aligning with theory,
Tarkovsky writes: “The distinctive time running through the shots makes the
rhythm...rhythm is not determined by the length of the edited pieces, but
by the pressure of the time that runs through them (1986, 117). The flow of time running through the shots
creates the rhythm of the film. Moreover, rhythm is determined not by the
length of the shots, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them.
Therefore, montage can only be a feature of style because it cannot create
this time-rhythm, the truly dominant element of our modern cinema. Flowing systems permeate all aspects of life,
matter, energy and time; but they manifest their myriad rhythms in a contradictory
duality of nature, exhibiting particle-wave characteristics. On the microscopic
level, nature behaves as a matter-wave whose motion is described by a matrix
energy operator, H, operating on a particle-wave function, within the
dynamics of the Hamiltonian representation where time is effectively
stationary at the moment of the measurement, or within the Schrodinger
representation where time evolves along with the moving matter, through
the operations of a 2nd order space differential operator. A finely
exquisite understanding of elementary quantum physics offers a penetrative
insight in the Tarkovskian theory of time-pressure. The material duality
of time [in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, time (t) is an equivalent
coordinate to those of space (x, y, z), where all four quantities are expressible
as a single 4-vector in space-time (x, y, z, t)]. The implication is tremendous
because time behaves much like a light-wave that never stops moving, but also
as a particle-wave that can be relatively arrested (an implication that allows
for the direct perception of time in Tarkovsky’s cinema). It is not
surprising that a cinematic physics exists which leads us to ask questions
such as: “what is a time-thrust and/or time-pressure?” In response
to this question, Totaro replies, simply, that it is the use of nature in
cinema that guides and gauges the degrees of temporality of the audiovisual
presentations and since nature exhibits an immense repertoire of all kinds
of activities [water, fire, rain, mud, snow, wind, and even milk (just to
name a few)], they become propagators of time-images in which the flow
of time is perceived directly through a time-thrust or time-pressure.
[8] The use of nature in film is purely organic and
has a sense of circularity, akin to certain Eastern philosophies which, like
Buddhism, are characterized by non-linear forms of thinking; for example parallelistic
logic, where A is equal to not A, is in marked opposition to Aristotelian
logic where A can never equal not A. Time dictates the particular cutting strategies
because it is imprinted in the frame. The shots that won’t edit or properly
join, are pieces that record different kinds of time; implying that actual
time cannot be joined with conceptual time. The temporal consistency that
propagates through the shot is defined as its rhythmic intensity (or “sloppiness”).
It follows from cinematic physics that editing is the assembly of the shots
which results from the time-impedance matching (analogous to the impedance
matching characteristics of filters used in electronic circuitry) of their
inherent time-pressures. In short, to make a Tarkovskian film is to
maintain the operative time-pressure (or “thrust”) that unifies the
impact of radically different shots. How does time-pressure makes itself
felt in a shot? To paraphrase Tarkovsky with a Deleuzian twist, time materializes
when there is a feeling of something significant and truthful that goes beyond
the optical and sound situations on the screen. The audiovisual events depicted
on the screen are merely material indicators of something stretching out beyond
the infinity of the image (in electromagnetic field theory, the light wave’s
potential becomes zero only at infinity) - what Tarkovsky calls “pointers
to life.” Thus, a truly real film stretches beyond the boundaries of its sound-images,
creating more thoughts, ideas, than consciously put there by the filmmaker.
It does so by recording on film the time-waves which flow beyond the
edges of the frame; and like time’s dual nature (particle-wave), the dominant
factor in Tarkovskian cinema is a dual or two-way process in which a real
film lives within time only if time lives within it. A ‘real’ film is like
a living organism because it grows in form and meaning after leaving the editing
bench, detaching itself from authorial intent and allowing itself to be experienced
and interpreted in individually personalized ways - just as those unique and
precious moments in real life. This is a radical movement in modern cinema
because it liberates film from the constraints of the author who creates it,
allowing the film to live in time on its own. [9] Ian Christie discusses the issues of formalism
and neo-formalism in the modern cinema:
Tarkovsky strictly applies time-thrust editing theory to the minute details of his films and achieves a separation between authorial intent and spectator participation. Films such as Solaris and Mirror tap into the time-memory elements of the viewers’ personal histories, allowing each individual to develop his or her variant forms of understanding to what he or she perceives. Tarkovsky’s theoria appears to be a complicated cinematic construct but it is not. [11] What is difficult about Tarkovsky’s cinema is its praxis. It is not easy to identify the proper time-image match which is necessary to maintain the desired stability of the time-pressure level between shots. In short, it is imperative that the time-wave propagates freely from shot-to-shot, otherwise, a form of resistance develops in the “gap” and the purity of the optical and sound situations which is the basis for the direct perception of time is lost. Gilles Deleuze discusses the significance of this “breach” in the sensory-motor linkage:
The stationary relation of the sensor-motor link and the indirect image of time is transformed to a delocalized relation of the pure optical and sound situations and the direct image of time. [13] Deleuze writes about Tarkovsky’s text of the ‘cinematographic figure’ as follows:
In short, modern film is not a language operating with predefined cinematic units (unit-shot = montage-cell) and montage is not a super-unitary system that organizes sub-unit shots. [15] The time-thrusts can be easily overlooked because they are often unperceivable optical and sound situations, with no commensurable links to each other and no easily inferable connections to conventional referents. [16] For example, Mirror is structured by the interposition of personal memories within a timeline of significant historical events and socio-cultural situations. Tarkovsky’s style of cutting tends to keep the historical temporalities separate, but now and then, he allows them to co-exist in the same diegetic space and sometimes in the same shot. In Mirror, the act of remembering alternates between two worlds, one actual and the other virtual, and sometimes, memory exist simultaneously in both worlds. The memory-scape bifurcates into actual and virtual situations that parallel each other within a temporal quandary. [17] Mirror extracts images from thought-memories and surrounds them in a world of time. Material objects are reflected in a mirror-image (time-image) as a double movement of liberation and capture, where the virtual object mirrors the real; as if, momentarily, the image in a mirror separates from its surface and crystallizes into physicality, only to reabsorb again and become mentality. In short, the time-image has an image-structure, a coalescence of the actual and the virtual. Donato Totaro explains that the physicality relates to matter as an extension of space and to the movement-image, while the mentality is tied into memory as a duration of thought and the time-image. The movement-image is a spatialized cinema, as seen in Hollywood genre films, where time is measured by movement and determined by action. The time-image is a temporalized cinema, as in the European art films, where the temporal links between shots are non-rational and incommensurable, resulting in the emergence of empty, disconnected spaces; what Deleuze calls “any-space-whatevers.” [18] Totaro correlates Bergson’s views on memory [19] with another form of the time-image concept:
The significance of the crystal-image is of immense importance in Tarkovsky’s theory of time-pressure and in the time-rhythm montage of Mirror because it is the key that unlocks the door to the compositional domains of the opsigns and sonsigns which are the correlates of the time-images. Totaro writes that:
If one compares film with music, cinema stands out as giving time visible, real form. A piece of music can be played in different ways where musical time is a condition of certain causes and effects set out in a given order, carrying abstract and philosophical sensibilities - music records time inwardly. But film is able to record time outwardly with visible signs, recognizable to the senses - so time becomes the very foundation of cinema, as sound is in music, color in painting, character in drama. Rhythm is not the metrical sequences of the shots but the time-thrust within the frames. What is different about Tarkovsky’s editing is that it brings together time, imprinted in the segments of film. Cutting does not engender, or recreate, a new quality; but it brings out a quality already inherent in the frame that it joins. Editing has to do with temporal extensions and the degree of intensity with which these time-thrusts possess (time-pressures). Editing represents intervals of time dealing with the diversity of life perceived. Rhythm exists in the life of the object visibly recorded in the frame while the temporal movement is conveyed by the flow of the life-process in the shot. It is through this time-rhythm that the director reveals his individuality and stylistic marks. Time-rhythms come into being spontaneously during shooting, with the filmmaker’s sensibility for nature’s rhythms in his search for these elusive time-images. Tarkovsky’s editing style disturbs the passage of time by introducing time-flow interruptions (the act of cutting) which create temporal distortions. It is the distortion of time that gives it rhythmical expression. This is the basis for Tarkovsky’s theory of sculpting in time. It exposes the direct figure of time by the deliberate and careful joining of shots of uneven time-pressure. The cutting has to come from the inner necessity (within the shot) and the organic process going on in the material as a whole (akin to Eisenstein’s overtonal montage). The process of joining segments of unequal time-value breaks the time-rhythm. However, if the temporal disjunctions are correlated by the time-thrusts (forces or pressures) within the assembled frames, then the desired rhythmic design can be achieved. As Totaro notes:
Tarkovsky’s sense of time is related to his innate perception of nature. His editing style is dictated by the rhythmic pressures in the segments of film. His authorial signature comes from his editing style and is the mark of his attitudes to the conception of cinema and philosophy of life. His art films are formed by organic processes and are living organisms with their own circulatory system (time flow) which must not be brought to stasis. Tarkovsky’s time-pressure montage represents the sensibility of an auteur, his film style, and personal philosophy. Tarkovsky’s films form a cinema of thought-images. A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky’s Theory of “Time-Pressure", Part Two: A Deleuzian Textual-Analysis of Tarkovsky [1]The
Stalin regime was brutal and deadly, limiting personal and social liberties,
and carrying out rampant political persecution; even art and culture were
subjugated to the aesthetic control of social realism, servicing the Soviet
ideology. The state film industry was sponsored and financed by government
subsidies, focusing on propaganda films and national epics. The Soviet cinema
was based on old fashioned production systems, with a few internationally
acclaimed directors (the others remained in obscurity), and suffered from
the lack of good screenwriters since many Russian writers looked down to script
writing as an inferior activity. All Soviet film aesthetics were centered
on the concept of ‘social realism,’ a representation of national identity
through national epics and heroes. The post-Stalin period began with the death
of Stalin in 1953. It was a time when Soviet politics progressively opened
up to the The first stage of relaxation in the arts is referred to as the Khrushchev period {1958 - 1964} (Nikita Khrushchev [1894 - 1971]). It is marked by the denunciation of the excesses of Stalinism and the abolishment of the cult of personality (Stalin). The second stage occurs between 1964 and 1982 when Leonid Brezhnev [1906 - 1982] becomes the general secretary of the communist party, and a more conservative, party-centered government is set up as the hallmark of this regime. In 1957, the Union of Filmmakers is formed to protect filmmakers but it also becomes a form of control on the Soviet filmmakers because censorship is still in effect and applied to all the Soviet film industry, especially when Brezhnev is the general secretary. Experimental or art films are controlled and released only in limited circuits determined by the state. In the Spring of 1968, the USSR invades Czechoslovakia and Prague falls under the control of the Soviet Union; and at the same time, a dissident movement begins in the USSR and the deportations of dissident trouble makers becomes policy. From 1986 to 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev takes power in the Soviet Union, marking the beginning of the final stages of the Soviet government. He opens up his country to the European economy and culture by introducing the Perestroika and Glasnost politics, effectively ending state control politics over Soviet industry and economy. It also marks the end of the state controlled film industry, and the withdrawal of government subsidies provokes a crisis in the Soviet cinema because of the lack of national circuits for the production and distribution of film; as a result, censorship is terminated with an order for the re-release of films banned during the previous years. Thus, distribution of Hollywood films in the national film market is allowed and international co-productions are initiated, especially with Europe. Therefore, Soviet cinema remained in the State’s repressive grip until the advent of glasnost in 1985-86, and social realism was not categorically rejected as the official style of Soviet film art until a unanimous vote by the membership of the Filmmakers Union in June 1990. After a military
coup in 1991 (marking the end of the Soviet Union), Boris Yeltsin governs
[2]Eisenstein believed the film image to be a composite of different shot arrangements in a structure in which collision and conflict were made to exist between its elements. Montage was at the heart of such a structure. Montage can be further divided into five categories: a) metric - tempo of the cutting based on temporal length b) rhythmic - specialized metric montage in which the cutting rate is based upon the rhythm of movement within the shot as well as predetermined metrical demands, c) tonal - dominant emotional tone becomes the basis for editing, d) overtonal - a synthesis of metric, rhythmic and tonal which emerges in the projection rather than in the editing process and e) intellectual or ideological - previous montage techniques were concerned with inducing emotional and/or physiological reactions through a sophisticated form of behavior, but intellectual montage was believed to express abstract ideas by creating conceptual relationships among the shots of opposing visual content. Furthermore since Eisenstein began his career in the Soviet theater where spectacle and attraction were a dominant part of the show, Soviet montage techniques are based on the montage of attractions, and its rhythm is developed as a sequence of images progressing through time. Its editing process can be characterized as an intellectual and conceptual juxtaposition of images, objects and concepts capable of achieving certain emotional and intellectual effects. Soviet montage/editing is based on the interplay of concepts, where the concepts dictate the editing rhythm. Therefore, Eisensteinian editing is a montage of attraction between shots, and elements in the shots juxtapose concepts, allowing the viewer to produce intellectual connections and meaning. Thus, the montage of attraction produces an explosion of meaning that arouses the viewer, and its purpose is to suggest specific ideas and concepts; and so, the filmmaker creates a new perception of social reality. [3]What happened to Sergei Paradjanov [1924 -1990] during the Brezhnev years was extreme. In October 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was removed from office by a conspiracy among his deputies, and Leonid Brezhnev placed in as the secretary of the Central Committee and Alexei N. Kosygin as the chairman of the Council of Ministers. There followed a period of uncertainty and indecision for the arts that ended abruptly with the Warsaw pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and a renewed domestic campaign against the liberation of Soviet culture in 1969. The brief interval of the Khrushchev relaxation ended with the production of one of the most extraordinary and beautiful films ever made, Sergei Paradjanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), a mythopoetic mode of experimental cinema. Like the legends of Tristan and Isolde and Romeo and Juliet, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors offers a relatively familiar and uncomplicated tale of undying love that has variants in cultures all over the world; with this film Paradjanov created a vision of human experience that was considered extremely radical in its subversion of all authority. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors violates every narrative code and representational system known to cinema, and it seems intent upon deconstructing the very process of representation itself by interrogating the whole set of historically evolved assumptions about the nature of cinematic space and the relationship between spectator and the screen. Paradjanov proceeds by means of ‘perceptual dislocation’ making it impossible at any given moment to imagine a stable time-space continuum for the dramatic action. The point of these techniques is not to confuse the spectator but to prevent the kind of comfortable, familiar, and logically continuous representational space associated with traditional narrative form. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors exists most fully not in the realm of narrative but in the world of myth and the unconscious. It is a psychological film embedded deep in Freudian and Jungian imagery, making the Pavlovian tactics of Eisensteinian montage look primitive. Psychologically, in order to tell a tale that operates at the level of myth, and not of narrative, the story becomes an archetype of life itself, where youth passes from innocence to experience to solitude and death in a recurring, eternal cycle. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors represents a set of collective archetypes, and forms a unified archetypal pattern that is composed of the ‘shadow’ (Jung’s shadow archetype) of ‘forgotten ancestors’ (Jung’s archetypes of the wise old man, trickster, Madonna), transcending individual identity (Jung’s persona archetype) and merging into the collective life force (Jung’s collective self archetype). [4]Tarkovsky graduated with honors in 1960, winning first prize at the New York film festival for his diploma project entitled Steamroller and Violin (1960). His first feature film was Ivan’s Childhood (1962, aka “My Name Is Ivan”), winning the Golden Lion award at the 1962 Venice film festival. Ivan’s Childhood is a story of a young war orphan boy who becomes a frontline spy for the Soviet army during WWII. Rather than following the traditional pattern of the brave and strong Socialist Realist hero, Ivan is a vulnerable, frail boy in hero’s garb. In form, this film approaches the avant-garde in its surreal rendition of the horrors of war. Tarkovsky’s next film was Andrei Rublev (1966-1971), written as a script by Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovski, which produced an official scandal. The title character is a historical figure, the Russian Orthodox monk who brought the art of religious icon painting to its zenith in the 15th century. He used Rublev’s life, reconstructed in loosely connected episodes, to symbolize the conflict between Russian barbarism and idealism. Tarkovsky’s third film was the metaphysical science-fiction entitled Solaris (1971), adapted from a novel by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. [5]This
film was scripted by Tonino Guerra, who had previously worked with
Michelangelo Antonioni and Francesco Rosi, and it portrays the memories,
dreams, and waking experience of a Russian professor of architecture
who has come to [6]This film was shot by the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and it is a visionary piece concerning a small group of people on an isolated Baltic island and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. It was his last film, as he died of lung cancer in Paris in December 1986. [7]In the section from Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema entitled “Time, rhythm and editing,” Andrei Tarkovsky theorizes that ‘film image’ as being non-essentially composite. He proposes the dominant factor of the film image as being essentially rhythm. The passage of time is clarified by the characters’ behavior, the visual treatment and the sound -but these are all accompanying elements, the absence of which would not affect the existence of the filmic time-thrust. Tarkovsky writes that it is impossible to imagine any cinematic work with no temporal undercurrents winding through the shots, but one can conceive of a film with no actors, music, decor or even editing. Tarkovsky goes on to explain that no one component of a film can have any meaning by itself: “it is the film that is the work of art.” [8]Donato Totaro, “Time and the Film Aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques Volume 2 No. 1 (Spring, 1992): 23. [9]Montage of attraction does not allow the film to continue beyond the frame, nor permit the spectator to bring personal feelings to what is perceived. Montage cinema presents the viewer with conceptual allegories that the intellect breaks down into puzzles, riddles and symbols to decipher. For Eisenstein, the construction of the image-concept becomes the determinant of his cinema, where the filmmaker imposes his belief structure, which carries his emotional and intellectual attitudes about life and the world, onto the minds of the spectators. [10]Christie, Ian. “ Formalism and Neo-Formalism.” In The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 62 -63. [11]His concept of the “time-thrust” is quite simple because the editor/director does not have to create the mystical effect produced by the time-images. The time-pressure intensities are inherent to the shots and exist naturally as variant forms of the rhythmic manifestations of the direct perception of time. [12]Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 40 - 41. [13]Modern cinema has been redefined in Deleuzian terms of a new audiovisual space-time parameter, the time-image (or sound-image). The interweaving of movement-images and time-images into film creates a combinant form of cinema with an “open structure” that does not specify any temporal sequencing of its elements. This film-image mixing creates a new breed of signs, opsigns (optical) and sonsigns (sonic) which are pure optical and sound images that break the sensory-motor links, overwhelming the relations between filmic elements and no longer letting themselves be expressed in terms of movement, but “open” directly onto time. [14]Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 42 - 43. [15]In Tarkovsky’s modern cinema, time in a shot must always flow freely as it does in nature, a condition that occurs only when the shot’s internal rhythm moves beyond the movement-image and the montage’s serial linkage goes beyond the indirect representation of time. It is the shot that determines the intensity of time in the image and the montage that organizes the relation of the time-pressure intensities in the sound-image series. [16]Time-thrusts can occur off-screen within or without a diegetic setting (i.e. non-diegetic space). Tarkovsky often utilizes non-diegetic sounds such as classical music, for example, J. S. Bach’s “Choral Prelude in F Minor” is a very haunting piece that he uses in Solaris (1972), to create a feeling of nostalgia and an uncertainty in time. [17]The Stalin period of the 1930s was marked by the great political purges, and even though the postwar period of the mid-1940s was a victorious time for the Soviet nation, the people lived in fear of being sent to gulags (or even being killed) for doing anything wrong. The entire population was traumatized by its own government. The individual had to live within two worlds, one political and the other personal. Thus, a breach existed between the citizen and the person. Tarkovsky re-enacts this split in the Soviet psyche. [18]“Time, Bergson, and the Cinematographical Mechanism.” Offscreen (www.offscreen.com). http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/Bergson_film.html. January 11, 2001. [19] Henri Bergson [1859 - 1941] was a French philosopher who distinguished between habit formed memories that are stored in the brain (matter => physical), pure recollections that permeate consciousness (mind => mental), and unsolicited independent memories that are detached from perception, appearing to move freely in a virtual flow of thoughts or quasi-thought-images (thought => temporal). [20]Totaro, Donato. “Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian Film Project - Part 2: Cinema 2: The Time-Image.” Offscreen (www.offscreen.com). http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze2.html. March 31, 1999, pp. 1. [21]Ibid. |
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