Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema

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Tarkovsky’s discussion of sound, not surprisingly, begins with its relationship to the cinematic image: “But music is not just an appendage . . . It must be an essential element of the realisation of the concept as a whole . . . it must be so completely one with the visual image that if it were to be removed from a particular episode, the visual image would not just be weaker in its idea and impact, it would be qualitatively different” (158). As is often the case when one attempts to write about music (who said it’s like “dancing about architecture”?), Tarkovsky slips more noticeably here into poetic (rather than hard, practical) language. It makes for wonderful reading, but I’m still unsure about his exact approach: “Above all,” he writes, “I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all” (162). My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him. — Tarkovsky Again, Tarkovsky’s approach (in this case, to directing actors) is a distinct break from the Soviet tradition, particularly that of Stanislawski. While he sees much value for the theater in what has become known as method acting, he argues that film actors, like their directors, should find inspiration in subjective experience. “The one thing the film actor has to do is express in particular circumstances a psychological state peculiar to him alone, and do so naturally, true to his own emotional and intellectual make-up, and in the form that is only right for him” (141). Free to perform without restraint, the actors then provide the director true experience from which he selects the “stuff” of his film. Music and Noises

Attempts to harness such a poetry of observation among twentieth-century audiences have, however, not been without friction in either film or music. Tarkovsky repeatedly points to the difficulties that his audiences had with giving themselves over to the poetic logic of raw observation, instead latching onto symbolism and trying to identify hidden meanings in his films that, often to their surprise, were never consciously placed there by its author. ​50​ A similar discourse unfolds around twentieth-century experimental music practices. John Cage responded to the frustration that audiences expressed about their inability to decipher a composition’s ‘meaning’. ​51​ He believes the actor shouldn't have any unconscious knowledge of how a scene will unfold but act naturally as if it were real by being given only the necessary information, and allows the actor to have autonomy without restricting their freedom of expression. He thinks a good actor isn't merely understandable but is truthful. David Kollar - El. guitars, Ronroco, Guitalele, Electronics, Synth, Sound Processing, Bass, Vocal 12 Kollar treats his music with a deep degree of seriousness and personal involvement, as if each and every one of his projects was not only his proverbial brain child but as if it was his actual offspring. He treats his instrument as a gateway between his complex ideas and their audible representation, the same way a sculptor treats the chisel or a painter the brush."

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In 1986, Tarkovsky published his Sculpting in Time, a dense and delightful work that is part film theory, part cultural criticism and part philosophy of life. What are the determining factors of cinema, and what emerges from them? What are its potential, means, images—not only formally, but even spiritually? – asked the renowned filmmaker. His explanation: Por otro lado, este libro es una especie de compendio de su experiencia como director en la creación de sus películas, escrito no linealmente, en un largo espacio de tiempo. Por estas páginas corren sus reflexiones y decisiones profesionales en películas como La infancia de Iván, Solaris, Stalker, El espejo (la más íntima de sus películas, ya que trata sobre sus recuerdos de niñez y juventud), Nostalgia (en la que se mezcla su propia experiencia de nostalgia, pues cuando la rodó, ya había salido de la URSS) y Sacrificio, en la que se da un hecho insólito, cuya explicación gráfica engloba el summum de su pensamiento, aunque no ahonda mucho más y lo deja sujeto a interpretación. Tal como en sus películas. Curiously, while the images of the film were being conceived, and indeed all the time the first version of the scenario was being written, regardless of the current circumstances of my life, the characters began to stand out more and more clearly, the action grew steadily more specific and structured. It was almost an independent process that entered my life of itself. Furthermore, while I was still making Nostalgia I could not escape the feeling that the film was influencing my life. In the Nostalgia scenario, Gorchakov had only come to Italy for a short time, but he fell ill and died. In other words, he failed to return to Russia not of his own volition, but by a dictate of fate. Nor did I imagine that after finishing Nostalgia I would remain in Italy; like Gorchakov, I am subject to a Higher Will. Another sad fact came to underline these thoughts: the death of Anatoliy Solonitsyn, who had played the lead in all my previous films and who, I assumed, would have the parts of Gorchakov in Nostalgia and of Alexander in The Sacrifice. He died of the illness of which Alexander was cured, and which a year later was to afflict me. It was far from easy to find protagonists for the eight parts, but I think that each member of the final cast completely identified with his or her character and actions.

a piece of magical sound metamorphosis in which the single “clink” of two whisky glasses [borrowed from Jonty Harrison’s piece et ainsi suite…] gradually metamorphoses into a multitude of other sounds, eventually alluding to the sounds of birdsong, a junkyard gamelan, the ocean and the human voice, but never entirely abandoning its links to this minimal source. I will expound developments I made while reading the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s poetic accounts, and they will collectively be an indirect review in the process... In the beginning was the Word, but you’re as silent as a dumb salmon,’ says Alexander to his son early in the film. The boy is recovering from a throat operation and is not allowed to talk. He listens in silence as his father tells him the story of the barren tree. Later, horrified at the news of impending disaster, Alexander himself takes a vow of silence: ‘… I shall be mute, I shall never utter another word to anyone, I shall give up everything that ties me to my life. Lord, help me to fulfil this vow.’ Un libro tan íntimo y tan abierto...¿cómo un hombre pudo alcanzar tal madurez, tal ingenio y tanta sensibilidad? Creo que no tiene que ser leído necesariamente por aficionados, estudiosos del cine, sino creo es un libro que alcanza a todo al que se lo permita, como lo fue tan necesario para mi en estos tiempos.

Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all. These words could be interpreted as a rejection of the use of music in film altogether. In contrast to such a reading, however, I will argue that Tarkovsky’s vision of an “organisation of sounds and noises” exhibits remarkable parallels to larger developments in musical aesthetics of his time. In the form of fixated and sometimes manipulated everyday sounds, music is literally woven into Tarkovsky’s films and “available to the ear that wishes to perceive it”. ​3​ As such, the clinking glasses in The Sacrifice and Stalker, the singing shower in Mirror (1975), or the ubiquitous sounds of dripping water in his films reflect a plurality of concurrently developing musical practices. Andrey Tarkovsky, the genius of modern Russian cinema—hailed by Ingmar Bergman as "the most important director of our time"—died an exile in Paris in December 1986. In Sculpting in Time, he has left his artistic testament, a remarkable revelation of both his life and work. Since Ivan's Childhood won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962, the visionary quality and totally original and haunting imagery of Tarkovsky's films have captivated serious movie audiences all over the world, who see in his work a continuation of the great literary traditions of nineteenth-century Russia. Many critics have tried to interpret his intensely personal vision, but he himself always remained inaccessible. What is the essence of the director’s work? We could define it as sculpting in time. Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and, inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is not part of it — so the film-maker, from a “lump of time” made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image.

I am interested above all in the character who is capable of sacrificing himself and his way of life—regardless of whether that sacrifice is made in the name of spiritual values, or for the sake of someone else, or of his own salvation, or of all these things together. Such behaviour precludes, by its very nature, all of those selfish interests that make up a ‘normal’ rationale for action; it refutes the laws of a materialistic world view. It is often absurd and unpractical. And yet—or indeed for that very reason—the man who acts in that way brings about fundamental changes to people’s lives and to the course of history. The space he lives in becomes a rare, distinctive point of contrast to the empirical concepts of our experience, an area where reality is all the more strongly present. In the closing paragraph of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky makes his final appeal, speaking to us as confidants:

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If we feel inexplicable symptoms of anxiety, depression or despair, we promptly turn to the services of the psychiatrist or, better still, the sexologist, who has taken over from the confessor, and who, we imagine, eases our minds and restores them to normality. Reassured, we pay him the going rate. Or if we feel the need for love, we go off to a brothel and again pay cash—not that it necessarily has to be a brothel. And all this despite the fact that we know perfectly well that neither love nor peace of mind can be bought with any currency. We had no technical or other problems during shooting, until one moment almost at the end, when all our efforts seemed on the point of coming to nothing. Suddenly, in the scene where Alexander sets fire to his house—a single take lasting six and a half minutes—the camera broke down. We only discovered it when the entire building—our set—was already blazing, burning to the ground as we looked on. We couldn’t put the fire out, nor could we take a single shot: four expensive months of intense hard work for nothing. In his book Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky distills the essence of his perspective on cinematic sound into the following statement: ​1​ To what degree Tarkovsky himself was aware of these parallels is a question that his own writing provides only few hints on, even though it does include detailed reflections on cinema’s relation to literature, theater, and also music. While he evidently discusses the latter from a perspective of tender passion, he does not reflect in much detail on concurrent developments in experimental or electronic music – perhaps due to boundaries between disciplines (film; music), geographic-political contexts (East; West), and professional roles (director; composer; sound designer). Looking beyond Tarkovsky’s oeuvre, it appears to me that more often than not, aesthetic discourses in music and film follow separate trajectories with surprisingly little overlap. ​4​ For example, Tarkovsky’s text has, to my knowledge, not been widely discussed in the field of electroacoustic music composition – even though its notion of sculpting in time seems particularly relevant in such a context.

My hope is that those readers whom I manage to convince, if not entirely then at least in part, may become my kindred spirits, if only in recognition of the fact that I have no secrets from them. — Tarkovsky For Tarkovsky, the greatest challenge associated with developing a script is maintaining the integrity of the film’s inspiration — “it almost seems as if circumstances have been deliberately calculated to make [the director] forget why it was that he started working on the picture” (125). For this reason, he argues that the director must also be the writer, or he must develop a partnership that is founded on complete trust. The majority of this section is devoted to The Mirror — Tarkovsky uses it as a case study of his method. Fascinating reading. The Film’s Graphic Realisation A third key property of the electronic medium is its ability to not only record and synthesize, but also process and thereby transform sound. Sound transformation techniques that alter the pitch, duration, spectrum, or other qualities of sound constitute a defining element of electronic music composition. ​81​ They are often applied in a manner that echoes the classical music technique of developing larger compositional structures from variations of a simple musical theme. An example of a masterful artistic application of this technique in electroacoustic music is Trevor Wishart’s piece Imago (2002), which its program notes describe as ​82​ He believes editing and assembly disturb the passage of time and gives it something new, thus distorting time can give it a rhythmical expression (Sculpting in time).To some degree, some of the other participants can also be seen as chosen and called by God. Otto, with his gift of prognostication, is a collector, as he says, of inexplicable and mysterious happenings. No one knows about his past, nor how or when he came to the village where so many strange things take place That we understand the gravity of this statement is more than a simple intellectual or rhetorical exercise for Tarkovsky. Throughout the book (but most notably in its “Conclusion”) he speaks in the voice of a trusted elder, as if determined to pass along the wisdom gained from experience and inspiration while time allows. That he was already suffering from terminal cancer when completing the book makes it all the more affecting.