18  Andrei Tarkovsky from Sculpting in Time

(Copyright 1987 by Andrei Tarkovsky, used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.)

Contrary to the theories developed during the classic period of early Soviet Cinema, Tarkovsky did not believe that editing or montage created the meaning of a film. For him it was more that editing has to bring out the meaning implicit in the material that has been filmed. It was not that editing was unimportant to him but that it was an integral part of the whole process as this extract from his book underlines.

No one component of a film can have any meaning in isolation: it is the film that is the work of art. And we can only talk about its components rather arbitrarily, dividing it up artificially for the sake of theoretical discussion.

Nor can I accept that editing is the main formative element of a film, as the protagonists of ‘montage cinema’, following Kuleshov and Eisenstein,¹ maintained in the 1920s, as if a film was made on the editing table.

It has often been pointed out, quite rightly, that every art form involves editing, in the sense of selection and collation, adjusting parts and pieces. The cinema image comes into being during shooting and exists within the frame. During shooting therefore, I concentrate on the course of time in the frame, in order to reproduce it and record it. Editing brings together shots which are already filled with time, and organises the unified living structure inherent in the film; and the time that pulsates through the blood vessels of the film, making it alive, is of varying rhythmic pressure.

The idea of ‘montage cinema’ – that editing brings together two concepts and thus engenders a new, third one – again seems to me to be incompatible with the nature of cinema. Art can never have the interplay of concepts as its ultimate goal. The image is tied to the concrete and the material, yet reaches out along mysterious paths to regions beyond the spirit – perhaps that is what Pushkin meant when he said that ‘Poetry has to be a little bit stupid’.

The poetics of cinema, a mixture of the basest material substances such as we tread every day, is resistant to symbolism. A single frame is enough to show, from his choice and recording of matter, whether a director is talented, whether he is endowed with cinematic vision.

Editing is ultimately no more than the ideal variant of the assembly of the shots, necessarily contained within the material that has been put on to the roll of film.

A still from ‘Mirror’ by Andrei Tarkovsky (Zerkalo [Mirror] (1974). Courtesy of Artificial Eye Film Company Ltd.)

… To refer again to my own experience, I must say that a prodigious amount of work went into editing ‘Mirror’.² There were some twenty or more variants. I don’t just mean changes in the order of certain shots, but major alterations in the actual structure, in the sequence of the episodes. At moments it looked as if the film could not be edited, which would have meant that inadmissible lapses had occurred during shooting. The film didn’t hold together, it wouldn’t stand up, it fell apart as one watched, it had no unity, no necessary inner connection, no logic. And then, one fine day, when we somehow managed to devise one last desperate rearrangement – there was the film. The material came to life; the parts started to function reciprocally, as if linked by a bloodstream; and as that last, despairing attempt was projected on to the screen, the film was born before our very eyes. For a long time I still couldn’t believe the miracle – the film held together.

… There are about two hundred shots in ‘Mirror’, very few when a film of that length usually has about five hundred: the small number is due to their length.

Although the assembly of the shots is responsible for the structure of the film, it does not, as is generally assumed, create the rhythm.

The distinctive time running through the shots makes the rhythm of the picture; and rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them. Editing cannot determine rhythm (in this respect it can only be a function of style); indeed time courses through the picture despite editing rather than because of it. The course of time recorded in the frame, is what the director has to catch in the pieces laid out on the editing table.

Notes

1.  To be fair to Eisenstein, when he was teaching at the Moscow Film School in the 1930s his main concern was to develop in his students a proper understanding of dramatic form and staging for the camera. Far from being obsessed with meaning established through montage he concentrated on how the dramatic action must dictate the mise-en-scène. Indeed to be clear he coined the phrase mise-en-shot to show how the essential skill is to emphasise all significant moments by the way the action is presented to the camera, rather than being necessarily achieved in the editing. I believe Tarkovsky would have been in tune with this approach by Eisenstein. Those interested can read further in ‘Lessons with Eisenstein’ by Vladimir Nizhny.

2.  Mirror – Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975.