ANDREI TARKOVSKY INTERV!EWS
CONVERSATIONS WITH FILMMAKERS SERIES PETER BRUNETTE, GENERAL EDITOR
ANDREI TARKOVSKY INT...
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ANDREI TARKOVSKY INTERV!EWS
CONVERSATIONS WITH FILMMAKERS SERIES PETER BRUNETTE, GENERAL EDITOR
ANDREI TARKOVSKY INTERVIEWS
EDITED BY JOHN GIANVITO
UNIVI lt.,l I Y l,ltl ss ()F
MISSISSIPPI/JACKSO
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CONTENTS www.upress. state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Associatit>n of
American University
Presses.
Introduction ix Copyright
@
zoo6 by University Press of Mississippi
Chronology xxiii
All rights reserved
Irilmography xxvii
Manufactured in the United States of America
Andrei Thrkovsky: I Am for a Poetic Cinema PATRICK BUREAU
@
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Andrei Tarkovsky : interviews / edited by John Gianvito. (Conversations with fllmmakers series) p. cm. Includes index.
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Burning
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ISBN-I3: 978-r-578o6-z19-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-ro: v578o6-zr9-5 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-I3: 978-r-578o6-zzo-t (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-ro: 1578o6-zzo-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) r. Tarkovskii, Andrei Arsen'evich,
r93z-r986-Interviews. 2. Motion picture producers and directors-Soviet
Union-Interviews. I. Tarkovskii, Andrei Arsen'evich, r93z-t986 II. Gianvito, John. III. Series.
'l'lrc Artist in Ancient Russia and in the New USSR 16 MICHEL CIMENT, LUDA SCHNITZER, AND .JEAN SCHNITZER l)irrlogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on
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lincounter with Andrei Tarkovsky 6 GIDEON BACHMANN
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CONTENTS
CONTENTS
The Artist Lives Off His Childhood like a Parasite: An Interview the Author of The Mirror 44 CLAIRE DEVARRIEUX
with
Portrait of a Filmmaker as a Monk-Poet 163 LAURENCT cossE A Glimmer at the Bottom of the
Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky 46 TONINO GUERRA
THOMAS JOHNSON Faith Is the Only Thing That Can Save Man r7B CHARLES H. DE BRANTES
Stalker, Smuggler of Happiness 50 TONINO GUERRA
lndex Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky (on Stalker) 55 ALDO TASSONE Against Interpretation: An Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky
IAN CHRISTIE Tarkovsky's Translations 70 PHILIP STRICK Tarkovsky in
Italy
73
TONY MITCHELL Nostalgia's Black
Tone
Bo
HERVE cutBERT Between Two
Worlds
88
J. HOBERMAN AND GIDEON BACHMANN
My Cinema in a Time of Television VELIA IACOVINO
97
An Enemy of Symbolism ro4 IRENA BREZNA The Twentieth Century and the Artist r24 V. ISHIMOV AND R. SHEJKO Red
Thpe r55 ANGUS MNCKINNON
Well? r7z
6Z
r89
INTRODUCTION
Frw AMoNG coNTEMpoRARY FtLM ARTtsrs inspire the degree of ardor and zeal that Andrei Thrkovsky does. In the eyes of the faithful, an encounter with virtually any of Tarkovsky's fllms holds the promise of awe-inspiring aesthetic transport liable to stir the innermost reaches of the spirit. To his detractors, the same films can provoke iust as fervent feelings of consternation, boredom, and outright antipathy. lf, however, one were to be judged by the company of one's admirers, 'larkovsky's place in the pantheon of film history would alone be secured, having earned during his career the esteem of many of the cinema's preeminent directors-Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni, Sergei Paradjanoy among a host of maior artists, inside and outside the world of film. Writing about Tarkovsky in his rgBT autobiography, The Magic I trntcrn, Bergman proclaimed that his discovery of Tarkovsky's work w:rs akin to "a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door ol' a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It wirs a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving Irt,cly and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was t'xprcssing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how. lirrlnly fincls
42
ANDRET rARKovsKY:
strength but also meaning in his suffering and in this gains perspective on his behavior. Kris rn Solaris, placed into un-human conditions, preserves his hum antty. Because the people on this space station have only to solve one problem: how to remain human. And they are dealing with it in very different ways. It is surely of interest to probe the character of one's protagonists, even in such an unbelievable situation that demands such a big decision. All three simply do not let go of their belief. They stay faithful to themselves. They preserve their individualityregardless of what will come. In this sense these three form one uni-
form whole.
o:
You were a student of
43
nature and mankind is an ideal place for the existence of man. Dovzhenko understood this. I think about him a lot-he forces me to think about him. Dovzhenko not only gives the impression of being a director. He is a philosopher. Of course there are also contemporary film directors who mean a great deal to me. For example I think that Giorgi Shengelaya-he made Pirosmani-and Otar Iosseliani are extremely gifted. They will make a lot more wonderful f,lms. I would, however, put Iosseliani with his two films, Lived Once a Song-Thrush arrd When Leaves Fall,before all others.
o: Mikhail Romm. What do you have to thank
him for? r: First of all, that he accepted me into his class at the Moscow State Film Institute. He was the only one in favor of my studying at the Institute. The admission committee was against me. In my opinion, Mikhail Romm is one of the best teachers because he never tried to force his opinion upon us. He had the gift to see the ability of his students and to develop them further, and he respected personality the most, the feeling of one's own dignity, that not everyone is alike.
o:
cuNrrR NETzEBANo/1973
INTERVIEWS
Which paragons of the Soviet film do you feel indebted to? Which film-
maker are you close to? r: For me this question has long ago been decided. I love Alexander Dovzhenko very much. I believe he is a genius. He created a film which
I have not stopped watching ovel and over again to this day: that is Earth.I cannot explain why this fllm touches me so deeply. The film may be naive in many ways, too schematic, rather roughly composed. But-the attention of this film is focused on the workingman who tills the land he lives on. And that surely is one of the noblest professions on earth. I probably did not express it accurately, I mean this profession ennobles people. I have lived a lot among very simple farmers and met extraordinary people. They spread calmness, had such tact, they conveyed a feeling of dignity and displayed wisdom that I have seldom come across on such a scale. Dovzhenko had obviously understood wherein the sense of life resides. And he addressed an issue that has left 1 tlsting inrllrcssiolt ()r'l rne. 'fhis trespassing of the border betwccn
What is your conception of filmmaking in this present time of ideological class struggle? What do you think about Brecht's statements that one has to activate the joy of cognition and organize the fun of changing reality? And elsewhere he says: The illustration of the new is not easfi it is a question of enthusiasm for the new. The socialist-realist way of composition needs constant training, change, formation of something new. Above all it must be aggressive. And as a fighter, it needs all weapons, always better weapons . . . t-: I agree entirely with this point of view. But I would add that in the life of every artist this form of flghting adopts a different nuance. In this conclusion of Brecht's, his attitude towards art is expressed. I share this point of view and I am of the opinion that art is a strong weapon. Sometimes art is even underestimated. A few years ago I had the opportunity to get familiar with
llertolucci's flrst films. I had the impression that this young Italian tlirector is a very talented, strong artist who has something to say. Now lre has turned into a commercial director. In his latest flJm Last Tango in l'oris (rg7z), Bertolucci could not stop himself from using pornography. lle betrayed his whole talent just to show what impotent and esoteric pcople, a bourgeois audience, enjoy. Before, Bertolucci had appeared as sorneone who would flght for his political views. Now he has stopped lrcing an artist. Nobody forced him to make this movie. He forgot that tlrc art he creates is not his property. It belongs to people who respect tlrc artist and his work. He is obviously missing the sense that with the Irt'ctl reveal a hicldcn meaning. In I
r
tAN cHRtsrtE/1981
ANDREI TARKOVSKY: INTERVIEWS
6B
Moscow I often meet viewers and I usually fight with them and try to make them tike children, generally without success. I am writing a screenplay based on The Idiot and it's very hard work. Many things have been ascribed to Dostoevsky which iust aren't true. For example, people everywhere-including Moscow-think of him as a religious writer. But it does not seem to have occurred to them that he was not so much religious as one of the flrst to express the drama of the man in whom the organ of belief has atrophied. He dealt with the tragedy of the loss of spirituality. A11 his heroes are people who would like to believe but cannot, and it seems to me that it is this conceln with spiritual emptiness, with the crisis of religiosity, that explains the enormous interest in Dostoevsky here in the West. He managed never to talk about this directly, but all his life he suffered because he was unable to believe. He always behaved like a believer, but he was unable to confess to anyone: he would have regarded it as imploper to do so. This is the point of view I want to take in treating Prince Myshkin'
in relation to fllms like The Exterminator. My purpose as far as possible is to make flIms that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness-and I don't mean the sort of tears that Kramer vs. Kramer produces. Perhaps you have noticed that the more pointless people's tears during a flIm, the more profound the reason for these tears. I am not talking about sentimentality, but about how art can reach to the depths of the human soul and leave man defenseless against good. (A question implying that his images were more valuable than his words ltrovoked laughter when Tarkovsky feigned qlsyyn-ttYou mean in my
frlms?')
r:
The point is that speech and words are merely a part of the world itround us and why should we reject that part of the world? That would lre pure formalism. (Did he regret that other filmmakers do not combine color and black and white within their films?)
(In response to a question about the primacy of emotional response to his films)
r:
What matters to me is that the feeling excited by my flIms should be universal. An artistic image is capable of arousing identical feelings in viewers, while the thoughts that come later may be very different. If you start to search for a meaning during the film you will miss everything that happens. The ideal viewer is someone who watches a film like a traveler watching the country he is passing through: because the effect of an artistic image is an extra-mental type of communication. There are some artists who attach symbolic meaning to their images, but that is not possible for me. Zen poets have a good way of dealing with this: they work to eliminate any possibility of interpretation, and in the process a parallel arises between the real world and what the artist creates in his work. What then is the purpose of this activity? It seems to me that the purpose of art is to prepare the human soul for the perception of good. The soul opens up under the influence of an artistic image, and it is for this reason that we say it helps us to communicate-but it is communication in the highest sensc of tlte word. I could not imagine a work of art that would l)r()lnpl a llt.rsorr t