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Time and memory merge into each other; they are like the two sides of a medal. Andrej Tarkowskij |
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| Time remembered A photographic exhibition in conjunction with the showing of the combined works of Andrey Tarkovsky in the Kommunale Kino Stuttgart from 10th March to 2nd May 2001 , documented in b/w photos together with quotations from the diaries of Tarkovsky and from his book Sculpting in Time.This exhibition showed stills from his films and snapshots behind the scenes together with family photos. The exhibition was organized by Anastasia Alexandrowa with the assistance of Oliver Scholz. |
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| It is obvious enough that without Time, memory cannot exist either. But memory is something so complex that no list of all its attributes could define the totality of the impressions through which it affects us. Memory is a spiritual concept! |
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| In this respect I classify cinema and music among the immediate art forms since they need no mediating language. This fundamental determining factor marks the kinship between music and cinema, and for the same reason distances cinema from literature, where everything is expressed by means of language, by a system of signs, of hieroglyphics. The literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts- for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for an utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work. |
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| All creative work strives for simplicity, for perfectly simple expression; and this means reaching down into the furthest depths of the recreation of life. But that is the most painful part of creative work: finding the shortest path between what you want to say or express and its ultimate reproduction in the finished image. The struggle for simplicity is the painful search for a form adequate to the truth you have grasped. You long to be able to achieve great things while economising the means. |
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| The image as a precise observation of life takes us straight back to Japanese poetry. What captivates me here is the refusal even to hint at the kind of final image meaning that can be gradually deciphered like a charade. Haiku cultivates its images in such a way that the poems mean nothing beyond themselves, and at the same time express so much that it is not possible to catch their final meaning. The more closely the image corresponds to its function, the more impossible it is to constrict it within a clear intellectual formula. The reader of haiku has to be absorbed into it as into nature, to plunge in, lose himself in its depth, as in the cosmos where there is no bottom and no top. |
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| We are faced with a paradox: the image signifies the fullest possible expression of what is typical, and the more fully it expresses it, the more individual, the more original it becomes. It is an extraordinary thing, this image! In a sense it is far richer than life itself; perhaps precisely because it expresses the idea of absolute truth. |
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| If only we could put aside all accepted methods, according to which films are made, or books are written, what wonder the things we could then create. We have completely lost the ability to see. It has been replaced by stereotyped routine. |
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| A symbol is only a true symbol, if its meaning is inexhaustible and unlimited, if it speaks through its arcane sacred and magical- language of allusion. |
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| Time is said to be irreversible. And this is true enough in the sense that you cant bring back the past, as they say. But what exactly is this past? Is it what has passed? And what does passed mean for a person when for each of us the past is the bearer of all that is constant in tne reality of the present, of each current moment? In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight only in its recollection. |
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| The image is indivisible and elusive, dependent upon our consciousness and on the real world which it seeks to embody. If the world is inscrutable, then the image will be so too. It is a kind of equation, signifying the correlation between truth and the human consciousness, bound as the latter is by Euclidean space. We cannot comprehend the totality of the universe, but the poetic image is able to express that totality. |
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| 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9,10 Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 7,8 Andrey Tarkovsky, The diaries, 1970 1986 Translation: Sheila McBride Andrej Tarkowskij WGIK Filmkunst russisches Kino Haiku Poesie Russland Osteuropa Paradjanow Alexander Sokurov Arsenij Tarkovskij Sven Nykvist |
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