Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky cinematic theories and techniques

Tarkovsky created theory that could be called”Sculpting in time” specific attribute of cinema is the fact that it can change the way we feel about time. With a use of long and slow takes and with least editing us possible he tried to give the spectator feeling of passing, perhaps as well lost time and create a relation between its different planes. Time, rhythm and editing where the most important elements, with editing left on far end, which for Tarkovsky was a little bit more than assembly process. With this point he was definitely in opposition Soviet directors like Eisenstein and Pudovkin concentrated mainly on the montage.
‘Tarkovsky describes an essential aesthetic principle of film as its ability to capture and reproduce time, to retain time, [...]
; they are two sides of the same coin. Memory is part of man’s mortal equipment, Tarkovsky argued, since life in no more than a finite period given to man in which to shape his spirit in accordance with his own conception of human existence. Although time is irretrievable, Tarkovsky saw the past as far more real or permanent than the present. The present passes away, slips through out fingers like sand . It acquires its material weight only in the memory. But time cannot disappear without trace.
Tarkovsky developed this aesthetic idea of film with increasing subtlety, cutting between past, present and future, and between memory, dream and vision, creating time within time in complex system of subjective cross-references. [...]
Solaris and The Mirror went furthest in Tarkovsky’s investigation of time in film. The former explored the idea of the materialisation of dreams and memories. The letter, a complex autobiographical timescape, was an essay in the rediscovery of lost time, in which beginning and end seems part of an endless spiral.’ Green, P. (1993), Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest, The McMillan Press Ltd., Introduction, p. 7

In Sculpting the Time (1986), he gives an example of ten minute film by Pascal Aubier that consist only one shot: it begins with a landscape and then the camera closes in/zooms in slowly to revile man on the hill that appears to be asleep, another bigger close up and we learn that the man is dead.
‘ You will remember that the film has no editing, no acting and no décor. But the rhythm of the movement of time is there within the frame, as the sole organising force of the – quite complex – dramatic development.’ Tarkovsky, A. (1986), Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, translated from the Russian by Kitty Hunter-Blair, The Bodley Head Ltd., p. 114
The Time and the Rhythm we can see both of them polished to the perfection in Trakovsky film art.