From Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky:

I think that one of the saddest aspects of our time is the total destruction in people’s awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the beautiful. Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being. But the artist cannot be deaf to the call of truth; it alone defines his creative will, organises it, thus enabling him to pass on his faith to others. An artist who has no faith is like a painter who was born blind.

It is a mistake to talk about the artist ‘looking for’ his subject. In fact the subject grows within him like a fruit, and begins to demand expression. It is like childbirth… The poet has nothing to be proud of: he is not the master of the situation, but a servant. Creative work is his only possible form of existence, and his every work is like a deed he has no power to annul. For him to be aware that a sequence of such deeds is due and right, that it lies in the very nature of things, he has to have faith in the idea, for only faith interlocks the system of images (for which read: system of life).

And what are the moments of illumination if not momentarily felt truth?

The meaning of religious truth is hope. Philosophy seeks the truth, defining the meaning of human activity, the limits of human reason, the meaning of existence, even when the philosopher reaches the conclusion that existence is senseless, and human effort — futile.

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognise and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.

Revisiting Tarkovsky
July 7 – July 14, 2009
The Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center, New York

Okay, so maybe New Yorkers are right after all: Manhattan really is the centre of the universe. To heck with the Empire State Building, they’ve got MOVIES! Years back I salivated over the two-month cinematic smorgasbord that was “The Hidden God” – the accompanying volume of essays is one of the indispensable books on faith and film. During my first trip to La Pomme Grande I tasted a retrospective of rarely-seen Rossellini works at MOMA, including a display of vintage RR posters, and documents such as the first letters and telegrams between the director and Ingrid Bergman. It doesn’t stop: The Dardennes were there plumping their new flick and trotting out the old stuff a month or so ago, and now it’s Tarkovsky in the spotlight.

Not that Andrei will be there himself. But Dmitri will. July 7, 8, 9 and 14, Russian expat Dmitri Trakovsky (no rleation) will be in the house to screen and chat (do Russians chat?) about his new documentary Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (2008). The flick is described thusly in Lincoln Centre propaganda:

In 1987, a year after Tarkovsky’s death, Dmitry Trakovsky and his parents emigrated from Russia to the United States, where he grew up feeling a special relationship to the images, sounds, and themes in Tarkovsky’s films. Here, he goes in searchof other lives affected by the auteur’s work: collaborators Erland Josephson and Domiziana Giordano, friends Krzysztof Zanussi and Franco Terilli, an Orthodox priest, and even the director’s son. Andrei Andreevich Tarkovsky. The result is a touching, highly personal and provocative record of the lingering effects of Tarkovsky on an extraordinary range of individuals. 

There’s a trailer for the film, and an opportunity to donate toward the (apparently uncompleted) work, here.

The Trako doc is embedded in a Tarkothon of all seven of the Russian director’s feature films.
Andrei Rublev (”Andrey Rublyov” 1966)
Ivan’s Childhood (”Ivanovo detstvo” 1962)
The Mirror (”Zerkalo” 1975)
Nostalgia (”Nostalghia” 1983)
The Sacrifice (”Offret” 1986)
Solaris (”Solyaris” 1972)
Stalker (1979)

Doug Cummings posts further notes on the Trakovsky flick at filmjourney.com, as well as a detailed look at another doc currently in circulation, Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of ‘Stalker’. And of course the definitive Tarkovsky site is Nostalghia.com

This film doesn’t pander. It barely accommodates. You can watch for an hour, you might even make it all the way to the end, without being entirely sure which of the grim Russian monks is the title character. They look all alike, and names are rarely spoken.

In the opening sequence, a mob tries to prevent a man from taking flight in a hot air balloon made of animal skins. He soars headlong over land and water, experiencing a view of the world unavailable to the violent crowd left behind him on the ground. A dizzying, perhaps disastrous, descent to the earth. Then in slow motion, a horse rolls on its back, gets to its feet and walks past the deflating balloon. What this incident has to do with the rest of the film is never explained. It might or might not become clear on second or third viewing.

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966) might be considered the Mount Everest of spiritual film. It is intimidating, imposing, remote, yet sooner or later every cinephile with an interest in exploring the furthest reaches of faith and art will mount an inevitable expedition. For those who persevere, the film yields an extraordinary perspective on the world below.

The director’s quasi-autobiographical film conveys the near impossibility and apparent futility of the artist’s task in the face of suffering and upheaval. Overwhelmed by and even implicated in the horrific violence of Tartar invasions and ongoing bloody clashes between warring Russian princes – the protracted birth pains of modern Russia – the nation’s greatest artist struggles with the legitimacy of his work, questioning whether art-making could possibly server the glory of God in such circumstances.

Andrei Tarkovsky was himself a Christian, and it is easy to read the film as the testimony (protest?) of an artist believer under the repressive Soviet regime of the early 1960s. Its subtitle suggests his personal identification with the travails of the great Russian iconographer, and may explain why the film was shown only briefly in Moscow in 1966 before being shelved for three years. A single covert out-of-competition screening at the Cannes Festival introduced this austere, obscure masterpiece to the world, and its mystique grew until bemused London audiences were finally able to view a 140 minute cut in 1973. They assumed that this elliptical pageant, moving almost at random through a quarter century of medieval Russian history in a series of barely connected scenarios of brutal violence and obscure theologizing, interrupted by sudden and unannounced fantasy sequences, must have been rendered unintelligible by Soviet censors.

Such challenges did not originate with the bureaucrats. Far more complete versions screened in the ensuing three and a half decades, each successive release only adding to the film’s narrative and thematic challenges. Tarkovsky’s subsequent films all confirm the artist’s lack of interest in conventional narrative and his unwillingness to diminish the mysterious complexities of the images he places on screen. Indeed it might be said that his central preoccupation is Mystery, that he fiercely resists any steps toward simplification or clarity that might diminish his ability to evoke that quality on film. In his aesthetic manifesto Sculpting In Time, Tarkovsky himself writes that his masterpiece “strikes me as disjointed and incoherent”: he calls it “a complete mystery, the riddle of my life.”

It was only during my second viewing that I started even to appreciate this daunting, opaque film. It took a third time through (with two friends who had never met, each of whom counted this their uncontested favorite film) to begin actually to like it. But it was only after working my way through the film scene-by-scene, followed a fifth complete viewing, that the power ofAndrei Rublev truly took hold of me, and I came to share my friends’ enthusiasm. I can’t understand why the film didn’t speak to me when first I encountered it, it lives so close to the central concerns of my life. In all its mystery and concreteness, Tarkovsky’s masterpiece has become essential to my faith, speaking as no other film does to my understanding of the place of my art in the world, and in the kingdom of God. And in no way that I can express in words, it reassures and strengthens my resolve to face the inevitability of suffering that comes to every human life.

It has been worth so so long and challenging a climb. So difficult a flight. When you get up high enough, there’s a lot you can see.

Andrei Rublev is being shown as part of the “Revisiting Tarkovsky” retrospective now in progress at Lincoln Centre