By

Laura Ivins

Published on/by

Indiana University Cinema

Accompanying text

Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky is known for his enigmatic films. Though his filmography is brief – in part due to political constraints in the former Soviet Union – he left an indelible mark on the art of cinema.

This video uses Andrei Tarkovsky’s book about filmmaking, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, as a lens to examine how his cinematic ideas are expressed on the screen. I’m not interested in parsing meaning or symbolism; each viewer will find their own significance in Tarkovsky’s images. Instead, I focus on the underlying philosophy the director brings to his images.