Tarkovsky’s Conception of Poetry Cinema

When talking about poetry cinema, or poetry film, many might simply take it as avant-garde art that has aside poetry in cinema. Yet, Andrei Tarkovsky’s films delve deeper into the concept of poetry cinema----delving into the poetic logic of film.

Andrei Tarkovsky takes film as an artistic apparatus that is rather synthetic. His take on pure cinema is quite unconventional in the sense that his films’ narratives do not follow logical reason, the logic of linear sequentiality. Rather, Andrei Tarkovsky’s conception believes that film is about evoking and creating human experience, which is a multifactorial and highly personal product.

“I don’t feel I have the right to dictate the form of expression his individual psychology is to take. For each of us experiences a situation in his own way, which is entirely personal.” (Sculpting in Time, Pg 141)

To further explain Tarkovsky’s conception of poetic logic, we need to understand how life experience does not linearly proceed in one single direction; instead, our perception of experience extracts memories from the past or even from fabrications and speculations. In Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, she articulates that nostalgia [which represents our ability to create an experience in times non-linearly] is like an “alter egos” ----“[It] is a result of a new understanding of time and space.” That is to say, poetic logic takes both the retrospective and the prospective into account.

Thus, Tarkovsky’s films are not about the plot but about the human experience and the characters’ psyche. In Tarkovsky’s own words, he says that “the characters might be absent from the view, but what he thinks, how he thinks, and what he thinks about a graphic and clearly-defined picture of him.” This conception allows Tarkovsky to build his film not with a conventional narrative plot but with various art forms. This idea is best exemplified by Mirror (1975), in which Tarkovsky mixed historical footage, black and white films, his father’s poetry, and classical music. This synthetic feature makes the film experiential itself instead of the replication of experience.

In Tarkovsky’s Stalker, he extensively films the texture of a certain object to trigger certain feelings. (Note how Tarkovsky aims to trigger feelings instead of replicate feelings with film). The screenshots below are from The Stalker, showing different deserted objects in a swamp.

The shot displays used needle, photographs, and a pistol, which organically and graphically explains the setting of the story----a hazardous wasteland and intrigues the audience as the shot ends with the main character lying in the water. These objects evoke a sense of bewilderment and contemplation in the audience, which is parallel to what the character is feeling. Thus, metaphysically, Tarkovsky’s film is a duo apparatus that experimentally delves into both the characters and the audience’s psychological state. The parallelism between the character and the audience’s psyche is the essence of Tarkovsky’s film.

To sum up, Tarkovsky’s poetic style of cinema is not confined to the narration of his father’s poetry; his poetic style stems from the recreation of a parallel psychological state. In this sense, there are no symbols in his films since every symbolic object is not a representation of another object but remains a substantial existence that can be interpreted by everyone and can be linked with anyone’s life experience. According to Ingmar Bergman’s remark, “When the film is not a documentary, it is a dream…That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all.” Tarkovsky’s films are not orientated to the purpose of documenting a story; rather, they are orientated to evoke feelings and to pry into the clandestine human spirituality. His films (that follow the poetic logic) are, in essence, the quests of substantial human experience.