Andrey Tarkovsky, Russian Experience, and the Poetry of Cinema

A documentary work is an attempt to recapture someone somewhere looking back. Looking back, Orpheus was the first known documentarist: Orpheus, or Lot’s wife.

—Susan Howe¹

The first cinematic site of Andrey Tarkovsky’s quotation of poetry is Zerkalo [The Mirror (1974)]. There he quotes in toto four poems of his father, Arseny Tarkovsky, without identifying him as the author, as well as a substantial passage from a letter by Pushkin. The protagonist of Stalker (1979) recites another of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poems, attributing it to a fictional character. Then, in Nostalghia (1983) yet two more of his poems, once again unattributed, can be heard in the mode of Zerkalo.

Tarkovsky’s theoretical book, Sculpting in Time [Zapechat lennoe vremi a’, literally “Depicted Time,” (1986)] is saturated with references to and quotations of poetry, not only the poems of his father, but those of Pushkin, Dante, Pasternak, Valéry, Mandelstam, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Bashō are mentioned, along with works of prose masters Cervantes, Gogol, Proust, Joyce, Mann, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hesse, and Kleist. But even before he cites any of these writers (aside from the ubiquitous Dostoevsky), he is careful to elaborate on what he means by “poetry.” Therefore, I shall dwell on his exposition at length. When he writes in the opening chapter of the genesis of his first feature film, Ivanovo detstvo [Ivan’s Childhood (1962)], he makes the following extraordinary claim: “I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They seem to me to be perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful and poetic of art forms.”² Here the filmmaker identifies poetry with a principle of linkage. He adds that discovering these links as a creator (and, he will later add, as a viewer) provides an intensity of pleasure. It remains to be seen whether or not he believed truth and poetry were identical or separate dimensions of the potential of cinema. His elaboration, perhaps clarification, of this point, entails the introduction of a new category: thought. The poetic linking of cinema, he asserts, is in opposition to any “rigidly logical development of plot.” In a sense, poetry is opposed to the conventions of drama that have been massively adapted by feature filmmakers. “But film material can be joined together in another way, which works above all to open the logic of a person’s thought.”³ Poetry then organizes its pleasurable links according to the processes of thought. This thought is not a static system of ideas and perceptions but something that “develops” or changes with time: “In my view poetic reasoning is closer to the laws by which thought develops, and thus to life itself, than is the logic of traditional drama.” So, it seems, poetry approaches truth insofar as it reveals the nature of life. Because it is the logic of life itself, poetic linkage triggers the emotions: “Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active.”

The revelation of life, then, gives pleasurable feelings to both the creator and the spectator of films. How? Tarkovsky tells us that this occurs through “associative linking, which allows for an affective as well as a rational appraisal.” But this seems to be a rephrasing of his initial observation. He repeats it because he believes that the cinema has very rarely utilized its poetic potential. “It possesses an inner power which is concentrated within the image and comes across to the audience in the form of feelings, inducing tension in direct response to the author’s narrative logic.” That narrative logic must be synonymous with poetic linkage. He explains how this works. The spectator is not passive. Instead he is compelled by the author “to build the separate parts into a whole.”⁴ Tarkovsky will tell us in a latter chapter that the “artistic image is a “‘metonym’.”⁵ The proper viewing of a film requires the spectator to organize the disparate elements of a film by intuiting the poetic linkages of its construction, guided by the fundamental metonymy of cinematic imagery. The tension raised by...