Andrei Tarkovsky is a Soviet director of theatre and cinema, a striking phenomenon of world culture in his depth and originality. His films remain relevant because they explore the spiritual world of man; they are conceptual, metaphorical and original. His philosophical view of the world and of the nature of creativity is reflected in his statements:
Every artist, during his time on earth, finds and leaves behind some fragment of truth about civilization, about humanity. The very idea of seeking, of searching, is offensive to an artist. It resembles gathering mushrooms in the forest. They may be found, or they may not.
Picasso even said: 'I do not seek, I find.' In my view, the artist does not act like a seeker at all; he in no way acts empirically ('I'll try this, I'll attempt that').
The artist testifies to truth, to his own truth of the world. The artist must be certain that he and his work correspond to the truth. I reject the idea of experiment and searching in the realm of art. Any search in this field, everything pompously called 'the avant-garde', is simply a lie.
No one knows what beauty is. The thought people form about beauty, the very idea of beauty, changes over the course of history along with philosophical claims and simply with the development of a person during his life. And this leads me to think that, in fact, beauty is a symbol of something else. But of what exactly? Beauty is a symbol of truth. I do not mean this in the sense of the opposition 'truth and falsehood', but in the sense of the truth of the path a person chooses.
Beauty (of course, relative!) in different eras attests to the level of consciousness that people of that era have about truth. There was a time when that truth was expressed in the image of the Venus de Milo.
And it goes without saying that a complete collection of female portraits, say by Picasso, strictly speaking, has not the slightest relation to truth. This is not about prettiness, not about something cute — it is about harmonious beauty, hidden beauty, beauty as such. Picasso, instead of exalting beauty, trying to glorify it, speak about it, testify to it, acted as its destroyer, its reviler, its annihilator.
Truth expressed in beauty is mysterious; it cannot be deciphered or explained in words.
But when a human being, a personality, stands next to this beauty, encounters this beauty, stands before this beauty, one senses its presence, even by the goosebumps that run down the spine. Beauty is like a miracle, involuntarily witnessed by man. That is the whole point.
There was a time when I could name the people who influenced me, who had been my teachers. But now in my consciousness only 'characters' remain — half saints, half madmen. These 'characters' may be slightly possessed, but not by the devil; they are, so to speak, 'God's madmen'. Among the living I will name Robert Bresson. Among the deceased — Leo Tolstoy, Bach, Leonardo da Vinci... After all, they were all madmen.
Because they absolutely did not seek anything in their minds.
They did not create by means of the head... They both frighten and inspire me. It is absolutely impossible to explain their work.
Thousands of pages have been written about Bach, Leonardo and Tolstoy, but in the end no one has been able to explain anything. No one, thank God, has been able to find or touch the truth, to grasp the essence of their creativity! This once again proves that the miracle is inexplicable...
In the highest sense of the term — freedom, especially in the artistic sense, in the sense of creativity — does not exist. Yes, the idea of freedom exists; it is a reality in social and political life.
In different regions and different countries people live with more or less freedom; but there are accounts that show that even in the most monstrous conditions there were people who possessed an unheard-of inner freedom, an inner world, a greatness.
It seems to me that freedom does not exist as a choice: freedom is a state of the soul. For example, one can be socially and politically completely 'free' and nevertheless perish from a feeling of transience, of confinement, of the absence of a future.
As for the freedom of creativity, it cannot be argued about at all. No art can exist without it. The absence of freedom automatically devalues a work of art, because that absence prevents it from expressing itself in the most beautiful form. The lack of this freedom leads to the fact that a work of art, despite its physical existence, in reality does not exist.
In art we must see not only creativity. But, unfortunately, in the 20th century the dominant tendency is that the individualist artist, instead of striving to create a work of art, uses it to display his own 'self'.
A work of art becomes the expresser of its creator's 'I' and turns, so to speak, into a megaphone for his petty pretensions. You know this better than I. Paul Valéry wrote a great deal about this. By contrast, the true artist — and moreover, the genius — is a slave to the gift with which they have been endowed.
They owe this gift to the people whom they were chosen to spiritually nourish and serve. That, for me, is what freedom consists of.
