Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them into a darkened room where, for two hours, they watch the play of shadows on a sheet? The search for entertainment? The need for a kind of drug? ..I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a personโs experience-and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: โstarsโ, story-lines and entertainment have nothing to do with it.
Andrei TarkovskyWhen less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part. What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?
Andrei TarkovskySome sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldnโt look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.
Andrei TarkovskyModern 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.
Andrei Tarkovsky