Tarkovsky interviewed by Tony Mitchell; Sight&Sound 1982
T: The film clips which I am showing represent what is closest to my heart. They are examples of a form of thought and how this thought is expressed through film. In Bresson's Mouchette the way in which the girl commits suicide is particularly striking. In Seven Samurai, in the sequence in which the youngest member of the group is afraid, we see how Kurosawa transmits this sense of fear. The boy is trembling in the grass, but we don't see him trembling, we see the grass and flowers trembling. We see a battle in the rain and when the character played by Toshiro Mifune dies we see him fall and his legs become covered with mud. He dies before our eyes.
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T: To me cinema is unique in its dimension of time. This doesn't mean it develops in time — so do music, theatre and ballet. I mean time in the literal sense. What is a frame, the interval between "Action" and "Cut"? Film fixes reality in a sense of time — it's a way of conserving time. No other art form can fix and stop time like this. Film is a mosaic made up of time.
Amazing- film fixes reality in a sense of time that no other art is capable of doing.. hmm, I wonder what a photographer would say.. I can't say I understand the water and ceiling falling juxtaposed with flames behind the windows, but beautiful cinematography none-the-less!
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