3 UNIQUE TRADEMARKS OF ANDREI TARKOVSKY

Andrei Tarkovsky is the high priest of spiritual cinema!

There are very few artists who are able to reach immortality through their work. In each medium of art one must strive to achieve the unachievable in-order to accomplish this feat. Once an artist achieves this status in their respective field of work their idiosyncrasies can be identified through markers or trademarks in their work that make it differ from any of their contemporaries. Andrei Tarkovsky is such an artist; his work is seeped with a deep sense of the philosophical understanding of temporality. Each and every work of his is also drenched in a sense of spirituality and reflection on the human condition, it makes the patrons of his art deeply understand the concept of morality itself. This list contains those indelible trademarks that any patron of his work and identify with ease these traits also make a case of why someone should probe even more deeply into his works.

An Emphasis on the Stasis of Sound

In all of Andrei Tarkovsky’s work sound plays a crucial role. He makes sure that the audience gets the time to fully understand the space. He also uses sound to sometimes relay more than the tangible space, or to transform a two-dimensional space into a three-dimensional space. Sound serves as a window into the soul of the complex protagonists in his stories who are often not only battling insurmountable personal conflicts but also deeply clashing philosophical conflicts that they may or may not be able to overcome.

A Fascination with Temporality

Andrei Tarkovsky’s work has a preoccupation with temporality. In each of his efforts one thing is clear: he as an artist understands the concept of time like no other directors in the medium, this is clearly visible by the way he treats every single frame, how it lingers poses a very deep question to the viewer, about the nature of time and the strength of the will of human beings against the sheer brutality of time. In almost all his works the characters are both trapped and liberated by time, and that’s exactly how Tarkovsky wants his patrons to feel. The burden of inevitability looms in his sense of time.

Movement Plays A Key Role

Perhaps the most common trademark linked to all of Tarkovsky’s work is movement, that slow movement makes his static characters and constant image feel immensely dynamic, and the dynamism reflects in every frame of work. Even though the shots are long they don’t feel still because each and every frame has movement in it.  The sheer stretch of the movement makes one wonder about the difficulty of constructing such a mise-en-scene with ease.