Tarkovsky on Crafting the Artistic Image: Time, Rhythm, and Editing
“One cannot conceive of a cinematic work with no sense of time passing through the shot, but one can easily imagine a film with no actors, music, decor or even editing” (Tarkosky 113). In his treatise on time, rhythm, and editing in chapter 5 of Sculpting in Time, Andrey Tarkovsky works to explain one arena of the philosophical methodologies he strives for in filmmaking. How do you effectively employ what he calls “time-pressure” and solve the editing of the rhythmical mystery contained within those frames of film? Wait a minute, did he say actors, music, decor, and editing are optional for a movie?
Rhythm Expressing the Course of Time: Time-Pressure
A short film that Tarkovsky points to in illustration of the optionality of those common components of filmmaking is Pascal Aubier’s Le Dormeur. In this nearly 10-minute film, a moving camera takes us through a wide range of wilderness areas in one continuous take, hence no picture editing. Apart from music used in the opening titles, there is only the sound of nature, with at least the feeling that most of it is ambient sound; though an audibly buzzing fly sound effect has definitely been added to the sound track. It ends on a revolutionary, apparently shot down and his dead body left to the wilderness. Playing dead is arguably very nearly void of acting. And the only decor is that which nature has provided. The short film is intriguing. What was this soldier’s story? Is there no one left to mourn him? Will he just be left for the Earth to reclaim? Is any battle more than just vanity?
Tarkovsky’s point was not that we should do away with those elements in the production of films, but that, “No one component of a film can have any meaning in isolation: it is the [entire] film that is the work of art. And we can only talk about its components rather arbitrarily, dividing it up artificially for the sake of theoretical discussion” (114). Tarkovsky was identifying for himself: what is the unique factor intrinsic to the art of filmmaking? What, if taken away from the production, would cause it to cease being a film? If the foundation piece of music is sound, then the foundational element of “the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame” (Tarkovsky 113, 119). Actors, music, etc. can add to how time passes through the camera’s lens and is captured for the film, however, those factors are only a part of the time-pressure pulsing through the cinematic art piece, they are not time itself with the accompanying rhythm that shapes our experience of it.
Editing: Following the Intrinsic Pattern
Tarkovsky balked at “the notion that editing is the main formative element of film”, stating that, “The cinema image comes into being during shooting, and exists within the frame” (114). Editing is then not the foundational component of filmmaking, but rather “means allowing the separate scenes and shots to come together spontaneously, for in a sense they edit themselves; they join up according to their own intrinsic pattern. It is simply a question of recognising and following this pattern while joining and cutting […] time courses through the picture despite editing rather than because of it” (Tarkovsky 116-117). This is not to berate the importance of editing in any way, rather it is to state that the editing purpose is to find the rhythm that is already contained within the separate shots and join them in a way that is true to the time present within the collective shots and to the rhythm that expresses how the audience will experience that time manifestation. “The consistency of the time that runs through the shot, its intensity or ‘sloppiness’, could be called time-pressure: then editing can be seen as the assembly of the pieces on the basis of the time-pressure within them. Maintaining the operative pressure, or thrust, will unify the impact of the different shots” (Tarkovsky 117).
Tarkovsky further argued that editing couldn’t alter this time-pressure within the shots, however, one could edit against the time-pressure present in the frames and thus create contradictions, perhaps similar to a person who says one thing, but their body language says otherwise. Tarkovsky criticized such editing as “arbitrary and superficial because it bears no relation to any time within the shots” (120). On the other hand he also believed that an “endogenous development” that comes from the time-pressure of the materials within the shots could give legitimate, organic reasoning for editing that “disturbs the passage of time, interrupts it and simultaneously gives it something new. The distortions of time can be a means of giving it rhythmical expression. Sculpting in time” (121)!
Why All the Fuss?
Andrey Tarkovsky wanted to be truthful in his perception of time as he experienced it through the rhythms of life. He believed that directors who stayed true to their time perceptions in life would not fall into superficiality, that their consistency could not cause such directors to “ever be confused with anyone else, because each one’s perception of time, as expressed in the rhythm of his films, is always the same” (121). To the greatest measure possible he wanted “to have time flowing through the frame with dignity, independently, so that no-one in the audience will feel that his perception is being coerced, so that he may, as it were, allow himself to be taken prisoner voluntarily by the artist, as he starts to recognise the material of the film as his own, assimilating it, drawing it in to himself as new, intimate experience ” (120).
Questions, Comments, and Concerns
Tarkovsky also recognized that the director’s perspective of time expressed through the rhythms of the film do have a level of coercion present, that “The person watching your film either falls into your rhythm (your world), and becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made” (120). He saw that as a natural inevitably. How much do we accept that as part of being true to our perspective as individual artists? Do we want to counter that with producing “what sells”? Can we even achieve, with any consistency, Tarkovsky’s ideal of being true to the time-pressure within the frames? Do we want to sometimes use editing that counters the time-pressure present within the shots in order to give our audience an uncanny valley effect because that is what we want them to feel at that moment rather than because the time-pressure was organically moving in that direction? Do we want to sometimes imitate another filmmaker’s sense of time, deviating to a different perspective than what we actually experience? I have to say that, at minimum, taking the time to consider these questions and to contemplate on our own philosophies about our methodologies of filmmaking is important to our growth. The element of time captured within cinema is undeniable. How are we going to use our time?
Works Cited
Aubier, Pascal, director. Le Dormeur. https://youtu.be/J66vg7xI66Q?si=SBxch3KI_wb07OZP. Accessed 19 Nov. 2025.
Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting In Time. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, Twenty-First University of Texas Press, 2023.
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