Tarkovsky on Crafting the Artistic Image: Scenario and Shooting Script

Tarkovsky on Crafting the Artistic Image: Scenario and Shooting Script

In Sculpting In Time, Tarkovsky starts out the segment about the scenario and shooting script by saying that during the course of a director’s work on a film “it almost seems as if circumstances have been deliberately calculated to make him forget why it was that he started working on the picture […] for me the difficulties connected specifically with the conception of a film have little to do with its initial inspiration; the problem has always been to keep it intact and unadulterated as the stimulus for work and as a symbol of the finished picture” (125).  And that difficulty, apart from the always present technical challenges, he is speaking of is working with a large team of people; the scriptwriter, actors, cinematographer, designer, composer, editor, etc.  He states “that at every turn the director is beset by the danger of becoming a mere witness” of each of the other artists involved creating their part in the film, of becoming merely an organizer of their efforts, and of losing the original inspiration (125).  Tarkovsky’s focus here is on how he develops and uses the scenario to shape the outcome of a film.

Scenario

By the term scenario, Tarkovsky means the screenplay or script; one that during his time as a filmmaker had to be approved by the Soviet Union State.  He saw the scriptwriter as a co-writer alongside himself.  “For the idea and purpose of a film, and their realisation, have finally to be the responsibility of the director-author; otherwise he cannot have effective control of the shooting” (Tarkovsky 126).  So, Tarkovsky as the director-author was “channeling their [the co-writer’s] skills in the direction he requires.  I am talking of course of what are known as auteur films” (Tarkovsky 127).   

Anyone who has ever worked on a film set knows the impossibility of crafting a film by yourself.  Even if someone knows how to do it all, one can simply not wear that many hats and still have any quality level of efficacy in filmmaking.  That said, there are directors who do have a high level of control over the final outcomes of the film and those who hold on more loosely to the reins.  Andrey Tarkovsky was a director who sought to effectively communicate his initial inspiration for the film to his key crew members in a a way that would guarantee that his vision for the film as a whole would not be lost to others’ vision for a particular part of the production and thus taint the original story idea.  Tarkovsky observed that “in highly commercialised productions: the director’s task is merely to coordinate the professional functions of the various members of the team.  In a word, it is terribly difficult to insist on an author’s [director’s] film” in that system of working (125-126).  His solution to effectively communicate that initial story concept with his crew was to have control of the script, or scenario, from conception to completion of the film; a daunting goal for a filmmaker of the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s.

Tarkovsky’s Methodology of Scenario

Tarkovsky saw the scenario for a film as “a fragile, living, ever-changing structure [...] the base from which one starts to explore” (131).  As such, the script was never the final say of what his film’s story would be, but merely a dock to launch from.  He says of earlier films he directed that, “In the process of developing a script I used always to try to have an exact picture of the film in my mind, even down to the sets”, that “There was a time when I could not start shooting without having devised a complete plan of the episode, but now I find that such a plan is abstract, and that it restricts the imagination” (127-128).  

His director-author approach eventually became reminiscent of an artist who makes some initial sketches, works up a full design, paints the design, scraps that, works up another full design, revises that, and finally paints the completed work with the artistic image fully realized.  The film Mirror, for example,  had a minimum of four or five revisions of the script, with some revisions happening after seeing that the footage shot had still not captured what Tarkovsky was after in the essence of the story.  He came onto the set not with an exact plan for the day, however, what he had “was clear sense of atmosphere and empathy with the characters, which demanded, then and there on the set, exact plastic realisation” (Tarkovsky 132).  He said, apart from that “if I envisage anything, then it is the inner state, the distinctive inner tension of the scenes to be filmed, and the psychology of the character” (132).  That feels like a severe lack of planning, yet by that time Tarkovsky had 13 years of filmmaking under his belt too.  He said that for him “a film is only made at the moment when work on it is finally completed. The script is the base from which one starts to explore; and for the entire time that I am working on a film I have the constant anxiety that perhaps nothing may come of it” (131).  For Mirror, that period of time working on the film was just over four months short of a year for the principal photography.

The Moment of Transcendence 

Tell a major U.S. film studio that it will only take you 8 months to nail down the principal photography, and the screenplay will be done then too.  It is definitely not an economically practical method for many of today’s big budget feature films.  It’s probably too big of a gamble for even most independent studios.  Could Netflix do it if we wrap it into the context of a year-long episodic series?  Maybe so, maybe if the director-author had an already well established name.  But even as a director-author, why?  Why go through the anxiety ridden months?

“I wanted to tell the story of the pain suffered by one man because he feels he cannot repay his family for all they have given him.  He feels he hasn’t loved them enough, and this idea torments him and will not let him be” (Tarkovsky 134).  Tarkovsky said after he had completed Mirror that “Childhood memories which for years had given me no peace suddenly vanished, as if they had melted away, and at last I stopped dreaming about the house where I had lived so many years before” (128).  In directing Mirror, Andrey Tarkovsky faced pain and irreconcilables within himself that had yet to be answered, his unfinished business was made complete.  By this point in his life he had decided “that if you are serious about your work, then a film is not merely the next item in your career, it is an action which will affect the whole of your life” (133).  And he and his crew held onto “the belief  that since our work was so important to us it could not but become equally important to the audience” (Tarkovsky 133).  Tarkovsky said of audience responses, “I could not have hoped for a higher level of understanding, and such audience reaction was supremely important to me for my future work” (134).

Questions, Comments, Concerns, and the Shooting Script

“The literary element in a film is smelted; it ceases to be literature once the film has been made” (Tarkovsky 134).  That statement probably best sums up Tarkovsky’s view of scriptwriting.  It was never really fully written for him until the film was complete, at which point the scenario had become merely a “shooting script, which could not be called literature by any definition.  It is more like an account of something seen related to a blind man” (Tarkovsky 134).  The scenario was just the block from which everything that was not the film he was trying to discover must be chiseled away.  Much of the art world seems to accept that an artist’s work takes time, discovery, reflection, design, and many iterations to make the artistic image that is in the heart and mind of the artist made manifest to the beholder.  But how do you, or can you even, reconcile the time of so many artists, artisans, and the investment of money into them with an artwork of about 2 hours of sculpted time?  The latest movie production mimicking what is hot right now is certainly not going to risk that.  As an artist, are your own discoveries and wrestlings with life here and in the beyond beneficial to an audience of others?  Is what is personal and important to you going to resonate in their hearts and minds?  That is a risk, isn’t it?  Is connecting with the souls of your audience more important or is the increase of revenue more important?  Does what resonates in the hearts of your audience actually become the thing that also brings in the revenue?  Interestingly, if you look at a timeline of Tarkovsky’s films and the time taken in the principal photography of each, at and after the point that he directed Mirror his period of principal photography was becoming increasingly shorter.  Could it be, perhaps, that as he worked out his methodology for filmmaking, it eventually allowed him to work more efficiently as well?  What is your methodology as an artist and how important is it to take the time to develop it?  Every seed takes time before the harvest is ready.  What have you been planting?  What artistic yield are you hoping for?