Tarkovsky on Crafting the Artistic Image: Music and Noises

Tarkovsky on Crafting the Artistic Image: Music and Noises

“Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all” (Tarkovsky 162).  Yet, like all representative images, moving pictures or the movies entered our world incomplete.  It came without sound.  So we added a substitute noise to fill the vacuum we felt, the musical accompaniment of a piano or organ that supports the film in a way “which reiterates the main theme in order to heighten its emotional resonance-or sometimes just to make the best of a scene that hasn’t worked” (Tarkovsky 158). In his section on “Music and noise” from Sculpting In Time, Andrey Tarkovsky argues that sound in film should be something more.

On Music in Film

The uses of music in film, according to Tarkovsky, are poetical, distortive, and transformative.  These uses should not merely support what is already contained within the film when it was without that music, but make it distinctly changed; a singularity from what it was without the music. When music in film is used like a poetic refrain, “we return again and again to the emotions the film has given us, with our experience deepened each time by new impressions” (Tarkovsky 158).  The music then, like the song first danced to when a romance was new, becomes one with that initial moment.  When the refrain is played again, that original moment is taken into a new moment and the two moments now join together to form a new singularity.  The next time that musical refrain enters into a new moment will then impact that moment deeper still.

Music in film used as a poetic refrain is one way it can be used to distort a visual moment.  “Music can be used to produce a necessary distortion of the visual material in the audience’s perception […] By using music, it is possible for the director to prompt the emotions of the audience in a particular direction, by widening the range of their perception of the visual image.  The meaning of the object is not changed, but the object itself takes on a new colouring” (Tarkovsky 158).  As in other methodologies of filmmaking that Tarkovsky discusses, he notes here again his desire to allow the audience to experience the moments of the film for themselves and to make their own decisions about that experience.  I think he senses that music used as a “necessary distortion” of a moment may in fact be taking away some of the audience’s autonomy as he states, “I should hope that it [music] has never been a flat illustration of what was happening on the screen […] in order to force the audience to see the image in the way I wanted.  In every instance, music in cinema is for me a natural part of our resonant world, a part of human life” (159).  Still, he also sees music’s ability in cinema to transform the visual image in the film into something entirely other than what it would be without it.  In fact, he seems to believe it should function in that way or just not be used.

“Properly used, music has the capacity to change the whole emotional tone of a filmed sequence; it must be so completely one with the visual image that if it were to be removed from a particular episode, the visual image would not just be weaker in its idea and its impact, it would be qualitatively different” (Tarkovsky 158-159).  And thus, music in film has the capacity to be transformative.  Yet, Tarkovsky struggled with the use of music in films at all, “For strictly speaking the world as transformed by cinema and the world as transformed by music are parallel, and conflict with each other.  Properly organised in a film, the resonant world is musical in its essence-and that is the true music of cinema” (Tarkovsky 159).

On Noise in Film

Andrey Tarkovsky wrestled with the idea of a better way of crafting the noises of the cinema than with music.  “I have a feeling that there must be other ways of working with sound, ways which would allow one to be more accurate, more true to the inner world which we try to reproduce on screen, not just the author’s inner world, but what lies within the world itself, what is essential to it and does not depend on us” (Tarkovsky 159).  It was a wrestling match and an idea that he could not fully bear out.  He deduced that in creating a film you cannot include all the sounds that would occur naturally, that trying to capture them all would be akin to silence.  “In itself, accurately recorded sound adds nothing to the image system of cinema, for it still has no aesthetic content” (Tarkovsky 159-162).  Design was still necessary in order for sound to become a part of the art of cinema.  As a filmmaker you must make a selection of what sound is needed just as a painter selects colors.  Only when you select one sound, remove another, distort one noise, or hyperbolise another “then the film acquires a resonance” (Tarkovsky 162).“  Tarkovsky uses an example from Bergman’s film Winter Light in which the director uses only the sound of the water from the stream in which a suicide has been found as a sort of dramatic hyperbole; nothing else is heard (162).

Those sorts of cinematic moments are likely what prompted Tarkovsky to state, “that in my heart of hearts I don’t believe films need music at all.  However, I have not yet made a film without it though I moved in that direction in Stalker and Nostalgia…For the moment at least music has always had a rightful place in my films, and has been important and precious” (159).  That is perhaps the reason that he moved in the direction of electronic music.

On Music and Noise as One in Film

Film director Andrey Tarkovsky saw great potential in electronic music.  He felt you could imperceptibly weave it into the film to where it becomes almost unnoticed at all.  He thought that instrumental music had too strong of an individual voice to be able to be used in a way that integrates into a film image imperceptibly; the music’s own voice would always stand out. However, “electronic music has exactly that capacity for being absorbed into the sound.  It can be hidden behind other noises and remain indistinct, like the voice of nature, of vague imitations…It can be like somebody breathing” (Tarkovsky 163).  Perhaps in electronic music he saw the opportunity to have it all, noise and music melding with the filmic image in perfect unity.

Questions, Comments, and Concerns

What I respect in Tarkovsky’s struggle for the most effective design of sound in cinema was not the perfect outcome, but his willingness to strive for the best expression he was capable of for the moment he was working on.  It is not that the piano accompaniment of the silent film era wasn’t a true part of film in that time, but rather our tenacity in holding onto “what works” when it doesn’t resonate truly any longer.  In any art form, when we talk about breaking the rules, what we really mean is setting aside a true thing that has become a formula.  A formula comes into being because it works, because it resonates with the audience of that time and space.  Our stubborn tenacity as the human race is to hold onto the formula because it worked.  It produced the right outcome once upon a time, even if it is not resonating with audiences in the present moment, but merely giving them the mental signal about what is being said there emotionally.  Have you ever had a picture or a quote that you love and you hung it in the room so that you could always see it?   At first you take notice.  Over time it blends into the wall with the rest of the room.  How long was it before you forgot the truth that is there?  You take it out, put it in a new frame, find a new place for it to hang, and you take notice of that truth once more.  Sound in cinema is like that.  It holds the truth up for the audience to see.  When it’s framed and placed in the same way time after time, we stop beholding the truth in an experiential manner, giving it only mental assent.  Each new story, though the truth doesn’t change, needs to be accompanied by the sound of that story’s heartbeat; be it music or noise.  How can we use those sounds to disrupt the cinematic image enough for people to be able to experience the truth within it once more?  Is that worth wrestling with?  Is it worthy of our momentary inconvenience?  Are we able to listen to the sounds of this world properly?

Works Cited

Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting In Time. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, Twenty-First University of Texas Press, 2023.