‘You were the welcome trap, what they used to call the devil, and my rescuer, who pulled me out of my trap, what they used to call the saviour. To renounce you, my failure, would be the ultimate failure, what they used to call pride.’

‘I lose you just as I lose myself, because I want you beyond the limits of my words, and I only know you through my words, just as I know myself. You’re my loss, my impatience. I want to withdraw from your absence, into what? Into endless impatience, suffered patiently.’

‘To the day we were mad, the night drew us to itself until we tried to turn away and faced only more dark. We realised we’d crossed the day from day one, by the very presence of the night, which never engulfed us, which for us was impure. We were called away from ourselves. We belonged to the night because we couldn’t be the night.’

‘I can’t see you, I can only talk to you, talk with you. Should I turn to you or away from you? I look for you and see what hides you, I talk and hear what conceals my meaning.’

‘I had more or less whole wholes from rare moment to moment like those pockets in time with [ ] or should I say whole holes those moments of fictive truth or truthful fiction dare I say presence I dare not but I held on tight I bounced between hope and hopelessness from moment to moment from whole to hole pain to relief held on tighter wanted harder until at last I let go so slow so reluctant I was until I let myself drift into your undertow but it is false to say let myself there was some force yet no violence it is true then let us say a strange drift pulled me into your slipstreams where it is always too late where you murmur now distant now near like calls across windy waters where you make your strange demand where your currents run in and out of wholes and holes as they loosen the grip on hope and hopelessness alike until I am my own enemy the enemy of I until I abandons nostalgia to your currents until I drifts from I to I drifts into your endless presence perhaps but it is not like that other presence it is not like that at all why not why not tell me.’

A. The pressure Rublev is subject to is not an exception. An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world. This is the issue in Andrei Rublev; the search for harmonic relationships among men, between art and life, between time and history. That’s what my film is all about.

Q. What is art?

A. Before defining art or any concept we must answer a far broader question. What’s the meaning of man’s life on earth? Maybe we are here to enhance ourselves spiritually. If our life tends to this spiritual enrichment, then art is a means to get there. This is in accordance with my definition of life. Art should help man in this process. Some say that art helps man to know the world like any other intellectual activity. I don’t believe in this possibility of knowing; I am almost an agnostic. Knowledge distracts us from our main purpose in life. The more we know the less we know; getting deeper, our horizon becomes narrower. Art enriches man’s own spiritual capabilities and he can then rise above himself to use what we call ‘free will’.

– Tarkovsky

*

When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure.

– Bergman, Laterna Magica

This mastery of our innermost movements, which in the long run we can acquire, is well known: it is yoga. But yoga is given in the form of coarse recipes, embellished with pedantism and with bizarre statements. And yoga, practiced for its own sake, advances no further than an aesthetics or a hygiene, whereas I have recourse to the same means (laid bare), in despair.

– Bataille, Inner Experience (tr. L.A. Boldt)

As she rubbed the furniture to make it shine, she upbraided me, telling me that the life I led was unhealthy. She had remarked that I had a tendency to drink a little too much, it was bad for the health. Very bad, for a man at the height of his powers. Wasn’t I going to buckle down and find some work for myself? All right, so I had an inheritance. That was no reason to sit around and do nothing all day. At least get married. Did I intend to go one living all alone, like some impotent? I ought to start a family. Man is made to have children, and there’s nothing cuter than little ones underfoot. And then when they grow up and you grow old, they don’t abandon you to poverty; no, they reach out a helping hand when you need it most. If there’s anything worse than living alone, it’s dying alone, with no one around to offer you a little milk of human kindness. I didn’t know what was in store for me.

*

She was downstairs, with the concierge, next to her door. When they saw me they stopped talking. Were they talking about me? All I want is for them to leave me alone. I can do whatever I want. I can loaf all day if I’ve a mind to. That’s my business. Oh! I can feel myself getting angry. I hurried through the lobby. But before I exited I glanced back: I saw them looking at me. They were waiting till I had disappeared before going on with their backbiting, their malicious small talk. What could they be dreaming up about me? The whole concierge system is a kind of plot.

*

She had grown used to my comings and goings at the same time every day, and adjusted to my strange solitude. ‘You look to me’, she said to me at one point, ‘like you’re hiding from the police. Or from some rivals’. I told her that no one was after my skin, that as far as my hash was concerned I was sure no one was trying to settle it, and that I had never belonged to the underworld. ‘Just as I suspected’, she said, ‘you don’t look brave enough for that’.

– Ionesco, The Hermit (tr. R. Seaver)

If only he had some philosophical talent, X tells me. Then he might be able to explain his feelings, then he might not need to talk to me. If only you’d answer, he says. How am I supposed to get any philosophical talent if you don’t answer my questions? It’s because you know you’d only explain what I already feel, isn’t that why? So why don’t you say something if it’s so easy, he says. He would have been happier if he hadn’t taken up with me, that much is clear, he says. If you’re not a thinker you shouldn’t think, that much is clear too. He tries not to, he says. He has no system, no philosophy, all he does is wait for my answers, so why don’t you answer, he says.

‘I talk to push my self out on the undertow of my words; to leave an emptiness for you to fill.’