The Master’s thesis attempts to delineate the theory of the Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky as he himself described it in his work Sculpting in Time. An extensive part of his theoretical system shall be presented through three theoretical concepts: image, time and poetry of cinema. In the first part of the thesis, we will examine how the author strictly separates an image from a symbol. It is because of its special characteristics that the image can be interpreted and remains open ad infinitum. In the second part, we shall focus on the specific capacity of cinema to capture and retain subjective time that viewers can then experience due to its “pressure”. Tarkovsky distances himself from the Soviet montage theory, according to which a director creates the rhythm of a film through editing, and disputes it by claiming that it is the pressure of time in a shot that determines the film’s rhythm. In the third part, it shall become evident that the poetic aspect is, in fact, a special attitude towards reality and that it is closely related to the gift of observation of life. This ability of observation is strongly reflected in the Japanese poetic form haiku. In order for film to consistently present the observation of life, the dramatic logic, which was adapted from literature, must be replaced by the poetic logic. Therein lies the poetry of cinema that gives the author the possibility to create his own world on the screen, one that the viewer can then not only explore, but in a very important sense also co-create with the author.
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