“Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.”
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 152
Context: Never try to convey your idea to the audience — it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 133
Context: [About Mirror] I had the greatest difficulty in explaining to people that there is no hidden, coded meaning in the film, nothing beyond the desire to tell the truth. Often my assurances provoked incredulity and even disappointment. Some people evidently wanted more: they needed arcane symbols, secret meanings. They were not accustomed to the poetics of the cinema image. And I was disappointed in my turn. Such was the reaction of the opposition party in the audience; as for my own colleagues, they launched a bitter attack on me, accusing me of immodesty, of wanting to make a film about myself.
“Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.”
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 192
Context: Art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition — otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 241
Context: Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 38
Context: Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken the wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for his own sake. What purports to be art begins to looks like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalised action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in an artistic creation the personality does not assert itself it serves another, higher and communal idea. The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of human calling.
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 124
“Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.”
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 66
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 114
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 97
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 218
“The meaning of religious truth is hope.”
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 43
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 180
And we can only talk about its components rather arbitrarily, dividing it up artificially or the sake of theoretical discussion.
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 114