A-BitterSweet-Life

Spark your artistic passion. A-BitterSweet-Life is a creative engine with the mission to inspire your creativity and passion for the arts, featured in Tumblr's Spotlight for Filmmakers.

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Filmmaking Wisdom from @poetsofcinema, an Instagram page dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson.

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Robert Bresson: “A sigh, a silence, a word, a sentence, a din, a hand, the whole of your model, his face, in repose, in movement, in profile, full face, an immense view, a restricted space...Each thing exactly in its place: your only resources.”

Keep plugged in to all things art, cinema, and filmmaking at @a.bittersweet.life!

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Here are the links if you're interested!

festivalscope.com/…/fes…/rendez-vous-with-french-cinema/2020

filmlinc.org/films/satantango/

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Andrei Tarkovsky: “I believe that it is always through spiritual crisis that healing occurs. A spiritual crisis is an attempt to find oneself, to acquire new faith. It is the apportioned lot of everyone whose objectives are on the spiritual plane. The soul yearns for harmony, and life is full of discordance. This dichotomy is the stimulus for movement, the source at once of our pain and of our hope: confirmation of our spiritual depths and potential.”

Keep plugged in to all things art, cinema, and filmmaking at @a.bittersweet.life!

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Andrei Tarkovsky, acting in Aleksander Gordon's Sergey Lazo. It should be a rule that every film director experience the actor's role. This is a great way of learning how to communicate with your actors and how to empathize with them since being in front of a camera and bearing your soul is quite a feat, one that should be respected and appreciated. On acting, Andrei Tarkovsky: "Original, unique expressiveness—that is the essential attribute of the cinema actor, for nothing less can become infectious on the screen or express the truth. For the actor to be brought to the required state of mind the director has to empathize with the character. There is no other way of finding the right note for the performance. You cannot, for instance, go into an unknown house and start shooting a rehearsed scene. It is an unfamiliar house, inhabited by strangers, and naturally enough it cannot help a character from a different world to express himself. The director's first, very specific task is to convey to the actor the whole truth of the state of mind that has to be achieved. Naturally, different actors have to be approached in different ways.”

Keep plugged in to all things art, cinema, and filmmaking at @a.bittersweet.life!

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Filmmaking Wisdom from Andrei Tarkovsky

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Andrei Tarkovsky in Donatella Baglivo's A Poet in the Cinema presents a poetic and timeless definition of art.

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Mirror, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, screenplay by Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Misharin, cinematography by Georgi Rerberg, music by Eduard Artemev, and edit by Lyudmila Feyginova.

“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, of course, in accordance with my definition of life. Art should help man in this process.” Art should help mankind in this process that Tarkovsky describes as spiritual enrichment. One of the gifts of art is its ability to present meaning to our experience of life. That is to say, art should help mankind rise toward the actualization of our best selves. As Tarkovsky writes in Sculpting in Time, “Art is a meta-language, with the help of which people try to communicate with one another; to impart information about themselves and assimilate the experience of others. Again, this has not to do with practical advantage but with realizing the idea of love, the meaning of which is in sacrifice: the very antithesis of pragmatism.”

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Be well and mindful beautiful people.

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Filmmaking Wisdom from Jean-Pierre Melville

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Le Samouraï, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, screenplay by Jean-Pierre Melville and Georges Pellegrin, cinematography by Henri Decaë, music by François de Roubaix, and edit by Monique Bonnot and Yolande Maurette.

As Melville himself put it, “You must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.” Your awareness of film history, of the technical aspects of filmmaking, of film language, and of your cinematic style are vital to great filmmaking. Determination is another quality that emerges from that mad love for cinema. After serving in World War II, Melville applied to join the union in the French film industry and was rejected. Determined, he opened his own studio and began writing and directing his films. Later, he lost his studio to a fire, only to successfully come out of such a devastation through the need to continue making films. Obstacles always surface for the filmmaker, however, it is how one faces those obstacles that counts. (excerpt from: Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï: "I never lose. Not really.")

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All artists have unique paths. Bresson, Tarkovsky, and Melville are three examples of artists who inspire us not only with their masterful filmmaking and timeless films but also with how they began their careers as filmmakers. It does not matter at what age you start. It does not matter from where you start. The pursuit of your dreams and passions is a never-ending quest. The right time to start is always now.

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To all, be well, healthy, safe, and creative during these dire times. Keep showing love to your creative spirit, loved ones, and communities. Much love from A-BitterSweet-Life.

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Favorite Films of Filmmakers: Andrei Tarkovsky's Top 10 Films

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Filmmaking Wisdom from Andrei Tarkovsky

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Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, screenplay by Andrei Tarkovsky and Fridrikh Gorenshteyn, cinematography by Vadim Yusov, music by Eduard Artemev, and edit by Lyudmila Feyginova and Nina Marcus.

The key to great filmmaking is how you utilize your cinematic style to absorb the audience into a unique experience that can only be created through the art of cinema.  Harmonizing specificity of vision and economy of meaning results in great filmmaking, meaning that your artistic voice plus finely-tuned decision-making in details equals a mindful use of your cinematic style. All great films encapsulate the filmmaker’s struggle to express him or herself within the confines of production and his or her feelings of what is and what is not meaningful to the film and the path to implementing what is in the most mindful way to the storytelling of the film.

In Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky shares a striking thought on cinema relevant to this philosophy on great filmmaking: “I love cinema. There is still a lot that I don't know: what I am going to work on, what I shall do later, how everything will turn out, whether my work will actually correspond to the principles to which I now adhere, to the system of working hypotheses I put forward. There are too many temptations on every side: stereotypes, preconceptions, commonplaces, artistic ideas other than one's own. And really it's so easy to shoot a scene beautifully, for effect, for acclaim...But you only have to take one step in that direction and you are lost. Cinema should be a means of exploring the most complex problems of our time, as vital as those which for centuries have been the subject of literature, music and painting. It is only a question of searching, each time searching out afresh the path, the channel, to be followed by cinema. I am convinced that for any one of us our filmmaking will turn out to be a fruitless and hopeless affair if we fail to grasp precisely and unequivocally the specific character of cinema, and if we fail to find in ourselves our own key to it.”

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Filmmaking Wisdom from Victor Erice