Tarkovsky's statement to a question about what is art summarizes the issues and senses that this research tries to approach.
“Andrei, what is art?”
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 of course, 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’.
The specific research is divided in two parts. The first one is an attempt to present the standpoints and prospects of Tarkovsky on the issues of art, faith and truth. The second part tries to display the way through which the person, as a character in each movie, is composed. All over his work, culminating in the film "Nostalgia" (1983), the main request that he comes up with and is willing to answer is the deep human desire for the absolute and his simultaneous need to live with the commitments and the restrictions imposed by the material world.
