«Tarkovsky's films, though dealing so outspokenly with dreams, do not take place entirely within the realm of sleep, but maintain a constant contact with the waking world. Settling on a middle ground between sleeping and waking, they take place in a kind of morning sleep, or at night when we suddenly wake up and realize that the "real world" around is deeply strange.
The possibility of an abrupt awakening that makes us see the real world as a dream is essential for any aesthetics that tries to overcome the avant-garde. Here Tarkovsky has something in common with Walter Benjamin. Is there an alternative to a modem world, which increasingly sanctions only those theories of understanding that lead to abstract knowledge? Is there not something like an "experience" of the world which, though being an experience, still does not cling to romantic theories of Einfirhlung.
(...) In a way, Benjamin follows the strategy of the Russian Formalists: There is an estranged world that we cannot understand by means of common, Romantic, positivist or other rationalist theories of understanding. It is hopeless to develop more detailed or more scientific methods because the world is incomprehensible not because it is too complicated. The "loss of the world" is due rather to a routinization of our understanding of the world, to an understanding that follows too fixed and prescribed lines.
(...) For Benjamin as much as for the Formalists, Einfuhlung means perceiving images of a world that is strange; and these images should come to us by surprise. Einfuhlung does not mean to re-experience anything that we might come across within the strange world of estrangement just "out of curiosity." Knowledge about the world is rather a matter of a sudden "awakening" to the real world. However, while for the Formalists the "strange" images are a matter of technical arrangement, for Benjamin the "images" through which the world comes to us, should settle somewhere between reality and dream. It is clear that Tarkovsky's developments of the Formalist heritage come particularly close to Benjamin's ideas about the strange.
Tarkovsky develops a version of anti-realism that conceives of dream as an intermediary between abstractness and concreteness. Instead of being simply "everyday life made strange," the dream communicates reality as something "unreal" which affects us nevertheless at least as harshly as could reality itself. This "logic of dream" is no anti-logic that an author brought forward by "making strange" what he still recognizes clearly as "logical thinking," that is, as a thinking firmly embedded into the framework of an authorial discourse. "Logic of the dream" means that every scene produces its own temporal laws, its own time or, as he calls it, its own "time truth".
Tarkovsky develops a version of anti-realism that conceives of dream as an intermediary between abstractness and concreteness. Instead of being simply "everyday life made strange," the dream communicates reality as something "unreal" which affects us nevertheless at least as harshly as could reality itself. This "logic of dream" is no anti-logic that an author brought forward by "making strange" what he still recognizes clearly as "logical thinking," that is, as a thinking firmly embedded into the framework of an authorial discourse. "Logic of the dream" means that every scene produces its own temporal laws, its own time or, as he calls it, its own "time truth".
(...) Both Tarkovsky and Benjamin negate (conventional, routinized, non-artistic) everyday world without demanding a flight into an illusionary, aestheticised, "stylized" world of dream. They suggest that we "awaken" not in order to enter non-reality but in order to find reality more "real" than before. The waking world confronted in a shock-like manner with the world of the dream becomes a world free of illusions. The structure of the "awakened world" is "aesthetic" not in the sense of a stylized and softened version of a harder and more matter-of-fact reality. The aesthetic world of the dream is as simple and banal as the "medical facts" that Tarkovsky wanted to see, for example, in the "breath of the plague" in Bunuel's Nazarin where "the plague" seems to have arisen out of "nowhere" like a dreamlike imagery.» (excerpted from Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-wai by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein)
