CINEMA OF SPIRITUALITY - Quotation from Tarkovsky's Sculpting In Time (1)

It is not surprising that Ingmar Bergman considered Andrei Tarkovsky the best filmmaker. As he noted -

My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how. Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.
(from Nostalgia.com)

Reading Tarkovsky's Sculpting In Time brings me so close to his world: his vision and exploration of human nature, his own way of interpreting man's spiritual world on the screen, the development of his thinking and approach in cinema through time...Just want to include some of his writing here as I read along -

I was not interested in the development of the plot, in the chain of events- with each film I feel less and less need for them. I have always been interested in a person’s inner world, and for me it was far more natural to make a journey into the psychology that informed the hero’s attitude to life, into the literary and cultural traditions that are the foundation of his spiritual world. I am well aware that from a commercial point of view it would be far more advantageous to move from place to place, to introduce shots from one ingenious angle after another, to use exotic landscapes and impressive interiors. But for what I am essentially trying to do, outward effects simply distance and blur the goal which I am pursuing. I am interested in man, for he contains a universe within himself; and in order to find expression for the idea, for the meaning of human life, there is no need to spread behind it, as it were, a canvas crowded with happenings.