Film and Video Editing Theory

7 Dream and Ritual

Andrei Tarkovsky and Maya Deren

Andrei Tarkovsky and Maya Deren are two filmmakers from different eras who made significant contributions to the art of filmmaking, and who also wrote theoretical works about their film practice. Taking their own film work as a starting point, Tarkovsky and Deren theorize that one of the filmmaker’s primary functions is the control of time within the shot. Since every shot necessarily has a sense of time inherent within it, these filmmakers embrace the temporal command of the shot (and thus ultimately of the film) – what Tarkovsky called “time pressure” and what Deren described as “composition in time” – as a primary element of artistic control. In other words, these two filmmakers see the control ...