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Yesterday, a good friend and director Katharine asked me about Tarkovsky. I immediately thought of Stalker, my favorite film of his.

When I was in school, all I wanted to do was make sound like Stalker. So many memorable sequences–from the train tracks in the zone, to the dream sequences, to the house and the trembling “train” or abilities of the young child at the end–have pervaded my thoughts each time I begin work on sound for film. But the Stalker taught me so much more than just to design and mix with a goal of “sculpting in time”, the title of his aptly named autobiography.

Tarkovsky taught me about persistence. Little is known of the difficulties of producing poetry, whether in motion or on paper. What is known is that it is frequently looked upon as an art of choice: choice of words, choice of phrasing, choice of styles, imagery etc.. In a sense, poetry is the process of editing. It is a profound use of negative space. Getting rid of the “wrong choice”, opting for what is best or best for right now.

I have never felt that I am a poet. But I do think that sound-editing and design, when done well, is approaches to poetry’s original impulses, the aural nerves that overwhelm the mind so tightly aligned with the desires for language and communication.

And it is this persistence, to communicate, that makes Chris Marker’s documentary on Tarkovsky so One Day in The Life of Andrei Arsenovich so compelling. Told from Tarkovsky’s deathbed, in part, where he lay with cancer, we see the varying struggles Andrei Arsenevich Tarkovsky went through to have a visions realized. The struggle to make choices. And the desire to make good work.

One often sited sequence, from his last film, The Sacrifice (it’s name appropriate for this discussion), shows the director in his most critical form. That of a believer. A fighter.

It is the moment of failure. Or at least the appearance of failure. The dolly and tracking shots for a complex final sequence in which a house on the tundra burns to the ground, fails. One camera , and then the second, are unable to get the shot. The house lay in ruins.

Tarkovsky had to rebuild a house to get the sequence. And he did so (though largely framework) after making his choice. And Marker’s film illustrates not only the beauty of the process of doing this work, but the strength and struggle to decide to go on, despite failure. The strength not only to believe in an idea, but to rely on colleagues and comrades to realize this vision. Film, as opposed to some other forms of art making, is almost always collective. And it is its collective perseverance that I continue to find so driving, even after all this time.