Andrei Tarkovsky on why solitude is important for young people
Solitude for young people in 2024 is almost impossible to achieve. With a simple glance across your vicinity, it will be easy to spot multiple avenues of distraction and connection to friends, enemies and the entire planet. While the ability to have conversations with friends and family members worldwide at the swipe of a phone screen is certainly impressive and, at times, wholly necessary, filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky would implore you to shut off, if only for a few moments.
Movies are one area of art that has suffered greatly from the world’s heavily reduced attention span. One need only listen to the cries of derision for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which, at three-and-a-half hours long, provided one of the sternest tests of cinemagoers in recent years to see the detrimental effect connectivity is having on cinema.
Not only has the appetite for on-demand digestible visual media seen a surge of fantastic television, providing a challenge to movies’ previous stranglehold, but the escapism movies and the act of going to the cinema provided are now under threat. Emails, texts, social media and many other apps are consistently trying to grab your attention and bring you into the doomed space of ‘double-screening’. It’s a world in which filmmaker Tarkovsky would have heavily struggled.
His work is noted for its density, delivering layer upon layer of critical thinking on the human psyche. His movies are not for the easily distracted and require genuine dedication. Without it, one will simply have the images pass through the screen as a flash of a time gone by. One key facet that Tarkovsky tackled in his work is loneliness, and he believed it to be essential to the human condition.
In an interview with The Criterion Collection, Tarkovsky shares his message for young people, and it feels perhaps even more important in today’s climate: “I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion.”
If we add the ability young people now have to be a part of events without even having to leave their bedrooms, there is an easy cause to see how this could negatively affect young minds trying to find their own footing in a turbulent world. “Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself,” Tarkovsky continued. “That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.”
Of course, Tarkovsky had no knowledge of the digital age and the benefits it could provide. He was unaware of its ability to connect two people in different places in the world instantly, to unite friends and enemies with ease. With this knowledge, he may have noted the huge advantages such an invention would allow. However, there can be no doubt that he would still have highlighted the importance of solitude and the ability to connect with our own feelings and thoughts that it provides.
