.

What then are are these two tendencies (of cinema)? On one side, it's "poetic cinema"...I believe I could be situated within this tendency of poetic cinema, because I don't follow a strict narrative development and logical connections. I don't like looking for justifications for the protagonist's actions. One of the reasons why I became involved in cinema is because I saw too many films that didn't correspond to what I expected from cinematic language.

On the other hand, there is what we in the USSR call the "intellectual cinema" of Mikhail Romm. In spite of the fact that for a time I was his student, I can't say anything about it because I don't understand that kind of cinema.

All art, of course, is intellectual, but for me, all the arts, and cinema even more so, must above all be emotional and act upon the heart.

Andrei Tarkovsky
from an interview with Patrick Bureau, 1962