"The image is indivisible and elusive, dependent upon our consciousness and on the real world which it seeks to embody. If the world is inscrutable, then the image will be so too. It is a kind of equation, signifying the correlation between truth and the human consciousness, bound as the latter is by Euclidean space. We cannot comprehend the totality of the universe, but the poetic image is able to express that totality.
The image is an impression of the truth, a glimpse of the truth permitted in our blindness. The incarnate image will be faithful when its articulations are palpably the expression of truth, when they make it unique, singular - as life itself is, even in its simplest manifestation."
— Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky, Russian filmmaker, writer, film editor, film theorist and opera director