Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the most renowned filmmakers of all time, albeit with a daunting reputation for being a master of slow cinema and the formidably esoteric. When describing the Russian director’s films, it is almost impossible not to reach for the term ‘auteur’ –his seven features constitute a distinctive oeuvre. Produced over a twenty-five-year period, these films form an ongoing meditation on themes relating to time, memory and human existence expressed through a mosaic of recurring motifs. The pace of his films is a distinctive feature, and integral to his understanding of the purpose of filmmaking: to be ‘sculpting in time’ in order to engage with lived experience.

Tarkovsky trained at the Soviet state film school VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography), embarking on his filmmaking career during a time of liberalisation in the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev. This was a period of much greater creative freedom and increased cultural dialogue with the West, and VGIK introduced students to contemporary European trends in filmmaking.¹ As Tarkovsky developed his ideas within this more outward-looking society, he was inspired by many international filmmakers, particularly admiring Robert Bresson’s ‘absolute simplicity’² and Ingmar Bergman’s capacity to ‘arrive at the spiritual truth about human life’.³ The influence of European film cultures can be seen in Tarkovsky’s mid-length graduation film The Steamroller and the Violin (1961), a homage to Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (1956) that also draws on the Italian-neorealist themes and style of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948).⁴ While the film received top marks from VGIK, the authorities at Mosfilm studios, which had funded the project, debated its merits to the extent that it was lucky to get a release. Film academic Robert Bird observes that the negative response to Tarkovsky’s innovative narrative style was a harbinger of the ‘adversarial tone that subsequently came to dominate his relationship with the Soviet cinema authorities’.⁵ With each of the five features Tarkovsky went on to make in the USSR, he would find himself at odds with the authorities’ preference for cinema that could suitably communicate Soviet ideology. Eventually, he was forced out of the system altogether, and made his final two films, Nostalgia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986), in Italy and Sweden, respectively.

Tarkovsky’s reputation as filmmaker non grata in his homeland was countered by the accolades he received outside the USSR. His first feature, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Best Director prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival.⁶ A few years later, the religiously themed Andrei Rublev (1966) was the subject of ongoing complaints by authorities in the USSR and a fairly determined campaign to remove it from circulation, but nevertheless went on to win the International Critics’ Award at Cannes in 1969, three years after its completion; while Solaris (1972), Nostalgia and The Sacrifice all received multiple honours at Cannes. Tarkovsky’s autobiographical masterpiece The Mirror (1975) had only a limited showing in Russia and was initially denied an international release due to the perceived elitism of its experimental form and poetic elusiveness,⁷ but has since made its way into numerous lists of the ‘greatest films of all time’.⁸ Celebrated by cinephiles, filmmakers and critics around the world, Tarkovsky had died by the time the liberal polices introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev opened the way for the filmmaker’s eventual but resounding incorporation into Russian cultural identity.⁹

FILMS

Ivan’s Childhood

forms a bridge between the showy charm of and the subsequent playing-out of the distinctive Tarkovsky style in . The director did not approach the film as an adaptation of the original story written by Vladimir Bogomolov, but rather as a reimagining with a This narrative approach has the effect of portraying a world devastated by war as a series of chilling tableaux depicting human activity as estranged and displaced, a portrayal of human alienation heightened by dream sequences that imagine an alternative experience of plenitude and connection.