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Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) |
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Russian film and theater director, screenwriter, a poetic visionary, whose most famous films include Andrei Rublev (1966), a dark vision about the relationship between art and society, Solaris (1972), probing the limits of human understanding, and Sacrifice (1986), a contemplation about spiritual rebirth and the end of the world. Although Andrei Tarkovsky did not openly deal with the failures of the Soviet system – his themes were more universal and spiritual – the authorities viewed his films with suspicion, and often restricted their distribution. Tarkovsky died in exile in Paris at the age of 54. "In all my films it seemed to me important to try to establish the links which connect people (other than those of the flesh), those links which connect me with humanity, and all of us with everything that surrounds us. I need to have a sense that I myself am in this world as a successor, that there is nothing accidental about my being here. Within each of us there must exist a scale of values. In Mirror I wanted to make people feel that Bach and Pergolesi and Pushkin's letter and the soldiers forcing the Sivash crossing, and also the intimate events—that all these things are in a sense equally important as human experience." (Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema by Andrey Tarkovsky, translated from the Russian by Kitty Hunter-Blair, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003, pp. 192-193) Andrei Tarkovsky was born in Zavrzhye, Yurievets region, the
son of
Arseni Alexandrovich Tarkovsky, a poet and critic, and Maria Ivanovna, an actress.
Later Tarkovsky used his father's poems in several of his films. However, Arseni's first collection of poems, Pered snegom,
was not published until 1962, when he was fifty-five. When the Nazi's
began their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he volunteered for
the front, where he lost a leg. Although Tarkovsky lived most of his life in Moscow and
abroad, and was often on the move, the house where he grew up remained
for him the symbolic idealised image of home. After his
parents divorced, Andrei and his sister Marina were raised by their
mother. Tarkovsky's experiences during the Great Patriotic War against
Germany, evacuation from Moscow to the countryside, and the separation
of his parents, formed the background of the film Mirror
(1974). The family returned to Moscow in 1943. From the age of thirteen, Tarkovsky took up drawing seriously at school. Tarkovsky saw his father but rarely, and he did not want to go
to live with him. ". . . we lived in a small, two-room apartment in the
old part of Moscow. My father . . . stayed up all night sometimes to
write. He typed on a machine. I would hear him asking my mother every
night, "Maruschka, tell me whether you like it better this way or that
way," and he would read her a line. My father generally accepted her
suggestions." ('Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky' by Tonino Guerra, 1976, in Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, edited by John Gianvito, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006, p. 47) From 1951 to 1954 Tarkovsky studied Arabic at Moscow's
Institute of Oriental Languages, but couldn't complete the course due
to illness. Before entering the Soviet State Film School (VGIK) in
1956, he studied geology in Siberia. At VGIK his teacher was Mikhail
Romm (1901-1971), who was awarded five Stalin Prizes during his career.
Later Tarkovsky said that the students did not see enough achievements
of world cinema, because teachers were afraid of Western influences. In
1959 Tarkovsky made a short television film There Will Be No Leave
Today and won a prize with his diploma work, Steamroller and
the Violin (1960). Its screenplay Tarkovsky wrote with H Andrei
Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky; they collaborated also in Andrei Rublev.
Ivan's Childhood (1962),
Tarkovsky's first feature film, was based on Vladimir Bogolomov's
austere war tale published in 1958. The
film, which had a medium-sized budget, 2.5 million rubles, was shot in
the summer of 1961. A feeling of loneliness
hangs over the whole picture, which Tarkovsky considered his own
private qualifying examination: does he really have the ability to be a
director. The dreamlike construction of the fate of an orphan boy
behind enemy lines
won the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival. Irma Rausch, whom Tarkovsky
had married in 1957, played
Ivan's mother. Andrei Rublev was shelved for nearly six years after its acceptance by Goskino (the Soviet State Film Committee). "And during all that time I did nothing, I didn't work," Tarkovsky recalled, "because it was presumed that if I made an "ideologically unseasoned" picture, then I would have no further right to work until that conflict was settled . . . " (quoted in 'Trava-Travlya-Trata: Tarkovsky’s Psychobiography à la Lettre' by Andrei Gornykh, ReFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, edited by Sergey Toymentsev, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021, p. 38) Andrei Rublev won at Cannes in 1970 the FIPRESCI Prize, given by the International Federation of Film Critics. Despite becoming an international phenomenon, this thinly veiled comment on the situation of Soviet artists was given a limited release in the USSR, and was cut for distribution abroad. The episodic story is built around the life of the famous
15th-century Russian icon painter and monk, Andrei Rublev, played by
Tarkovsky's favorite actor Anatoly Solonitsyn. He witnesses the cruelty
and misery of the world, slaughter and plunder, but eventually
finds his faith in art and creates his acclaimed religious paintings. A parallel story follows a young man, Boriska, who courageously completes the task of creating a new bell, without having any previous experience of such work. The film, shot in black and white, bursts into color in the last ten to fifteen minutes. Tarkovsky opens the film showing the flight and crash of a hot-air balloon made of skins, ropes and rags. Originally the script included an episode, in which a peasant attempts to fly with hand-made wings. In the 1960s Tarkovsky also wrote screenplays and acted in
Marlen Hutsiev's Mne dvatsat let (1964) and Alexander V.
Gordon's Sergei Lazo (1967). After Andrei Rublev
Tarkovsky fell into official disfavour for a time. He co-wrote the script for the adventure war movie Odin shans iz tysyachi (1968, One Chance in One Thousand), directed by Leon Kocharyan. In 1970 he read Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, saw Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo ("Poor old Seryozha! It's embarrassing") and a bad film by Bunuel (Tristana), and expessed his sympathy towards Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn fallowing the furore over his Nobel Prize for Literature. (Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986 by Andrey Tarkovsky, translated from the Russian by Kitty Hunter-Blair, London: Faber and Faber, 1994, pp. 20-29) It took six years
before Tarkovsky made his third film, Solaris, based on the novel by
the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. Being
a less priviledged director, Tarkovsky was urged by a Goskino
bureaucrat to shoot the film in black-and-white, but the director
refused to do so. When he ran out of colour film at least twice, and
was forced to combine monochrome and colour footage. Solaris continued the metaphysical themes of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The Soviet authorities claimed that the work was too difficult for the average Russian audience to understand – Western critics did not find it any less so. Most of the events are set on a spaceship hovering over the organic and sentient ocean of planet Solaris. Scientists, sweating like Romans in historical spectacles, try to reveal its secret but they only meet apparitions of their own imagination and secret desires. Whereas Kubrick ends his film in a symbolical rebirth of humankind, Tarkovsky seems to say that there is no escape from human nature. Solaris won the Jury Prize at Cannes, but the film had a limited distribution at home. The Mirror was an autobiographical work, in which
Tarkovky
used the logic of dreams and poems. Rhythmically slow meditation on
moments of existence, The Mirror consisted of about two hundred
shots.
The cinematic technique bore similarities to that of the Russian
avant-garde directors of the 1920s and experimental Western films.
Tarkovsky's wife Larissa Pavlovna Yegorkina served as the assistant
director; she worked with him in the three following projects. They had
moved together while Tarkovsky was making Andrei Rublev. Vadim Yusov, who had cooperated with the director from the beginning,
refused to shoot the film – he found its tone too private. Also
Tarkovsky's troubles with authorities continued. The chief of the State
Cinema wanted to take out the newsreel piece of the Soviet Army
crossing Lake Sivash in 1943. It had been filmed by an army cameraman
who had been killed on that same day. Solaris, Mirror, and Stalker
were shot on colour Kodak, which was strictly rationed and highly
prized in the Soviet Union. Due to the shortfalls of the stock,
directors mixed Kodak and Sovcolor. Tarkovsky's solution was to use
black-and white: 71 minutes of Mirror
are in colour and 33 minutes are in black-and white. The film was
extremely difficult to edit, "there was no sense of wholeness,"
Tarkovsky recalled. "Then, suddenly, we decided in desperation, to
rearrange it one last time, and the film took shape before our eyes. .
. It took me a long time to believe that the miracle had taken place." (Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry
by Maya Turovskaya, translated by Natasha Ward, edited and with an
introduction by Ian Christie, London: Faber and Faber, 1989, p. 71) After the
premiere in early 1975 Tarkovsky
considered giving up the whole business. At a meeting of the State
Institute of Cinematography and the Union of Cinematographists,
Tarkovsky's
colleagues condemned the work as "elitist". In 1977 Tarkovsky directed Shakespeare's Hamlet for
the Komsomol theater. Stalker (1979) was again based on a
science fiction story, Roadside Picnic, written by Arkady and Boris Strugatski.
The slowly moving, enigmatic story is set in a desolate, unnamed
country, where the Stalker, dressed in the dirty rags of a gulag
inmate, has lost his hope and faith in humanity. He guides two men, the
Writer and the Scientist, to the mysterious Zone, a kind of alien
Disneyland. Their destination is the Room, where everybody's most
secret wish will be granted. When they reach the place, nobody has the
courage to step across its threshold. Back at home Stalker goes to sleep while his legless daughter shows her telekinetic powers. Tarkovsky asks the question: have we courage to face our inner self, the truth? Like the sentient ocean of Solaris, the Room mercilessly reveals what are our real wishes, not what we say they are. Much of the film was shot in Jägala, Estonia. It has been argued that exposure to the toxic runoff from a chemical plant on the river Jägala may have contributed to the cancer that killed Tarkovsky. Stalker was the last feature film Tarkovsky directed in his home country. The doom-laden Nostalgia (1983) was made in Italy. It presented a number of Tarkovsky's favorite images from his cinematographic vocabulary, which include dripping water, fire, mud, wind, windows and doors, ruins and scenes of erosion, slow and prolonged camera shots, all filled with stilfling sense of longing. In the story a Russian poet, Andrei Gorchakov, and his translator, Eugenia, collect material about a long-dead Russian composer. They meet a recluse, Domenico, prophesying the end of the world. "What kind of world is this," he cries, "if a madman has to tell you to be ashamed of yourselves?" Domenico commits suicide by setting himself on fire. Andrei walks across St Catherine's thermal pool and dies of a heart attack. At the end Tarkovsky brings a Russian house inside an Italian cathedral. Tarkovsky wrote the screenplay with the poet Tonino Guerra, who had collaborated earlier with Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. When the film was shown at Cannes, the leader of the Soviet representatives, the director Sergei Bondarchuk, prevented it winning the Palme d'or. Nostalgia received the less prestigious Special Jury Prize. Tarkovsky had already decided to go into exile after finishing the production, but the authorities were reluctant to give both him and Larissa visas for abroad. Like Andrei in Nostalgia, Tarkovsky longed to go back to Russia. However, in Moscow he found cockroaches in his home, and accused his stepdaughter Olga of being lazy and slovenly. The Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who scored several films, wrote his Nostalghia for violin and string orchestra in 1987 in memory of Tarkovsky and his film. While in London Tarkovsky directed a stage production of Boris
Godunov at Covent Garden. Tarkovsky's spiritual testament as a
director, The Sacrifice
(1986), was shot on the Baltic Sea island of Gotland. Primarily a
Swedish production, the members of the crew included Sven Nykvist and
Erland Josephson, both famous for their collaboration with Ingmar
Bergman. Later Erland Josephson returned to Tarkovky in his sarcastic
play, En natt i den svenska sommaren (2002), about cultural
conflicts between a Swedish film team and a Russian foreign director. Sacrifice received at Cannes the Grand Special Jury Prize, the International Critics Prize, and the Ecumenical Prize. The idea was sketched while Tarkovky was still living in the Soviet Union. In the story a birthday dinner of Alexander, an artist, is interrupted by some kind of nuclear Big Bang. Eventually Alexander, weary of the discord in his family, must prove his faith in mankind to save the world. Also in this work healing occurs through a spiritual crisis. During the last years of his life, Tarkovsky suffered from cancer. He died in Paris on December 29, 1986, and was buried in a graveyard for Russian émigrés in the town of Saint-Geneviève-du-Bois, France. Tarkovsky's unfulfilled projects included Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Flaubert's The Temptations of Saint Anthony, and a film about the life of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Occupied with the question of life after death and his own dreams, Tarkovsky found Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Dostoevsky generally more interesting than his contemporary writers. Among the exceptions was Solzhenitsyn – in 1970 he had planned to film the author's short story Matryona's Home (1963), which he considered the author's best work. Before his death Tarkovsky published Sapetshatljonnoje vremja (1984, Sculpting in Time), an account of the original inspiration for his films and his method of work. Martyrolog (1989), Tarkovsky's diary from 1970 to 1981, revealed that he was not much interested in the Social realism, international politics, or the radical thoughts of the new left. For further reading: Andrej Tarkowskij: Film als Poesie, Poesie als Film by Maja Josifowna Turowskaja & Felicitas Allardt-Nostitz (1981); Andreï Tarkovsky (Études cinématographiques nos.135-138), ed. by Michel Estève (1983); Tarkovskij: tanken på en hemkomst, ed. by Magnus Berg & Bergit Munkhammar (1986); The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky by Mark le Fanu (1987); Andrei Tarkovski by Guy Gauthier (1988); Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry by Maya Turovshaya (1989); Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest by Peter Green (1993); Five Filmmakers: Tarkovsky, Forman, Polanski, Szabó, Makavejev, ed. by Daniel J. Goulding (1994); The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue by Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie (1994); The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema by Juhani Pallasmaa (2001); Andreĭ Tarkovskiĭ: arkhivy, dokumenty, vospominaniia, avtor-sostavitelʹ P.D. Volkova (2002); Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, edited by John Gianvito (2006); Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema by Robert Bird (2008); Tarkovsky, edited by Nathan Dunne (2008); Andrei Tarkovsky by Sean Martin (2011); Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer (2012); Andreĭ Tarkovskiĭ: zhiznʹ na kreste by Liudmila Boiadzhieva (2012); Andrei Tarkovsky: The Collector of Dreams by Layla Alexander-Garrett; translated from the Russian by Maria Amadei Ashot; edited by David Holohan and Layla Alexander-Garrett (2012); Poetry and Film: Artistic Kinship between Arsenii and Andrei Tarkovsky, compiled by Kitty Hunter Blair (2014); Andrei Tarkovsky: A Life on the Cross by Lyudmila Boyadzhieva (2014); Beyond the Frame: The Films and Film Theory of Andrei Tarkovsky by Terence McSweeney (2015); Costumes for the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky by Nelli Fomina (2015); Andrey Tarkovsky: Life and Work: Film by Film, Stills, Polaroids & Writings by Andrei Tarkovsky, et al. (2019); Perfect in Weakness: Faith in Tarkovsky's Stalker by Colin Heber-Percy (2019); Andrei Tarkovsky's Sounding Cinema: Music and Meaning from Solaris to The Sacrifice by Tobias Pontara (2020); The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time by Nariman Skakov (2012); Space Exploration on Film by Paul Meehan (2022); Andrei Tarkovsky: Philosophical Illuminations by Alexander Kozin (2022) Selected films and books:
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