Andrei Tarkovsky Overview

Tarkovsky's poetic films, interwoven with loose narrative threads and strikingly sublime images, demand a lot from the viewer, but return much more. In his signature piece "Andrei Rublev" (1969), a three-hour exposition on the fifteenth-century painter, Tarkovsky takes the viewer through... [more]

Tarkovsky's poetic films, interwoven with loose narrative threads and strikingly sublime images, demand a lot from the viewer, but return much more. In his signature piece "Andrei Rublev" (1969), a three-hour exposition on the fifteenth-century painter, Tarkovsky takes the viewer through series of scenes that jump one to the next with no seeming coherence or linear structure. Shots of everyday life in the countryside are interspliced with recurring symbolic imagery such as a jug of milk shattering on the floor, lovers levitating in ecstasy, and characters struck by an invisible hand; each image transitions to the next until the gaze is gradually arrested by the whole of this meticulously crafted cinematic experience. Each scene, quietly lensed, not obtrusively explained, leaves a stark impression; the kinetic thought process can then synthesize these into its own meanings. Tarkovsky's belief in the visual is thus clear: "The image is an impression of the truth, a glimpse of the truth permitted to us in our blindness." Noted as the most famous Soviet filmmaker since Sergei Eisenstein, Tarkovsky was heavily influenced by the classical education provided by his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, a well-known poet. To a certain extent, Tarkovsky was able to evade Marxist restrictions on art and his government's emphasis on Social Realism. (He defected to the West just prior to his death from cancer.) His films have religious subtexts, as in his debut, "Ivan's Childhood" (1962), and often focus on spiritual battles. Tarkovsky's artistic motivation also seems to have been spiritually borne: "The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by miracle." Although Tarkovksy's dream-like cinema compiles shards of inner lucidity that initially seem incoherent, the overall effect of his films is both haunting and elegiac when consumed as a subconscious whole. [show less]