Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский) (April 4, 1932 - December 28, 1986) was a Russian movie director, writer, and actor. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers of the Soviet era in Russia and one of the greatest in the history of cinema.
Biography
Tarkovsky was a product of the golden era of Soviet arts education. He received a classical education in Moscow, studying Music and Arabic, before training for over five years at the VGIK film school, studying directly under Mikhail Romm among others. Although the Orthodox Christian symbolism of his films led to prevarication and occasional suppression of the finished product by the Soviet authorities, the Soviet Mosfilm studio system enabled him to make films that would not have been commercially viable in the West. However, Tarkovsky's principal complaint about his treatment by the authorities was that he had many more ideas in him than he was allowed to bring to the screen, and in 1984, after shooting Nostalghia in Italy, he decided not to return to Russia. He made only one more film, The Sacrifice, a European co-production filmed in Sweden, before dying of cancer in Paris at the early age of 54.
Andrei Tarkovsky was buried in a graveyard for Russian émigrés in the town of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Île-de-France, France.
Work
His films are characterised by metaphysical themes, extremely long takes, and memorable images of exceptional beauty. Recurring motifs in his films are dreams, memory, childhood, running water, reflections, and characters re-appearing in the foreground of long panning movements of the camera.
Filmography
- The Steamroller and the Violin (1960) - Tarkovsky's graduation film from VGIK, the Soviet State Film School.
- My Name is Ivan / Ivan's Childhood (1962) - Set in the Second World War, this is Tarkovsky's most conventional feature film, although it still has moments of lyrical beauty.
- Andrei Rublev (1966) - An epic based on the life of Andrei Rublev, the most famous medieval Russian painter of icons.
- Solaris (1972) - based on the science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem and often said to be Tarkovsky's personal response to what he considered the coldness of Kubrick's 2001.
- The Mirror (1975) - A loosely autobiographical reconstruction of key scenes in Tarkovsky's life, the film he'd tried to make earlier but abandoned for Solaris (we can note thematic ties between them). Said by Tarkovsky to be closest to his own vision of cinema.
- Stalker (1979) - inspired by the novel A Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
- Tempo di Viaggio/Italian Journey (1982) - a documentary made for Italian television while scouting locations for Nostalghia.
- Nostalghia (1983) - A Russian historian retraces the footsteps of one of his countrymen in Italy two hundred years before and his encounter with a mentally disturbed man in the present that rekindles a sense of homesickness.
- The Sacrifice (1986) - The film is about the prospect of nuclear annihilation and man's spiritual response to this and other dilemmas set in counterpoint to a minor fable of failed adultery.
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