Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky
File:Tarkovsky v kresle.jpg
Birth name:	Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky
Date of birth:	April 4 1932(1932-04-04)
Birth location:	Zavrazhye, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Date of death:	December 29 1986 (aged 54)
Death location:	Paris, France
Spouse:	Irma Raush (1960-1963) Larisa Tarkovskya (1964-1986)

Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (Андре́й Арсе́ньевич Тарко́вский) (April 4, 1932 - December 29, 1986) was a Russian Soviet film director, opera director, writer, and actor. He is generally regarded as the foremost important and influential filmmaker of the post-war Soviet era in Russia and one of the greatest in the history of cinema.

Biography

Tarkovsky, son of the prominent poet Arseny Tarkovsky, was a product of the golden era of Soviet arts education. He was born and spent his childhood at the village of Zavrazhye in Kostroma Province.Born into Stalin's Russia, little is known in detail of his early life. Three things, however, were present that were to be important to his future film career; volumes of poetry, illustrated art books and sacred images from the Russian Orthodox church. Although the house where he was born is under the waters of the Gorky Reservoir, there is a museum dedicated to him in his native village.

Tarkovsky 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. For a time he worked as a geologist in Siberia.

    From his early years Tarkovsky expressed a desire to use the medium of film not only as entertainment or a sophisticated vehicle of propaganda(as Lenin had proposed) but as a means to speak to the soul of modern humanity. "Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual."

Tarkovsky's use of ambiguous images, Orthodox Christian themes and symbols and sometimes a brutal realism caused friction between himself and his sponsors. This led to interference 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. He made only seven major films in the course of a twenty five year career. 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 a suburb of Paris at the age of 54.

Andrei Tarkovsky, in spite of many setbacks, had worldwide influence. Ingmar Bergman remembered him as the finest contemporary filmaker. He was buried in a graveyard for Russian émigrés in the town of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Île-de-France, France. The inscription on Tarkovsky's grave reads "To the man who saw the Angel".

Work

Tarkovsky both in his life and work is not easy to classify. His treatment in film of the human condition was both very personal and universal, quintessentially Russian and transcultural. He saw himself in an almost sacramental role as a mediator through images and symbols between the seen and unseen worlds. "The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miricle...True affirmation of self can only be expressed as sacrifice."

is remembered as an individual who fought to maintain creative control.  This is most evident during his fight to have Mirror released despite the severe criticism he knew would accompany such a film's release.  This film tells the story of his life as a child, juxtaposes Soviet history, and the life of his mother.  Furthermore, it stated his obvious growing discontent with the restricting creative policies while working in the Soviet Union.  These restrictions placed upon him during his creative life raise the question of just how great an artist he was allowed to be.

File:Tarkovsky work.jpg

Andrei Tarkovsky at work

Tarkovsky's films are characterised by Christian and metaphysical themes, extremely long takes, and memorable images of exceptional beauty. Recurring motifs in his films are dreams, memory, childhood, running water accompanied by fire, rain indoors, reflections, levitation, and characters re-appearing in the foreground of long panning movements of the camera.

Tarkovsky developed a theory of cinema that he called "sculpting in time". By this he meant that the unique characteristic of cinema as a medium was to take our experience of time and alter it. Unedited movie footage transcribes time in real time. By using long takes and few cuts in his films, he aimed to give the viewers a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship of one moment in time to another.

Up to and including his film Mirror, Tarkovsky focused his cinematic works on exploring this theory. After Mirror, he announced that he would focus his work on exploring the dramatic unities proposed by Aristotle: a concentrated action, happening in one place, within the span of a single day. Stalker is, by his own account, the only film that truly reflects this ambition; ^{[citation needed]} it is also considered by many to be a near-perfect reflection of the sculpting in time theory.

Life

"...it seems to me that the individual today stands at a crossroad, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, turn to God." - Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986

Diary

Tarkovsky kept a fairly regular diary for much of his life. This published posthumously originally in 1989. The last entry was on December 15, 1986. His last words are "But now I have no strength left—that is the problem". This notion that he has no strength parallels the creative fight he had for much of his life in the film industry. After his death, his films, banned from the screens in the USSR, were given back to the Russian Public and his life's work is now celebrated and examined.

Filmography

• The Killers (1958) - Tarkovsky's first student film at VGIK, the Soviet State Film School. Based on the Ernest Hemingway short story.
• Concentrate (1958) - Tarkovsky's second student film at VGIK, the Soviet State Film School.
• There Will be No Leave Today (1959) - Tarkovsky's final student film at VGIK, the Soviet State Film School.
• The Steamroller and the Violin (1960) - Tarkovsky's graduation film from VGIK, the Soviet State Film School, cowritten with Andrei Konchalovsky.
• My Name is Ivan / Ivan's Childhood (1962) - Winner of Golden Lion for "Best Film" at 1962 Venice Film Festival. Set in the Second World War, this is Tarkovsky's most conventional feature film.
• Andrei Rublev (1966) - An epic based on the life of Andrei Rublev, the most famous medieval Russian icon painter.
• Solaris (1972) - based on the science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem.
• 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 Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
• Voyage in Time (1982) - a documentary made for Italian television while scouting locations for Nostalghia with Italian co-writer (and frequent screenwriter for Michelangelo Antonioni) Tonino Guerra.
• Nostalghia (1983) - A Russian scholar retraces the footsteps of an 18th century Russian composer in Italy. An encounter with a local lunatic - a man who believes he can save humanity by carrying a lit candle across an empty swimming pool - crystallizes the poet's melancholic sense of longing for his family, faith, and homeland.
• 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.

Screenplays

• The Steamroller and the Violin (1960), co-scripted with Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky
• My Name is Ivan / Ivan's Childhood (1961), Vladimir Bogomolov, Mikhail Papava (Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky both uncredited)
• Solaris (1972), co-scripted with Fridrikh Gorenshtein
• Light Wind (Ariel) (1972), co-scripted with Fridrikh Gorenshtein
• A White, White Day (1968, 1984), co-scripted with Aleksandr Misharin
• Hoffmanniana (1975, 1984)
• Stalker (1978), Boris Strugatsky, Arkady Strugatsky (Andrei Tarkovsky uncredited)
• Sardor (1978), co-scripted with Aleksandr Misharin
• Nostalghia (1978-1982), co-scripted with Tonino Guerra
• The Sacrifice (1984)

Subjects Tarkovsky proposed for future films

(as noted in his diary Martyrlog)

• Hamlet
• Rudolf Steiner (with Alexander Kluge)
• St Anthony

Stage productions

• Hamlet by Shakespeare (1977) - The Lenkom Theatre (Moscow)
• Boris Godunov, opera by Mussorgsky (1983) - Covent Garden (London)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

"Martyrlog", 1984

Cultural references

• Canadian band Joe Jack Wagner has a song entitled "In Tarkovsky's Words" on its debut album, The Only Non-Classical Album You'll Ever Need (2007).

Bibliography

• Sculpting In Time, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair (1987)
• Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair (1993)
• Collected Screenplays, translated by William Powell and Natasha Synessios (1999)
• Johnson, Vidat and Petrie, Graham, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Indiana University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1994

Works about Tarkovsky

Books

• Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series), edited by John Gianvito, University Press of Mississippi, 2006, ISBN 1-57806-220-9
• "The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky", by Mark Le Fanu, British Film Institute, 1987, ISBN 0-85170-194-9
• The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, by Vida T. Johnston and Graham Petrie, 1994, ISBN 0-253-20887-4
• Andrei Tarkovsky, by Sean Martin, Pocket Essentials, 2006, ISBN 1-904048-49-8
• Andrei Rublev, by Robert Bird, British Film Institute, 2005, ISBN 1-84457-038-X
• Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, ISBN 1-904303-11-0

Films

• Moscow Elegy
• Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

External links

• Nostalghia.com: Comprehensive website on Andrei Tarkovsky and his works
• Andrei Tarkovsky at the Internet Movie Database
• Andrei Tarkovsky at SensesOfCinema.com
• The Genius of Andrei Tarkovsky by Alan Pavelin
• Find-A-Grave biography
• Andrei Tarkovsky's favorite films
• The Man Who Saw an Angel
• Tarkovsky in Italy Interview
• Four filmed interviews with Tarkovsky, featuring behind the scenes footage from The Sacrifice
• Biographical article
• http://www.andreitarkovski.org/ : Website on Andrei Tarkovsky in Spanish and English
• Andrei Tarkovsky as photographer (Russian page)
• A poem (Первые cвидания) of Arseny Tarkovsky from The Mirror (in Russian)
• Not enough ("Только этого мало") from Stalker (in Russian)

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