Andrei Tarkovsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrei Tarkovsky was born on the 4th of April 1932 in the village of Zavrazhye, a small settlement in what is now the Kostroma Oblast of Russia. He would go on to direct just seven feature films in his lifetime. Yet Ingmar Bergman, one of the most celebrated directors in cinema history, called him the greatest of all filmmakers, saying he invented a new language true to the nature of film. That is a remarkable claim. What kind of films could earn that verdict? What drove a Soviet director to leave his homeland in secret, never to return? And what was the true cost of the film Stalker, the movie that may have killed him?

  Tarkovsky died on the 29th of December 1986, at the age of 54, of lung cancer. His cinematographer, his wife, and one of his most trusted actors all died from the same type of cancer. A sound designer on Stalker believed the cause was a chemical plant upstream from the film's shooting locations. These are the questions his life opens up: about art, about sacrifice, about a man who claimed himself to be immortal in a documentary filmed shortly before his terminal diagnosis.

• 2. Roots and Restlessness

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  Tarkovsky's father, Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky, was a poet and translator, born in Yelysavethrad to parents of Ukrainian parentage. His mother, Maria Ivanova Vishnyakova, had graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute and later worked as a proofreader. The household Andrei grew up in was already saturated with language, literature, and a fraught relationship with Soviet authority.

  His paternal grandfather was a Polish nobleman who worked as a bank clerk. His maternal grandmother, Vera Nikolayevna Vishnyakova, belonged to a Russian noble family whose history stretched back to the 17th century. Among her relatives was Admiral Fyodor Dubasov, a figure so associated with the old order that she had to conceal the connection throughout the Soviet era.

  Andrei's father left the family in 1937, and when war came in 1941, he volunteered for the army. He returned in 1943 having been shot in one of his legs, an injury that eventually required amputation due to gangrene. He had been awarded the Order of the Red Star. The family, meanwhile, evacuated from Moscow to Yuryevets, living with Andrei's maternal grandmother through the worst of the war years.

  From November 1947 to spring 1948, Tarkovsky was in hospital with tuberculosis. He later described himself in his school years as a troublemaker and poor student, though he managed to graduate. His instincts pulled him in several directions at once: from 1951 to 1952 he studied Arabic at the Oriental Institute in Moscow, then dropped out to join a year-long research expedition to the river Kureyka near Turukhansk in the Krasnoyarsk Province. It was while working as a prospector in the taiga that he decided to study film.

• 3. Film School and First Films

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  Upon returning from the taiga in 1954, Tarkovsky applied to the State Institute of Cinematography, known by its Russian initials VGIK, and was admitted to the directing program. His teacher was Mikhail Romm, who gave students considerable freedom and stressed the independence of the director. Romm trained many students who would later become influential filmmakers, and Tarkovsky was perhaps the most consequential of them.

  The Khrushchev Thaw that followed Stalin's death in 1953 opened Soviet cultural life in ways that proved decisive for Tarkovsky. Foreign film production entered the country, and he was able to see work by the Italian neorealists, the French New Wave, and directors including Kurosawa, Buñuel, Bergman, Bresson, Wajda, and Mizoguchi. Fellow student Shavkat Abdusalmov later recalled how Tarkovsky was particularly fascinated by Japanese cinema, struck by how ordinary actions were elevated into something luminous on screen.

  In 1956, Tarkovsky directed his first student short, an adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway story called The Killers. In 1959, he and classmate Andrei Konchalovsky wrote a script together called The Steamroller and the Violin, which they sold to Mosfilm. The film became Tarkovsky's graduation project, earning his diploma in 1960 and winning First Prize at the New York Student Film Festival in 1961. That same year, he and classmate Irma Raush had married in April 1957, while she was still a fellow student at VGIK.

• 4. Five Films Under Soviet Watch

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  Ivan's Childhood arrived in 1962 when Tarkovsky inherited the project from director Eduard Abalov, who had been forced to abandon it. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival that year. It also brought Tarkovsky his first son, Arseny, born on the 30th of September 1962.

  Andrei Rublev followed in 1966, a portrait of the 15th-century Russian icon painter. The film carried a budget of more than 1 million rubles, a significant sum for the period. Soviet authorities refused to release it, permitting only a single screening in Moscow in 1966. Tarkovsky was forced to cut the film multiple times, resulting in several different versions. It was not widely shown in the Soviet Union until 1971, in a cut version. A version screened at Cannes in 1969 won the FIPRESCI prize.

  Solaris came in 1972, adapted from Stanislaw Lem's science fiction novel. Tarkovsky had worked on the script as early as 1968, alongside screenwriter Friedrich Gorenstein. At Cannes, it won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and received a nomination for the Palme d'Or.

  Mirror, shot between 1973 and 1974, was the most personal film of his Soviet career, drawing on his childhood and incorporating poems written by his father. He had worked on its screenplay since 1967, under the consecutive working titles Confession, White Day, and A White, White Day. Soviet authorities categorized it as a third-category film, restricting it to third-class cinemas and workers' clubs. Few prints were made and the filmmakers received no financial return. The threat of being accused of wasting public funds hung over everyone involved.

  Stalker, completed in 1979 and inspired by the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, was shadowed by catastrophe during production. Improper development of the negatives destroyed all the exterior footage already shot. Relations between Tarkovsky and cinematographer Georgy Rerberg broke down entirely, and Alexander Knyazhinsky was brought in as replacement. In April 1978, Tarkovsky suffered a heart attack, delaying the film further. He had first met the Strugatsky brothers in 1971 and remained in contact with them until his death. Stalker won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes.

• 5. Exile and the Final Films

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  During the summer of 1979, Tarkovsky traveled to Italy and shot the documentary Voyage in Time with his longtime friend Tonino Guerra. He returned to Italy in 1980 for an extended trip, and the two men completed the script for Nostalghia. When Tarkovsky came back in 1982 to begin filming, the Soviet studio Mosfilm withdrew its backing. He secured funding from the Italian broadcaster RAI instead.

  Nostalghia screened at Cannes in 1983, where it won the FIPRESCI prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Tarkovsky also shared a special prize called the Grand Prix du cinéma de création with Robert Bresson. Soviet authorities lobbied behind the scenes to prevent the film from receiving the Palme d'Or. That intervention decided something in Tarkovsky. He had already been thinking about whether he could ever work freely inside the Soviet system again.

  On the 10th of July 1984, at a press conference in Milan, he announced that he would remain in Western Europe. He stated plainly: "I am not a Soviet dissident, I have no conflict with the Soviet Government." But he also said that returning home would leave him unemployed. His son Andriosha was still in the Soviet Union at that point and could not leave the country. On the 28th of August 1985, Tarkovsky was processed as a Soviet defector at a refugee camp in Latina, Italy, registered under serial number 13225/379.

  The Sacrifice was shot in Sweden in 1985, with a crew that included many veterans of Ingmar Bergman's productions, among them cinematographer Sven Nykvist and lead actor Erland Josephson. Nykvist complained that Tarkovsky frequently took the camera away from him to look through it himself. Nykvist also later said choosing to work with Tarkovsky was one of the best decisions he had ever made.

  In the making-of documentary for The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky was filmed walking outside, telling the camera he considered himself immortal and had no fear of dying. Before that year ended, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Treatment began in Paris in January 1986. His son Andrei Jr. was finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union and joined him there. The Sacrifice was dedicated to Andrei Jr. When the film won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury, the FIPRESCI prize, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes, Tarkovsky was too ill to attend. His son collected the awards.

• 6. The Theory of Sculpting Time

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  In a 1962 interview, Tarkovsky stated that all arts, and cinema most of all, must be emotional and act upon the heart. That conviction shaped an entire filmmaking philosophy he eventually named "sculpting in time." The idea held that cinema's unique capacity is to alter the viewer's experience of time itself. By using long takes and few cuts, he aimed to give audiences a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship between one moment and another.

  He developed a close working relationship with cinematographer Vadim Yusov between 1958 and 1972. Tarkovsky would spend two full days preparing for a single long take, and because of that preparation, usually only one take was needed.

  Recurring visual elements across his films included water, fire, rain falling inside buildings, reflections, levitation, and long panning camera movements with characters reappearing in the foreground. He once explained levitation scenes specifically as possessing great power for their photogenic value and magical inexplicability. Water, clouds, and reflections he used for their surreal beauty and their symbolism.

  Up through Mirror, his films explored the sculptural theory of time directly. After Mirror, he announced a shift: he would concentrate on the dramatic unities proposed by Aristotle, a single concentrated action in a single place within a single day.

  His relationship to color was deliberately fractured. In 1966, he dismissed color film as a commercial gimmick. His reasoning was that in everyday life, people do not consciously notice colors most of the time; therefore color in film should appear only to emphasize certain moments rather than continuously. Andrei Rublev is otherwise black and white but ends with a color epilogue showing Rublev's authentic icon paintings. All his subsequent films alternate between color and monochrome, with Stalker using sepia sequences.

  In 1986, the same year he died, he published Sculpting in Time with the University of Texas Press, setting down his film theory in permanent form. His diaries, sometimes called Martyrology, covering 1970 to 1986, were published posthumously in 1989, with an English translation appearing in 1991.

• 7. A Cinema of Spiritual Conviction

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  Tarkovsky told film historian Leonid Kozlov in 1972 his ten favorite films. The list included Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette by Robert Bresson; Winter Light, Wild Strawberries, and Persona by Ingmar Bergman; Nazarin by Luis Bunuel; City Lights by Charlie Chaplin; Ugetsu by Kenji Mizoguchi; Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa; and Woman in the Dunes by Hiroshi Teshigahara. He noted that with the exception of City Lights, none of the films were from the early silent era; he regarded the very beginning of cinema as merely a prelude to the art form.

  Notably absent from the list were any Soviet films, though Tarkovsky held directors like Boris Barnet, Sergei Parajanov, and Alexander Dovzhenko in high regard. He considered Dovzhenko's Earth to be his cinematic university and watched it whenever he was about to begin a new project. He quoted Dovzhenko's grasp of the boundary between nature and mankind as an understanding of where the sense of life resides.

  The spiritual dimension of his work was real but refused categorization. Although he considered himself a religious person, he had little interest in the institutional church. His films draw from Christian mysticism, existentialism, paganism, and anthroposophy. He was deeply influenced by the existentialist writings of Dostoevsky and planned a film about that writer that was never made. He was also drawn to East Asian traditions including Taoism and Zen Buddhism, which recur in the films, and he was fascinated by Haiku and its capacity to create images that mean nothing beyond themselves.

  His critique of Western culture was pointed: he saw it as overly rationalistic, egoistic, and materialistic, more focused on monetary profit than on beauty, truth, or selflessness. His diaries show these perceptions hardened significantly during his years of exile. The artist, in his philosophy, carries a quasi-religious duty to disavow the self in service of a higher spiritual purpose. He saw characters in Andrei Rublev, Stalker, and The Sacrifice as embodiments of that ideal.

• 8. Legacy Across Borders

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  Akira Kurosawa described Tarkovsky's sensitivity as overwhelming and astounding, saying it almost reaches a pathological intensity, and added that he knew of no equal among film directors alive at the time. Abbas Kiarostami said Tarkovsky's works separated him from physical life entirely. Lars von Trier dedicated his 2009 film Antichrist to Tarkovsky, and when asked about Mirror, said: "I've seen it 20 times. It's the closest thing I've got to a religion."

  Nuri Bilge Ceylan recalled walking out of Solaris at the halfway point when he first encountered it as a college student. He later came to regard Mirror as the greatest film ever made, having seen it around 20 times. Michael Haneke voted for Mirror in the 2002 Sight and Sound directors' poll and reported having seen it at least 25 times. Three of Tarkovsky's films, Andrei Rublev, Mirror, and Stalker, appeared in the Sight and Sound 2012 poll of the 100 greatest films of all time.

  Sergei Parajanov credited Ivan's Childhood as his main inspiration to become a filmmaker. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu described the first time he saw a Tarkovsky film as a shock that revealed to him how many more layers film could contain. Wim Wenders dedicated Wings of Desire to Tarkovsky alongside Francois Truffaut and Yasujiro Ozu. Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto described his penultimate solo album, async, as a soundtrack for an imaginary Tarkovsky film.

  Tarkovsky was buried on the 3rd of January 1987 in the Russian Cemetery in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois in France. The gravestone inscription, conceived by his wife Larisa, reads: To the man who saw the Angel. Larisa, who died in 1998, is buried beside him. In 1990, he was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize. An asteroid, 3345 Tarkovskij, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina in 1982, bears his name. The Andrei Tarkovsky Museum opened in Yuryevets, his childhood town, in 1996.