From Russia with Love: Portrait of Tarkovsky

Ivan's Childhood

On July 30th this year Michelangelo Antonioni died. He was 95. On the same day Ingmar Bergman died. He was 89. This year marks Andrei Tarkovsky’s 75th birthday. Except that he died twenty-one years ago, on 29 December 1986, aged just 54. Though he made only seven feature films, they immediately became art-house classics. They helped define the West’s idea of brooding, contemplative, spiritual, philosophising “Russian-ness” and at the same time fitted neatly into Cold War ideas of the artist suffering at the hands of the Soviet state.

But that’s to crush him into our own idea of him.
A forthcoming festival, including not only all his features, but also documentaries, an exhibition of his polaroids and a play, with introductions by people who knew and worked with him, should broaden our perspective.
Hopefully it will also dispel some of our comfortable myths.

Tarkovsky exploded into world cinema with his first feature Ivan’s Childhood (1962). The plot - a 12 year-old wartime scout dies on a final mission – is standard Soviet issue, but the original director was fired and Tarkovsky took over and, fighting to include his trademark dream sequences, his rewrite made it completely his own.

While the struggles and pressures were replicated throughout his career, what is more astonishing is just how characteristic it is. He takes an existing genre and twists it slightly, adding a visual and aural repertoire that could only be his.

Dreams: places of happiness lost (Nostalgia, the title of his penultimate film, means, of course, to return home) or happiness cut short by waking.
 
The elements, purgatorial and soothing: fire, water, earth and air (he films, not the effect of the wind, but the wind itself).

Mirrors and water reflect (on) characters, while nature is unconcernedly simply itself.

Next, Andrei Rublev, a ‘biopic’ of the 15th-century icon-painter. Dark, violent, but ultimately redemptive, it became a battle of wills and, despite Tarkovsky’s appeals direct to the Soviet government, it was finally released only in 1971, five years after it was first approved.

During the fight Tarkovsky adapted Stanslaw Lem’s sci-fi novel Solaris, about a space-ocean and its mysterious powers. Seeing his story radically changed to a spiritual struggle with lost love and conscience, the rationalist Lem wanted to disassociate himself from the film.
 
But Tarkovsky was driving inexorably forward with variations on his personal concerns: family relationships, art, time, and redemption; his films a personal catechism, albeit ambiguous.
He showed life’s fluidity with miracles including hypnotherapy, telekinesis and, most magically, levitation.

Ironically, suspicious of cinema’s newness, he grounded it in history with references to paintings: basing compositions on them; having characters flip through art books or simply including reproductions of paintings: in Solaris’ space station Breughels transport us back to earth and the end echoes Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son.
So with music, starting with conventional scores, he first added electronic effects then pared away, relying increasingly on his beloved Bach.

The Mirror (1975), his most deeply personal film, contemplates his own youth, flitting between present and past, memory, dream and reality, colour and black-and-white; part-narrated through his father’s poems, and featuring (though not always recognisably) his mother, his wife and himself, sometimes playing multiple roles sometimes with different actors playing the same role.
Transfixingly beautiful, the meaning of its dream-imagery always stays hauntingly just beyond our intellectual grasp, while striking straight at our hearts.

The eponymous Stalker (1979) guides the Writer and the Scientist into the mysterious ‘zone’, a Chernobylesque landscape, bleak, threatening, something to be endured in return for some sort of redemption.
For four slow minutes on a railway flat truck, we watch each man’s thoughts etched on their silent faces, accompanied only by the wheels’ rhythmic clanking.

Now internationally famous, Tarkovsky planned an Italian film but, frustrated by the Soviets, defected to make Nostalghia about a Russian musicologist adrift in Italy, and somehow the two countries are fused into one mysterious place.

His anabasis continued to the island of Faro, home of Ingmar Bergman to make The Sacrifice an apocalyptic near-homage to that director.
Ivan’s Childhood ended with a dream of the boy running deliriously along the beach and coming face to face with a tree.
The Sacrifice, dedicated to his son Andrei Andreyevich, more calmly ends with a boy and a tree, bringing his career full circle.

Ill with throat cancer, Tarkovsky supervised the editing from what he must have known was his deathbed whilst desperately wrestling the Soviets’ permission for his son and wife to visit him, scenes unforgettably captured in Chris Marker’s A Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich.

Seven features, and many more unfulfilled plans.
But Tarkovsky was never going to be a prolific director.

In any case, if you count the scripts he wrote for other directors, the producing work, the acting roles and the theatre work, he was hardly a slacker.

As for his troubled career, even during the darkest times, it was a rare day when there wasn’t at least one Tarkovsky film being shown in Moscow. Nevertheless, he considered calling his diaries Martyrolog. It’s a measure of the uncontainable paradoxes of the man.

And his films’ intensity and multi-layeredness means we can endlessly revisit them, each time to drive deeper into their heart, to return satisfied and to know that there is still more to be mined.

John Riley

John  and  James de Carteret dicuss Tarkovsky's films on Friday 7th December  at 5pm  on I'm Ready for My Close-Up on Resonance 104.4fm www.resonancefm.com

A festival celebrating the works of Tarkovsky through an exhibition, screenings, documentaries and a play takes place throughout December. For more information visit  www.tarkovsky-festival.co.uk

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