Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky was born on April 4, 1932, in the village of Zavrazhye on the Volga, in what was then the Ivanovo Industrial Region of the Soviet Union ^[1]. His father, Arseny Tarkovsky, was a poet and translator whose verse would later appear, read aloud, in his son's films. His mother, Maria Vishnyakova, had studied literature and worked as a proofreader at a Moscow printing house. The family moved to Moscow, and after Arseny left them in the mid 1930s, Maria raised Andrei and his younger sister Marina largely on her own ^[2].

The war years marked him deeply. During the German invasion the family evacuated to Yuryevets, a small town on the Volga near his birthplace, and the rural landscapes of that period, wooden houses, rain, rivers, and fields, recur throughout his mature work, most explicitly in the autobiographical film Mirror ^[2]. Back in Moscow he attended school, studied music and drawing, and in 1951 enrolled at the Institute of Oriental Studies to learn Arabic, a course he abandoned after little more than a year ^[1].

Before turning to cinema he took an unusual detour: in 1953 he joined a geological research expedition to the Turukhansk region of Siberia, spending months in the taiga along the Kureyka River ^[2]. He later credited this experience with settling his decision to become a filmmaker. In 1954 he was admitted to the directing course at the VGIK, the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where he studied under Mikhail Romm, a teacher known for encouraging independence in his students ^[1].

At VGIK Tarkovsky formed a close working friendship with fellow student Andrei Konchalovsky, with whom he wrote scripts, and absorbed the wave of foreign cinema that reached Moscow during the post-Stalin thaw. His diploma film, The Steamroller and the Violin (1961), co-written with Konchalovsky, won a prize at the New York student film festival and secured him a place at the Mosfilm studio ^[2].

His first feature arrived almost by accident. Mosfilm had shelved a troubled adaptation of Vladimir Bogomolov's war story Ivan, and the young graduate was handed the salvage job. The result, Ivan's Childhood (1962), the account of a twelve year old orphan working as a reconnaissance scout on the Eastern Front, shared the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival that year and announced a startling new talent ^[3]. Jean-Paul Sartre publicly defended the film in the French press against critics who read it as either propaganda or pessimism ^[2].

The follow-up proved far harder to deliver. Andrei Rublev, a three hour portrait of the medieval Russian icon painter set against the violence of the fifteenth century, was completed in 1966 but troubled Soviet authorities with its brutality and its religious themes. The film was withheld from general Soviet release for years; a print shown out of competition at Cannes in 1969 won the international critics' prize, and the film gradually acquired a reputation as one of the great achievements of the medium ^[3]. The long struggle over Rublev set the pattern for Tarkovsky's career at home: official prestige abroad, obstruction and delay from the state film bureaucracy in Moscow ^[4].

Any account of Andrei Tarkovsky achievements begins with the fact that he completed only seven features in a quarter century, yet each one is studied, restored, and screened worldwide. Solaris (1972), adapted from Stanislaw Lem's novel about a sentient ocean planet that materializes human memories, won the Grand Prix Special du Jury at Cannes and was received in the West as a philosophical answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a comparison Tarkovsky himself resisted ^[3].

Mirror (1975) abandoned linear narrative altogether, interleaving childhood memories, newsreel footage, dreams, and his father's poems into a portrait of one Russian family across the twentieth century. Goskino officials found it incomprehensible and restricted its distribution, yet it has since climbed steadily in international critics' polls; the 2012 Sight and Sound survey of directors placed Mirror among the ten greatest films ever made ^[5]. Stalker (1979), loosely drawn from the Strugatsky brothers' novel Roadside Picnic, followed three men into a forbidden Zone toward a room said to grant innermost wishes. Its production was notoriously difficult, requiring the film to be substantially reshot after laboratory problems ruined early footage ^[2].

Tarkovsky also articulated a theory to match the practice. His book Sculpting in Time, first published in the West in 1986, argued that the director's essential material is time itself, captured in the rhythm of shots rather than in montage, and it remains a standard text in film schools ^[6]. Among the facts most often cited about him is the admiration of his peers: Ingmar Bergman described Tarkovsky as the greatest of contemporary directors, the inventor of a new language of film ^[4].

In 1957 Tarkovsky married Irma Raush, a fellow VGIK student who acted in Ivan's Childhood and played the deaf mute girl in Andrei Rublev. Their son Arseny was born in 1962; the marriage ended in divorce ^[2]. In 1970 he married Larisa Kizilova, who had worked as an assistant director on Andrei Rublev and who remained his closest collaborator and manager of his affairs until his death. Their son, Andrei Andreyevich Tarkovsky, born in 1970, later became the custodian of his father's archive and directed a documentary about him ^[7].

Tarkovsky kept a diary from 1970 onward, published after his death under the title Martyrolog, which records money troubles, quarrels with Goskino, drafts of unrealized projects, and a persistent religious searching ^[7]. He read Russian religious philosophy, admired Bresson, Bergman, Dovzhenko, and Kurosawa, and was famously severe in his judgments of commercial cinema. Friends described a man who was demanding on set, superstitious, devoted to his dogs and his country house in Myasnoye, and convinced that art carried a spiritual responsibility ^[2].

His relationship with his father shadowed much of the work. Arseny Tarkovsky's poems are recited in Mirror, Stalker, and Nostalghia, and the theme of the absent or longed for father runs from Ivan's Childhood to The Sacrifice ^[4].

By the end of the 1970s Tarkovsky's position in the Soviet film industry had become nearly untenable: projects were rejected or delayed, and he was permitted to make roughly one film every five years. In 1980 he was named a People's Artist of the RSFSR, but the honor changed little in practice ^[2]. In 1982 he traveled to Italy to shoot Nostalghia, a co-production with RAI written with the screenwriter Tonino Guerra, about a Russian writer stranded in Tuscany and consumed by homesickness. The film shared the creation prize at Cannes in 1983, an award Tarkovsky believed Soviet officials had lobbied to diminish ^[3].

On July 10, 1984, at a press conference in Milan, he announced that he would not return to the Soviet Union, citing years of obstruction and the refusal of authorities to let his young son join him abroad ^[8]. The decision cost him access to his homeland, his house at Myasnoye, and for a time his child; his son Andrei was only allowed to leave the USSR in 1986, when his father was already gravely ill ^[7].

His final film, The Sacrifice, was shot in Sweden in 1985 on the island of Gotland with Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist and several of Bergman's regular actors. A parable about a man who offers everything he owns to avert nuclear war, it won the Grand Prix Special du Jury at Cannes in 1986; his son accepted the award because Tarkovsky, by then diagnosed with lung cancer, was too ill to attend ^[3]. He spent his last months in Paris undergoing treatment, completing the editing of The Sacrifice and revising Sculpting in Time. Andrei Tarkovsky died in Paris on December 29, 1986, at the age of 54, and was buried at the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois outside the city ^[8].

Rehabilitation at home came quickly after his death. During the glasnost years his films returned to Soviet screens, retrospectives followed, and in 1990 he was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize, the state's highest distinction ^[2]. Andrei Rublev, once shelved, is now routinely listed among the finest films ever made, and restorations of his work by Mosfilm and international archives keep the films in circulation in cinemas and on home video ^[5].

His influence on later directors is unusually explicit. Filmmakers as different as Bela Tarr, Lars von Trier (who dedicated Antichrist to him), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Andrey Zvyagintsev have acknowledged his example, and the long take aesthetic sometimes called slow cinema traces much of its lineage to him ^[4]. Stalker gave the Russian language a lasting word: the term entered common speech, and the film's Zone acquired an eerie afterlife when the 1986 Chernobyl exclusion area came to be described in its vocabulary ^[4].

For readers approaching an Andrei Tarkovsky biography today, the essential record consists of the seven features, the diaries, Sculpting in Time, and a growing scholarly literature, including full length studies by Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie and by the British critic Sean Martin ^[4][6]. An international film festival named Zerkalo (Mirror) is held in the Ivanovo region near his birthplace, and the Tarkovsky family foundation maintains his archive ^[7]. Few directors with so small a filmography have shaped the idea of what cinema can be so completely.