Andrei Tarkovsky: Sculpting in Time

August 4–30, 2018

A tribute to the revered Russian director whose visionary films infuse images of the world with metaphysical mystery.

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Nostalghia
Stalker
Solaris
The Sacrifice

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Past Films

Ivan’s Childhood
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1962
BAMPFA Collection Print
Saturday, August 4 6 PM
Lyrical and brutal by turns, Tarkovsky’s first feature tells of a child’s experiences during World War II. “Tarkovsky would go on to make grander, weightier, more iconic films, but it’s tough to argue he ever made a better one” (Time Out).
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Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1966
Thursday, August 9 7 PM
Tarkovsky’s epic, otherworldly portrait of the fifteenth-century Russian icon painter is “a superproduction gone ideologically berserk” (Village Voice). “The best arthouse film of all time” (The Guardian).
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Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1972
Thursday, August 16 7 PM
In Tarkovsky’s influential 1972 masterwork, based on a famous novel by Stanislaw Lem, “the alien world is one immense ocean, the ocean is a brain, and the brain may be our own” (Village Voice).
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The Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1974
Saturday, August 18 8 PM
Tarkovsky’s most autobiographical work, a collection of memories of a young boy coming of age, invented “a new language, true to the nature of film . . . life as a dream” (Ingmar Bergman).
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Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1979
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
Thursday, August 23 7 PM
A writer, a scientist, and their “stalker” guide venture into a mysterious wasteland known as the Zone. “A dense, complex, often contradictory, and endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness” (Slant).
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Nostalghia
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1983
Saturday, August 25 8 PM
Tarkovsky’s breathtaking journey through the ruined but magical spaces of Tuscany follows a Russian man who feels the longing for home, closure, and the absolute that the film’s title describes. “Not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours” (J. Hoberman).
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Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1979
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
Sunday, August 26 6:30 PM
A writer, a scientist, and their “stalker” guide venture into a mysterious wasteland known as the Zone. “A dense, complex, often contradictory, and endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness” (Slant).
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The Sacrifice
Andrei Tarkovsky
Sweden, France, 1986
Thursday, August 30 7 PM
A retired actor and his family find themselves on a remote Baltic island when word arrives of nuclear war in Tarkovsky’s elegiac final film, shot in Sweden by the great Sven Nykvist.
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Andrei Tarkovsky: Sculpting in Time

August 4–30, 2018

“Artists are divided into those who create their own inner world, and those who recreate reality,” wrote Andrei Tarkovsky. “I undoubtedly belong to the first.” Born in 1932, the son of a prominent poet, Tarkovsky turned to cinema to capture “that most captivating quality of all art,” the “unspoken elusiveness” of feeling and dreams rather than the dull reality of language, story, or genre. “Tarkovsky is for me the greatest,” wrote Ingmar Bergman, “the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”

Fittingly for an artist who came of age during an era of Soviet doublespeak and manipulation of facts, Tarkovsky distrusted words and traditional narratives as tools of creation. “Words are too inert to express emotion,” notes a character in The Mirror. Genre? “As cold as the tomb,” Tarkovsky wrote. Even the quick-cut editing style of most filmmakers introduced too much control; “it leaves no ‘air,’” he wrote of Eisenstein’s fast-paced montage. The long take became Tarkovsky’s primary mode of expression, the tool with which he could begin “sculpting in time” (the title of his book on cinema) and allow viewers the freedom to breathe. Yet earth, wind, water, and fire infuse all aspects of his imagery, grounding metaphysical visions and emotions in a literally elemental sense of the natural world.

Inspired by the writers and artists of his beloved Russia (and by Dostoevsky above all), Tarkovsky finally fled the Soviet Union in 1984, after years of government censorship and interference. He died only two years later, leaving behind a body of work that has only grown in power and influence. “Art must transcend as well as observe,” he wrote; “its role is to bring spiritual vision to bear on reality.” The Soviet Union has long since faded, but Tarkovsky’s art remains.

Jason Sanders, Film Note Writer

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Series organized by Associate Film Curator Kate MacKay. Thanks to Brian Belovarac, Janus Films; and Jonathan Hertzberg, Kino Lorber, for their assistance.