The Poetry of Time: Andrei Tarkovsky

Influential Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) "invented a new language, true to the nature of film" (Ingmar Bergman). This complete retrospective extends from Tarkovsky's powerful first film, Ivan's Childhood (1962), to his final, the elegiac The Sacrifice (1986).

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Ivan's Childhood
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1962
Introduction/Nariman Skakov

Saturday, June 27 6:00 PM
Lyrical and brutal by turns, the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's first feature tells of a child's experiences during WWII. “A poetically directed antiwar film that also shows the beauty of the landscape” (SFIFF 1962).
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Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1966
Saturday, July 4 7:00 PM
Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic, otherworldly portrait of the 15th-century Russian icon-painter is “a superproduction gone ideologically berserk” (Village Voice).
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The Steamroller and the Violin
Andrei Arsenevich Tarkovskii
Soviet Union, 1961
Thursday, July 9 7:30 PM
Tarkovsky’s diploma film follows the unlikely friendship between a frail young violinist and a gruff older steamroller operative. With Voyage in Time, on Tarkovsky and screenwriter Tonino Guerra’s travels across Italy.
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The Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1976
Saturday, July 11 8:45 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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Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1972
Thursday, July 16 7:30 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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Nostalghia
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1983
New 35mm Print!
Saturday, July 18 8:30 PM
Andrei 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. "Nostalghia is not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours” (J. Hoberman).
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Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky
USSR, 1979
Imported Print!
Thursday, July 23 7:30 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
New 35mm Print!
Saturday, July 25 8:15 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.
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The Poetry of Time: Andrei Tarkovsky

“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.”

"Art must transcend as well as observe."

Fittingly for an artist who came of age during an era of Soviet double-speak 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 in which he could begin “sculpting in time” (to borrow from 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 curated by Senior Film Curator Susan Oxtoby. Thanks to Gary Palmucci, Kino Lorber, and Eric Litnaitzky, Contemporary Films, for their assistance.