Programme Notes: Andrei Tarkovsky

In the niche field of art cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky is the equivalent of a rock star. Routinely described in superlatives, the Russian director has attracted a legion of devotees, entranced by the lingering and mysterious beauty of his films. Tarkovsky himself has played a part in this mythologising, leaving behind diaries, notes and theoretical writings brimming with reflections on his cinema’s lofty spiritual mission. Decades of critical and scholarly attention have only added to the legend, which has even spilled over into pop culture. Inspired in part by Tarkovsky’s film, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is now also the name of a first-person shooter video game series.

Tarkovsky’s huge legacy rests on a slim filmography. His debut feature Ivan’s Childhood (1962), winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, immediately established his international reputation. Yet acclaim abroad did not translate into total creative freedom at home. Tarkovsky’s deeply existential films, replete with anguished characters and religious allusions, rubbed against the optimistic imperatives of Socialist Realism and the atheist ideology of the Soviet state. Andrei Rublev (1966), based on the life of the 15th-century Russian icon painter, spent five years in limbo before reaching Soviet audiences. Despite his growing prestige, clashes with Goskino, the Soviet film agency, continued through the 1970s. Bookended by his science-fiction adaptations, Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), that decade finds at its centre The Mirror (1975), Tarkovsky’s most unconventional and autobiographical film. In 1982, Tarkovsky left the Soviet Union, making his final two films in exile: Nostalghia (1983) in Italy, and The Sacrifice (1986), shot in Sweden and released in the same year of his untimely death.

Tarkovsky sits at the confluence of illustrious cinematic lineages. Lauded by the likes of Bergman and Kurosawa, his work swiftly joined a transcendental strand of European modernism represented by Dreyer, Rossellini and Bresson. Though these directors differed in style, they shared with Tarkovsky the conviction that the camera’s ability to record material reality acted as a gateway to a spiritual realm: through film, the physical reaches out into the metaphysical. A major precursor of the durational style favoured in contemporary ‘slow cinema’, Tarkovsky’s influence can be felt today in the works of Aleksandr Sokurov, Terrence Malick, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Béla Tarr and Carlos Reygadas.

At its best, Tarkovsky’s work can induce the kind of philosophical reverie that has made him such a towering figure in global art cinema. Perpetually haunted by war and catastrophe, his cinema is unapologetic and unafraid to tackle big questions. But its high-minded seriousness, materialised in virtuoso, painterly long takes, can also alienate. With the same fervour his work gathers supporters, it cultivates detractors for whom it is ponderous and self-important. It also reproduces some tired, gendered tropes of the ‘grand master’ tradition, exposing the dangers of the cult of the auteur: the tortured souls doing philosophy chat are all chaps, while women are often nowhere to be seen or heard, except in marginal or thinly developed roles. Confronted with this question in a now infamous 1984 interview, Tarkovsky’s medieval answer was that a woman’s meaning lies in ‘total devotion to the man’. Sometimes rock stars fall off the pedestal.

To reduce Tarkovsky’s cinema solely to representation, however, is to miss something fundamental about its enigmatic pull. Working with regular collaborators, including cinematographer Vadim Yusov and avant-garde composer Eduard Artemyev, Tarkovsky crafted a distinctly otherworldly cinema. For obvious reasons, science fiction is the genre most often associated with his work, yet some images and sounds could easily belong to a horror film. Dreams, reality, flashbacks, visions: the thresholds between these states often dissolve in the Tarkovskian universe, bleeding into an intricately textured world made of waterlogged landscapes, mist-shrouded fields, dripping ceilings and decaying interiors. Few directors have harnessed the haunting possibilities of elemental imagery and sound as evocatively as Tarkovsky. It is, to be sure, an apocalyptic world, but a strangely hypnotic one.

Tarkovsky’s cinema is an atmospheric cinema, in the double sense of the word. When we describe something as ‘atmospheric’, be it a film, a song or even a place, we often mean that it has an indefinable yet somewhat tangible emotional quality or mood. But the word atmosphere, as we know, also has a meteorological dimension, its Greek etymology meaning a ‘sphere of vapours’. In Tarkovsky’s films, the two senses of the word are indissoluble: bodies and landscapes are continually filmed through the thin film of smoke, mist, haze and fog, producing atmospheres out of thin air, literally so.

Drifting across the screen, these nebulous formations lend visual form to the passing of time, Tarkovsky’s central formal concern. Like other Soviet filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov before him, Tarkovsky theorised his own practice in the book Sculpting in Time, originally published in 1985. But contra Eisenstein, for whom the symbolic operations of montage comprise film’s essence, Tarkovsky’s main argument is that cinema, unlike any other medium, records the flow of time. Although this idea was not exactly new (it finds an important precedent in the postwar writings of French film critic André Bazin), Tarkovsky raised its stakes, and his theorising remains compelling. For him, the filmmaker’s task is to remain attuned to the ‘time-pressure’ recorded in each shot, ensuring that these unique temporal flows interact meaningfully over the course of a film. Editing, then, remains crucial, but less for its symbolism than for the overall rhythm it ‘sculpts’ out of recorded chunks of time. Incidentally, the sculptor in the editing room was the great Lyudmila Feiginova, who worked on Tarkovsky’s first five features and had a considerable influence over their final shape.

Tarkovsky’s theory of time-pressure offers a more nuanced way of understanding his films than the catch-all label of slow cinema that now often describes them. It draws attention to the different temporalities flowing through a film and the different feelings they may induce, including – why not? – boredom, somnolence, frustration, but also reverie, elation, even religious ecstasy if you’re into that sort of thing. Regardless, some images are likely to become seared in your mind, and you might spend a long time, perhaps a lifetime, trying to work out what it is about them that moves you so.