Andrei Tarkovsky is the most celebrated Russian filmmaker since
Eisenstein, and one of the most important directors to have emerged
during the 1960s and 70s.
Although he made only seven features, each one was a major landmark in
cinema, the most well-known of them being the mediaeval epic Andrei
Rublev - widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time - and
the autobiographical Mirror, set during the Russia of Stalin's purges
in the 1930s and the years of stagnation under Brezhnev. Both films
landed Tarkovsky in considerable trouble with the authorities, and he
gained a reputation for being a tortured - and ultimately martyred -
filmmaker. Despite the harshness of the conditions under which he
worked, Tarkovsky built up a remarkable body of work.
He burst upon the international scene in 1962 with his debut feature
Ivan's Childhood, which won the Golden Lion at Venice and immediately
established him as a major filmmaker. During the 1970s, he made two
classic ventures into science-fiction, Solaris, regarded at the time
as being the Soviet reply to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and later
remade by Steven Soderbergh, and Stalker, which was thought to have
predicted the Chernobyl disaster. Harassed at home, Tarkovsky went into
exile and made his last two films in the West, where he also published
his classic work of film and artistic theory, Sculpting in Time. Since
his death in Paris in 1986, his reputation continued - and continues -
to grow.
Sean Martin considers the whole of Tarkovsky's oeuvre, from the classic
student film The Steamroller and the Violin, across the full-length
films, to the later stage works and Tarkovsky's writings, paintings and
photographs. Martin also seeks to demystify Tarkovsky as a 'difficult'
director, whilst also celebrating his radical aesthetic of long takes
and tracking shots, which Tarkovsky was to dub 'imprinted' or 'sculpted'
time, and to make a case for Tarkovsky's position not just as an
important filmmaker, but also as an artist who speaks directly about the
most important spiritual issues of our time.
