The Sculptor of Time — The Life and Works of Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky spent most of his life trying to achieve maximum truthfulness on screen and being as close as possible to life. He is hailed as one of the most complex filmmakers by cinephiles all around the globe and to completely understand his ideas one must witness the enigmatic films. In his memoirs, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on Cinema, he wrote that “modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.” And in all fairness, Tarkovsky does the opposite of what, according to him, the modern mass culture aims to do. His films are not just stories that begin from point A and end at point Z, touching every letter of the alphabet and moving on. Tarkovsky’s cinema puts pressure on every letter till the time it breaks, expanding the universe that embodies the meaning of his films. Even though he directed only seven feature films during his lifetime, his legacy is that of the movie pantheon’s greatest and his works are still revered as unique, hypnotic, and serene.
At the age of twenty-two, he joined the VGIK film school. It was an important stage in his life for it was here that he met Irma Raush, who he married in 1957 and for the first time, watched films by iconic filmmakers like Kurosawa, Bunuel, Bergman, and Bresson. All these directors had an immense impact on his life and especially on his cinematic works. His graduation project at VGIK, The Steamroller and the Violin (1961), earned him the highest possible distinction, won the First Prize at the New York Student Film Festival in 1961, and marked the beginning of a career that would be absorbed by the generations to come.
Tarkovsky’s cinema is unique and each idea that he tried to express, he did it with complete perfection and offered what he could to the aesthetic of cinema. His films are not entertaining and speak in a language that is hard to decipher. His first feature-length film, Ivan’s Childhood (1962) was a Soviet war drama film that placed him on the map among the great directors of the 20th century. This film was partially autobiographical since Tarkovsky himself endured through the war and for him “the past was more real than the present”. Jean-Paul Sartre applauded the ‘young director’ for his film and Ingmar Bergman went on to say that “My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.”
One has to endure the profound flow of his bespoke thoughts and even today, no one has been able to replicate the atmospheric gravity of his slow-paced shots. From the marshlands of Stalker to the waterlogged houses in Nostalghia (1983), all the images, even if picked out from the film and placed separately, are unforgettable. Even when Tarkovsky chose to direct Solaris (1972), a science fiction film, he gave a new meaning to the genre, exploring the human condition through the notion of extraterrestrial life. In Stalker (1979), another movie that hangs somewhere between existentialism and life in “The Zone”, he explored philosophical and psychological themes. Like all of his other films, Stalker contains drawn-out shots and he rejected the use of rapid montages. He believed that the right images can express emotions that cannot be expressed by words. Talking about the film, he wrote that “Stalker needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.” It wouldn’t be too extreme to say that Tarkovsky’s cinema isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. His films require re-viewing and revisiting multiples times in order to fully understand them. Even though their pace is slow it doesn’t require much persuasion to go back to them. He spoke the most through the silences, memories, and dreams and expected his viewers to not just watch, but to feel all that he wants to show.
After watching and re-watching his films many times, it is clear that to try and find an absolute meaning in his films is an exercise in futility. His films are based on stories which find meaning in the recurring images of four elemental symbols — earth, fire, air, and water and he didn’t believe in vocal communication of ideas through dialogues but through emotions that emanated from a single image. Elements were very important for Tarkovsky. Their capacity of defining our existence was perhaps what motivated him to use them so much. In The Mirror (1975), he combined fire and water with the simple movement of the camera capturing a burning structure and water dripping from the ceiling of a house. In Nostalghia, while Domenico pours gasoline on himself and self-immolates, Gorkachov, the protagonist, struggles to light a matchstick as he attempts to cross a lake with a candle in his hand. In Stalker, the ‘guide’ embraces the earth and smiles as if he is never going to feel its touch again. It was through these nuances that he conveyed his ideas. No other director is as rooted to the ground as him. Andrei Tarkovsky makes the viewers feel as if they’re watching the earth, feeling the warmth of a flame, and hearing water dripping for the first time in their life.
By calling his most personal work The Mirror, Tarkovsky proved that all art symbolizes the self. Structurally, the film is similar to Bergman’s Persona, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, and is fraught with dreams and images that are interspersed throughout. In the film, he explored his own life and through a juxtaposition of memories and war footages that delved into the realms of human consciousness and reality, he depicted the realities of Soviet Russia and WWII. Tarkovsky called his film the “associative laws of music and poetry” and explaining it further in Sculpting in Time, he wrote, “Never try to convey your idea to the audience — it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.”
But like all great poets, Tarkovsky found it hard to attain poetic freedom. His work and his life were marked by Soviet censorship and Tarkovsky spent the last seven years of his life in exile. He began the production of his film The First Day in 1979, set during the reign of Peter the Great in eighteenth-century Russia. To get his film approved by the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino), Tarkovsky submitted a script that didn’t carry the scenes which were critical of the state’s official atheism. After shooting almost half of the film, it became obvious to the Goskino officials that the original screenplay differed from what was submitted and they ordered to stop the shooting. Infuriated, Tarkovsky destroyed all the footage of the film and vowed to never work in the Soviet Union again. Thus began his exile and it was during this time that he shot his last two films.
In 1982, Tarkovsky started working on Nostalghia in Italy. The theme of the film was typical of the Russian dilemma: that of the artist abroad, suffering because of homesickness, and at the same time unable to live in his country or away from it. Like all his other films, Nostalghia too was autobiographical in nature, reflecting Tarkovsky’s inner turmoil. An entry in diaries from Rome reads, “25 May, A bad day. Terrible thoughts. I’m frightened. I am lost! I cannot live in Russia, nor can I live here.” Mosfilm, the largest film studio in Soviet Russia, had withdrawn from the project and had fired him. Tarkovsky was forced to turn to Italian studios. He completed the film in 1983 and it garnered major awards. Even in Italy, his work was received well. It won the Ecumenical Jury Award, the Best Director Award, and the FIPRESCI prize. It also went to Cannes Film Festival the same year. But even in exile, Tarkovsky encountered fierce resistance from Soviet authorities. At Cannes, Sergei Bondarchuk, the head of the Soviet delegation, successfully campaigned against the award of Palme d’Or to his film. In the end, Tarkovsky shared a prize at the festival with Robert Bresson. In an interview he noted, “I was baffled, hurt, and distressed. Goskino did everything they could to embarrass me in front of the festival, the audience, and the press.” He also noted that none of the representatives from Russia came to him after the festival had ended and left without saying anything. In a press conference in Milan in 1984, he announced that it was the ugliest moment of his life and declared that he would remain in the West and never return to Russia. Betrayed, Tarkovsky felt alienated and spent time in London, before finally travelling to Sweden for his film The Sacrifice.
Tarkovsky faced the same fate as many artists from Russia did and the list includes people like Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, and Alexander Pushkin. The censorship and resistance were familiar to him. He’d faced soviet censorship during the shooting of his second film, Andrei Rublev. The film’s themes included artistic freedom and making art under a repressive regime. But Goskino didn’t release the film for over three years stating that they did it because of graphic images, nudity, and animal cruelty. The film which was completed in 1966 faced major cuts and was finally screened at Cannes Film Festival in 1969 but was allotted a 4:00 AM slot. After the release, Tarkovsky noted in his diary that there wasn’t even a single poster of the film in the whole of Moscow, but all the theatres were still sold out. After the completion of The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. In 1985, he arrived at the Latina Refugee Camp and bore the serial number 13225/379. His son, Andrei Jr, and his mother in law weren’t allowed to leave Russia. It was in Paris, only weeks before his death that he met his son. Tarkovsky took his last breath on 29 December 1986 at the age of 54, leaving behind a legacy that is unmatched and rests at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois in Paris.
