Andrei Tarkovsky

Fire and Wet Earth

Andrei Tarkovsky made his first feature film because the Soviet Union needed a quick replacement for a director who wasn't working out at Mosfilm Studios.

In 1962 he premiered Ivan's Childhood, and its Golden Lion win at Venice confirmed that this young man was not going to be a docile craftsman serving the party. That film, about a boy spy during World War II, already contained his visual obsessions, such as horses, stagnant water, and dreams that seem more real than waking life.

That debut won awards but also drew the censors' attention to him.

Because Tarkovsky did not see cinema as mass entertainment or a tool of propaganda. For him, the screen was a mirror where people had to confront their own faith or their own misery.

The Ordeal of the Horses and Space

To shoot Andrei Rublev in 1966, he had to wait five years before Soviet audiences could see it officially. The censors hated the violence and mysticism of an icon painter who barely speaks for half the film.

But the director refused to cut the scenes of the Tatar invasion or the rising of the bell. The film was screened at Cannes at four in the morning to avoid diplomatic conflicts with the USSR, and it ended up winning the International Critics' Prize.

And then came science fiction.

With Solaris in 1972, he tried to answer Kubrick's technical coldness with a space station that smelled of wet earth and remorse. The screenplay moved away from Stanislaw Lem's novel to focus on the human inability to communicate with the unknown unless first forgiving one's own sins.

The production budget soared because of the construction of circular sets simulating the scientific base and the filming of Tokyo highways representing the city of the future.

In 1975 he filmed Mirror, where he broke away from any conventional narrative structure. He mixed poems by his father (the poet Arseny Tarkovsky) with images from his childhood and archival news footage about the Spanish Civil War or the Sino-Soviet border conflict.

Many viewers walked out of the theater confused, but others wrote letters to the director thanking him for filming their own memories.

The Camera That Never Stops

In 1979, he finished Stalker after a hellish shoot in an abandoned hydroelectric plant near Tallinn. A developing error destroyed almost all the footage shot over a year, and Tarkovsky had to reshoot the film from scratch on a minimal budget.

Many crew members fell ill years later from the toxic waters they stood in for months. But the director wanted that end-of-the-world texture that only real abandonment could provide.

But Tarkovsky was already thinking about leaving Russia.

He shot Nostalghia in 1983 under the Italian sun (a country he loved) just as cancer began showing its first warning signs. The nine-minute tracking shot in which a man crosses an empty pool carrying a lit candle sums up his obsession with time and spiritual endurance.

Her last work was The Sacrifice in 1986, which she shot in Sweden with the usual crew of Ingmar Bergman. During the filming of the final scene, the camera jammed while the main house was burning, so they had to rebuild the entire mansion and burn it again in a single shot.

Seven feature films make up his entire filmography, and none of them runs less than two hours.

On December 29, 1986, he died in Paris and was buried in the Russian Cemetery in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. The full cost of his grave was covered by donations from fans and close friends in the European film industry.