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Film Programmes
26 June - 14 August 2021: Mirror
While Mirror, like all Tarkovsky’s films, pays homage to painting, music, and poetry, it also makes plain that the Russian director understood Mnemosyne to be the mother of the muses. Being a poet, he sought not only to retrieve the past but to reveal its essence – and in so doing to redeem an inherently flawed present.
27 June - 27 August 2021: The Sacrifice
Tarkovsky’s final film is also one of his most overtly theatrical, a chamber drama drawn in characteristically virtuoso long takes. A philosopher celebrates his birthday by planting a tree with his young son on an otherwise barren landscape. Disgusted with modernity, he finds his calling after reports of an impending nuclear war, the reality of which remains occluded in dream.
2 July - 6 August 2021: Ivan's Childhood
Ivan’s Childhood was one of many Soviet films to examine the catastrophic losses of World War II through the prism of childhood, but Tarkovsky’s debut was immediately singled out for its visionary aesthetics, winning the Golden Lion at Venice and the praise of prominent intellectuals. The director’s dramatic rendering of landscape is already richly apparent in the film’s celebrated "dance of birches" and the flares tracing lines of light over a sunken lagoon.
3 July - 8 August 2021: Solaris
Mindful that a space odyssey might find better favor with the Soviet film authorities following Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky reshaped Stanisław Lem’s metaphysical science-fiction novel to his own preoccupations with memory and sacrifice. A psychologist travels to a space station orbiting Solaris to explore rumors that the planet’s ocean may be a "thinking substance," materializing the astronauts’ memories.
4 July - 13 August 2021: Stalker
Arguably Tarkovsky’s purest articulation of the film as spiritual quest, Stalker develops a radically different attitude to time than the jigsaw of his previous film, Mirror. "A perverse replay of Solaris’s cosmic voyage, a remake of Rublev in a secular world of postapocalyptic misery, a premonition of Chernobyl and Soviet disintegration." – J. Hoberman
11 July - 15 August 2021: Andrei Rublev
Originally titled The Passion According to Andrei, Tarkovsky’s second feature remains a wholly original epic, a life of the medieval icon painter encompassing the full horror of history. The culminating vision of Rublev’s Trinity only emerges from the yoke of Tartar occupation, mystic rites, excommunications, and nearly unrelieved suffering.
16 July - 28 August 2021: Nostalghia
A film of stark symbols and mesmerizing long takes, Nostalghia’s nearly agonizing picture of personal loss is tempered by the painterly beauty of its compositions. Tarkovsky himself professed to be surprised at seeing how these images revealed "an exact reprint of my state of mind" during what was to be a permanent exile.
Coming Soon
This September: Essential Cinema
Our essential cinema series resume, presenting the masterpieces that shaped the art of cinema throughout its history.
Calendar
Sat 31 Jul 7:30pm
The Sacrifice
The Sacrifice
Sun 01 Aug 7:15pm
Stalker
Stalker
Thu 05 Aug 8:15pm
L'Atalante
L'Atalante
Fri 06 Aug 8:15pm
Ivan's Childhood
Ivan's Childhood
Sun 08 Aug 5:00pm
Solaris
Solaris
Fri 13 Aug 7:15pm
Stalker
Stalker
Sat 14 Aug 8:00pm
Mirror
Mirror
Sun 15 Aug 4:30pm
Andrei Rublev
Andrei Rublev
Fri 27 Aug 7:30pm
The Sacrifice
The Sacrifice
Sat 28 Aug 8:00pm
Nostalghia
Nostalghia
