"Andrei Tarkovsky belongs to that handful of filmmakers (Dreyer, Bresson, Vigo, Tati) who, with a small, concentrated body of work, created a universe. Though he made only seven features, thwarted by Soviet censors and then by cancer, each honoured his ambition to crash through the surface of ordinary life and find a larger spiritual meaning: to heal modern art's secular fragmentation by infusing it with metaphysical dimension. To that end he rejected Eisensteinian montage and developed a demanding, long-take aesthetic, which he thought better able to reveal the deeper truths underlying the ephemeral, performing moment." – Phillip Lopate

This programme presents Tarkovsky's seven masterpieces, coinciding with our season on his close friend Sergei Parajanov.

Ivan's Childhood
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962, 96 min
Russian with English subtitles

Andrei Tarkovsky's debut feature Ivan's Childhood is an extraordinarily moving view of war and revenge. 12-year old Ivan is determined to avenge his family's death at the hands of the Nazis, and he joins a Russian partisan regiment as a scout. The wonderful monochrome photography depicts Ivan's war in a series of memorable sequences: from the opening shots of him creeping through a dead and submerged forest; the flashback to happier days by the seashore; his devastated home village, to the final sequences in the paper-strewn ruins of Berlin in 1945. read more

Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966, 145 min
Russian with English subtitles

Immediately suppressed by the Soviets in 1966, Andrei Tarkovsky's epic masterpiece is a sweeping medieval tale of Russia's greatest icon painter. Widely regarded as Tarkovsky's finest film, Andrei Rublev charts the life of the painter through a turbulent period of 15th Century Russian history, which was marked by endless fighting between rival Princes and Tatar invasions. read more

Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972, 165 min
Russian with English subtitles

Solaris is Andrei Tarkovsky's third feature and his most far-reaching examination of human perceptions and failings. Ground control has been receiving strange transmissions from the three remaining residents of the Solaris space station. When cosmonaut and psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to investigate, he experiences the strange phenomena that afflict the Solaris crew, sending him on a voyage into the darkest recesses of his own consciousness. read more

Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974, 102 min
Russian with English subtitles

Mirror is Andrei Tarkovsky's most autobiographical work in which he reflects upon his own childhood and the destiny of the Russian people. The film's many layers intertwine real life and family relationships – Tarkovsky's father, the poet Arseny Tarkovsky reads his own poems on the soundtrack and Tarkovsky's mother appears as herself – with memories of childhood, dreams and nightmares. read more

Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979, 163 min
Russian with English subtitles

New digital restoration, made in collaboration with the film's camera operator from the original negatives.

Deep within the Zone lies a mysterious room with the power to grant the deepest wishes of those strong enough to make the hazardous journey there. Desperate to reach it, a scientist and a writer approach the Stalker, one of the few able to navigate the Zone's menacing terrain, and begin a dangerous trek into the unknown. read more

Nostalghia
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983, 125 min
Italian & Russian with English subtitles

As in Mirror, Tarkovsky weaves a dense, meditative pattern of images – freely mixing past and present, dream and reality – with the scholar and the madman acting as allegorical players in a metaphysical trial by fire and water. read more

Voyage in Time
Tonino Guerra & Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983, 62 min
Russian and Italian with English subtitles

Filmed as Tarkovsky conceptualized Nostalghia with famed Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, Voyage in Time is an exterior portrait of the Russian director’s creative process and a document of his dislocation. read more

The Sacrifice
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986, 149 min
Swedish with English subtitles

Tarkovsky's last visionary masterpiece The Sacrifice, unfolds in the hours before a nuclear holocaust. Alexander, a retired actor, is celebrating his birthday with family and friends when a TV announcement warns of an imminent nuclear catastrophe. Alexander makes a promise to God that he will sacrifice all he holds dear, if the disaster can be averted. The next day dawns and, as if in a dream, everything is restored to normality. But Alexander must keep his vow. read more

One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich
Chris Marker, 1999, 55 min

Chris Marker’s One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich is perhaps the best film yet made by one (great) filmmaker about another. A revelatory document, loving, lucid and lyrical, on the elemental structuring of Tarkovsky’s work, it marries moving footage of the terminally ill director shooting and struggling to finish his final film The Sacrifice with an exemplary assessment of the films and their importance, humane, humble and always open. read more

Hard to Be a God
Aleksei German, 2013, 170 min
Russian with English subtitles

A work of staggeringly visceral cinema, the epic, phantasmagoric final film of late Russian cinema god Aleksei German imagines a world in which the Renaissance never happened. Adapted from a cult science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – who penned the source novel and screenplay for Tarkovsky’s Stalker – the film is set on an alien planet mired in the savagery and squalor of a never-ending Middle Ages. read more