"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

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

"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. Ivan is a child of the war, orphaned and running dangerous intelligence missions for the Red Army. He has "interiorized [violence]," in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, a point Tarkovsky accentuates by interspersing the boy’s vivid recollections and dreams with his quiet hours waiting with two soldiers in the shadows of combat. 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." – Harvard Film Archive

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Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966, 183 min
Russian with English subtitles

"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. In attempting, as Tarkovsky told an interviewer, "to trace the road Rublev followed during the terrible years [in which] he lived," the film is besieged with lucid visions of violence and cruelty – a panorama worthy of Brueghel. The Goskino authorities found Tarkovsky’s hallucinatory staging of history sufficiently dangerous to shelve the film for five years." – Harvard Film Archive

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

"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. "I’ve noticed," Tarkovsky told an interviewer at the time, “[that] if the external, emotional construction of images… are based on the filmmaker’s own memory… then the film will have the power to affect those who see it." In this sense, the extraterrestrial ocean can be understood a figure for cinema itself, the means by which one’s innermost visions are to be extracted and reengaged. Magnificent set design notwithstanding, Solaris is surely the most intimate of science-fiction epics, a journey into inner-space revolving more around heartsick regret for lost love than blind terror of the unknown." – Harvard Film Archive

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

"For the first time," he resolved, "I would use the means of cinema to talk of all that was most precious to me, and do so directly, without playing any kind of tricks." Tarkovsky needed twenty rough cuts before arriving at the film’s intricately interflowing system of flashbacks and archival footage, often interpreted as unfolding in a dying artist’s final rays of consciousness. 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. "The story not of the filmmaker’s life," observes Tarkovsky scholar Robert Bird, "but of his visual imagination." – Harvard Film Archive

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

"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

"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. “I wanted it to be as if the whole film had been made in a single shot,” Tarkovsky wrote. In the event, Stalker is comprised of 142 – each chiseled with the greatest precision. The basic outline of the plot derives from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic: ascetic Stalker leads Writer and Professor, both figures of intellectual disenchantment, from a barren wasteland into the lush post-industrial environs of The Zone, a mysterious and forbidden territory believed to actualize desires. Tarkovsky identified with each of the characters but was especially drawn to Stalker as “the best part of myself, and also the part that is the least real.”" – Harvard Film Archive

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

"I wanted the film to be about the fatal attachment of Russians to their national roots," Tarkovsky wrote of Nostalghia, his first production outside the Soviet Union. The story, co-written with frequent Antonioni collaborator Tonino Guerra, traces the alienation of a Soviet poet visiting Italian baths as part of his research on a long-deceased Russian composer. 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. "How could I have imagined," he later wrote, "that the stifling sense of longing that fills the screen space in that film was to become my lot for the rest of my life?" – Harvard Film Archive

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

"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. A yin-yang symbol emblazoned on the philosopher’s robe indicates the many structuring dualities of the film: personal crisis and public catastrophe, Christian atonement and pagan rites, redemption and madness, the hopefulness of a closing tribute to Tarkovsky’s son and the irrevocable vision of a life in flames. The film’s setting (the Baltic island of Gotland), cinematographer (Sven Nykvist), and leading actor (Erland Josephson) were all borrowed from Ingmar Bergman, but the central dwelling is of a piece with the many Russian dachas in Tarkovsky’s work – a final reconstruction pitched on the brink of destruction." – Harvard Film Archive

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