The
upcoming series of films at the George Eastman House should educate American
audiences in the works of the highly praised but hardly famous Russian director
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986). The fact of his nationality — how many Russian
directors, aside from Sergei Eisenstein, are widely known or known at all in
the West? — his small, dense body of work, and his short life combine to make
him another example of that all-too-familiar phenomenon in the world of cinema:
a cult figure.
The series will showcase four
Tarkovsky works, beginning with his first feature-length film, Ivan’s Childhood, and ending with his
most famous picture, Solaris. The
four titles provide a useful and accurate overview of the director’s
production, displaying most of his characteristic subjects and themes, his
peculiar style and structure, some of his persistent visual motifs, perhaps
even those qualities that account for the documented admiration of a number of
academic critics as well as the support of the sort of film buffs who haunt the
museums and revival houses.
Ivan’s
Childhood (1962), scheduled for April 2, somewhat resembles a number of
Soviet films of its era, e.g., The Cranes
are Flying, in its concentration on World War II, then a fresh, gaping
wound for his nation. The child of the title is a 12-year-old boy who shuttles
back and forth between the Russian and German lines, risking his life to spy
for his country. Tarkovsky imposes his own special narrative and structural
devices on the relatively straightforward story, skipping back and forth,
sometimes with sudden shocks and surprises, through Ivan’s memories and dreams
of a childhood cut short by war.
Though the sudden shifts in time,
space, and setting occasionally disturb the narrative flow, they also
foreshadow Tarkovsky’s later methods in his longer and more ambitious pictures.
The director often chooses to tell his stories through reveries and dreams,
contrasting the reality of one world with the fantasy of another, illustrating
the inner lives of his characters and, especially in the case of Ivan’s Childhood, contrasting a
remembered idyll of childhood, the way things should be, with the grim facts of
war and death, the way things are. Despite the typically Russian sentimentality
and patriotism of the film, Tarkovsky’s work already indicates an unusual
approach to a traditional subject.
In general, in the works that follow
Ivan’s Childhood, the director
demonstrates a preference for elliptical rather than chronological
storytelling, complicated rather than simple structures, cryptic rather than
straightforward expression of theme.
His autobiographical 1974 film, The Mirror, returns to the subject of
childhood through the memories and delusions of a filmmaker, obviously a
surrogate for Tarkovsky himself, suffering from some unexplained illness.
Jumping around in space and time, switching abruptly from character to
character, interrupting its stories with other stories, providing glimpses of
seemingly disconnected actions, the movie combines newsreel footage, fantasies,
long silent shots broken up by puzzling conversations, a dreamy atmosphere of
the past contrasted with a bleak and distressing present.
Probably the least known and most
difficult of his pictures, Andrei Rublev (1966), combines the director’s interests in art, childhood, and good old
Mother Russia in a work that rather resembles Eisenstein’s classic, Alexander Nevsky.
An epic of Russian history, with
obvious allusions to its own temporal context, the immensely long, slow story
presents the life of an apparently legendary medieval painter of icons, the
title character, against a background of terrible violence. The Tartars invade
Russia, rape and pillage for almost four hours, but ultimately the glory of
Russian art and faith triumph over their unspeakable cruelty, blasphemy, and
sacrilege. The black and white picture ends in a suffusion of color, showing
the icons of Orthodoxy and the consequent endorsement of belief, which could
hardly have pleased the Soviet censors.
The final film of the series, surely
the most famous of Tarkovsky’s works, is Solaris (1972), which Steven Soderbergh remade a couple of years ago, and which,
despite a drastically shorter length, a Hollywood gloss, and the presence of
George Clooney, bombed.
Like Andrei Rublev, Solaris constitutes something like a lifetime commitment, which translates into a great
deal of time in the seats of the Dryden Theater with eyes fixed on a flickering
screen — it is not a movie for the faint of heart or the thin of derriere. A
metaphysical and ontological demonstration of the construction of reality from
the fabric of memory, the movie, like it or not, probably best exemplifies the
dominant interests and ambitions of the director, and is just the sort of thing
that fuels long, boozy discussions of a deeply philosophical sort, simply
perfect for film buffs and sophomores.
Whatever his special peculiarities
of style and content, Tarkovsky seems an entirely Russian director. Despite his
often innovative narrative methods, his sentimentality and his long, lugubrious
contemplation of empty landscapes, bodies of water, and the inevitable birch
forests, place him squarely in the traditions of his nation.
At the same time, even at their
slowest, dullest, and talkiest, his pictures will surprise the viewer with some
stunning images — overhead shots that enliven even commonplace actions, a
crucifixion in the snow, a panoramic battle scene — and some compelling
narrative idiosyncrasies. He may not be Eisenstein, but his work occasionally
recalls a moment in history when some Russian films deserved comparison with
the best of European cinema.
Tarkovsky, the George
Eastman House’s retrospective of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, runs each Friday in
April (up to April 23) at the Dryden Theatre, 900 East Avenue, at 8 p.m. Ivan’s Childhood is the first film to
screen, on Friday, April 2. $6. 271-3361 or www.geh.org
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2004.
