The Films Of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Retrospective

The great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman famously intoned in his 1987 autobiography, “ The Magic Lantern ,” that discovering Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky ’s work was, “A miracle. Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”

In 1987, a few months after Tarkovsky’s passing Akira Kurosawa would praise his “unusual sensitivity [was] both overwhelming and astounding. It almost reaches a pathological intensity. Probably there is no equal among film directors alive now.”  And experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage was practically smitten, chasing him down at the Telluride Film Festival in 1983 to screen him his work and calling him , “the greatest living narrative filmmaker.”

Accolades for Tarkovsky, one of Russia’s most influential filmmakers, were generally glowing plaudits, inspiring an ardor that find the cult director’s work examined and studied for years. But in almost equal zeal were his detractors; audiences and critics who found his slow, languid, inscrutable work boring and impenetrable. Such wildly divergent adore-him-or-loathe-him opinions can only mean one thing: that Tarkovsky’s films represent the apotheosis of a certain kind of filmmaking and ultimately your predisposition to like that kind of film conditions your reaction to Tarkovsky. Even those who hate slow, meditative, dreamlike films cannot deny Tarkovsky’s mastery of the form. And with film history constantly in a state of revision, Tarkovsky’s work, like trickling water looking for an exit, always finds avenues for re-appreciation. This week, Kino International releases his final picture, “ ” onto the Blu-format.

Endlessly fascinated by the spiritual, the metaphysical, the texture of dreams and memory, Tarkovsky eschewed conventional narrative and plot, and instead sought to illuminate the essence of the unconscious through a patient, enigmatic and reflective cinema that for many borders on poetic divinity.

While their methods and aesthetics are distinctly different, one wonders why ’s films and similar big-picture meditations rarely come up in conversations about Tarkovsky. There does seem to be a certain kinship between their work, though it’s unlikely the Russian filmmaker would ever have deigned to include a voiceover that literally asks each metaphysical question aloud; it was more his style to pose these often existential riddles implicitly, letting the imagery do the work, quietly, dreamily.

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