Tarkovsky, despite his avant-garde leanings, ultimately gravitated toward nineteenth-century Romanticism and its fin-de-siècle mystical offshoots. His diaries channel Goethe (“The more inaccessible a work is to reason, the greater it is”) and Schopenhauer (“We are all dreaming the same dream”). He displays a misogyny that is retrograde even by nineteenth-century standards; a woman’s real purpose, he writes, is “submission, humiliation in the name of love.” He pictures himself as a messianic artist beset by “lies, cant, and death,” in quest of a “hieroglyphic of absolute truth.” The aim of art, he declares, is to “prepare a person for death.”
You would expect him to have been a terror on set, and Tarkovsky had his tyrannical moments. In Michał Leszczyłowski’s 1988 documentary, “Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky,” which chronicles the making of “The Sacrifice,” assistants can be seen walking into a meadow muttering, “Everything yellow must go.” For the most part, though, Tarkovsky’s crews became swept up in his quixotic passions. The director’s son Andrei recalled how Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s longtime cinematographer, who shot “The Sacrifice,” described the prevailing mood: “We were giving totally for Bergman because we were afraid of him, and we gave everything to Tarkovsky because we loved him.”
You could take fifty stills from any Tarkovsky film, mount them on gallery walls, and make a stunning exhibition. The drenching richness of his visual imagination is evident in the first few minutes of “Ivan’s Childhood,” his début feature, released in 1962. Burlyayev plays a boy named Ivan, who has lost his family during the Second World War and is exacting revenge by scouting behind enemy lines. The opening sequence appears to be a flashback or a dream. The initial shot is a slow pan up the trunk of a tree—a reverential gesture that is replicated at the end of “The Sacrifice.” Idyllic imagery of nature, with the camera taking flight through treetops, leads to a closeup of the beatific face of the boy’s mother. The sound of gunfire cuts the sequence short, and Ivan awakens in a dark, menacing space, which turns out to be the interior of a windmill. These juxtapositions of dream memory and historical nightmare recur throughout the film, with the demarcations between the two states steadily disintegrating.
“Ivan’s Childhood” won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and received praise from Jean-Paul Sartre. It also made a profound impression at home, its freewheeling technique helping to embolden Tarkovsky’s colleagues. The Armenian director Sergei Parajanov unleashed an anarchic visual feast in “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” (1965), which centers on life in a traditional mountain village in western Ukraine. Larisa Shepitko, perhaps Tarkovsky’s most gifted contemporary, created her own hallucinatory realism in “The Ascent” (1977), set during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; Susan Sontag once called it the most affecting war film ever made.
To be sure, Tarkovsky’s breakthrough relied on his V.G.I.K.-trained crew, particularly the cinematographer Vadim Yusov, who might be considered the co-creator of the Tarkovsky style. A famous scene in “Ivan” shows the boy and two soldiers making their way at night through a flooded forest in a boat, with flares exploding high above them. The cinematographer Roger Deakins has named one lingering shot—in which a stand of bare trees is silhouetted against a gray expanse of land, water, and sky—his favorite in movie history. Yusov had scouted the location and mapped out the scene before the director arrived for the shoot. Still, Tarkovsky’s collaborators were working in his spirit. Yusov recalled, “Tarkovsky frequently could not understand the limitations, and this ignorance made him bold.”
For Tarkovsky, the question was always whether he could find a narrative structure to match his pictorial visions or whether he should discard narrative altogether. “Rublev,” which he co-wrote with Andrei Konchalovsky, is his monumental exercise in the epic mode. It unfolds in discrete episodes, not all of which focus on Rublev. We witness a primitive experiment in balloon flight; the cavortings of a doomed jester; the sage musings of an elder icon painter, Theophanes the Greek; an orgy among pagans; the savage court of the Grand Prince, who punishes a group of stonemasons by having their eyes gouged out; an attempted coup by the prince’s brother, resulting in the sacking of a cathedral in the city of Vladimir; Rublev’s retreat into a vow of silence; and the casting of the bell. These chapters add up to a formidable architecture: grim pillars of historical reality support the extravagance of the whole.
The film is a portrait of an artist in which we almost never see the artist at work. Tarkovsky thus avoids the trap of the standard artist bio-pic, in which celebrity actors thrash around pretending to be Michelangelo or Frida Kahlo. Rather, we are shown the storehouse of experiences that shaped him. Rublev’s proxy is the camera, which glides through immense, chaotic scenes like an invisible observer, becoming distracted by irrationally beautiful details. A black horse rolls on its back; geese flutter above the mayhem of battle; a cat prowls among bodies in the plundered cathedral. The viewer’s awareness that Tarkovsky has planted those details does not detract from their world-building effect. One moment has always mesmerized me. During the sacking of Vladimir, the camera comes to rest on the dazed face of the prince’s brother. A tasselled censer swings behind him: three times, it floats into sight from the left side of the frame and then floats out of sight again. Without explanation, it fails to appear a fourth time. Whenever I watch this brief shot, I have the same involuntary reaction: the cessation of movement causes an interior shudder.
Soviet bureaucrats, having accused “Rublev” of both obscurantism and excessive naturalism, delayed its Russian release until 1971, five years after its completion, although a print was shown at Cannes in 1969. Tarkovsky made various cuts but stuck to his original plan. (A superb Criterion Collection release contains the initial version, “The Passion According to Andrei,” which runs three hours and twenty-six minutes, and the final cut, which is twenty-three minutes shorter.) Johnson and Petrie, in their “Visual Fugue” book, argue that Tarkovsky suffered less under the Soviet system than many of his contemporaries. His main weapons were his fearless self-assurance and his unrelenting stubbornness. He was too much of an individualist to fit the profile of the dissenter, and opposition to his work was rooted more in incomprehension than in anything else.
While Tarkovsky was pondering his next project, he saw Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which he both disliked and envied. He set about making “Solaris” (1972), his own attempt at transcendental science fiction. The source was the eponymous novel by the Polish sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem, in which a sentient ocean planet invades the consciousness of human visitors and drives them mad. Unlike Kubrick, Tarkovsky showed little interest in the mechanics of space travel, dwelling instead on the haunted memories and unresolved conflicts of his protagonist. (Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 remake, also titled “Solaris,” is more faithful to Lem’s text.) Hallmarks of the later Tarkovsky come to the fore, for better or for worse: majestic long takes, rambling philosophical dialogues, extended scrutiny of classic art works, bouts of Bach on the soundtrack. The lead actor, Donatas Banionis, is all too palpably trying to figure out what kind of movie he is in.
Tarkovsky was probably right when he named “Solaris” his weakest film, but it is transfixing all the same. As Julia Shpinitskaya points out in “ReFocus,” Tarkovsky almost emulates Kubrick in a nearly five-minute-long sequence that consists largely of highways and tunnels as seen from a moving car. A thick overlay of electronic sound, fashioned by the composer Eduard Artemyev, helps transform the footage into a voyage no less mind-bending than the one at the climax of “2001.” By the end of “Solaris,” Banionis seems to have returned to a country house on Earth, but increasingly lofty vantage points reveal that he is on an island in the seething Solaris ocean. Bach’s chorale prelude “Ich ruf zu dir” gives way to a cataract of noise.
“My aim is to place cinema among the other art forms,” Tarkovsky wrote in his diaries. “To put it on a par with music, poetry, prose, etc.” He fulfilled that ambition spectacularly in “Mirror,” which came after “Solaris.” A deeply personal work that re-creates scenes from Tarkovsky’s childhood in fanatical detail, “Mirror” is at the same time a tour-de-force assemblage of stream-of-consciousness memories, dreamscapes, paranormal occurrences, poetry recitations, and grainy newsreel footage. Watching it is like attending a séance of the twentieth-century Russian soul. The first time I saw “Mirror,” I experienced it as a gorgeous, sensuous bewilderment. It was equally rewarding to watch the restored film in conjunction with Johnson and Petrie’s fastidious analysis. “Mirror,” like “Ulysses” or “The Waste Land,” is the kind of work for which you welcome a guide.
The cinematographer for “Mirror” was Georgy Rerberg, who had a knack for making drab interiors and dusky landscapes shimmer with unseen forces. From the start, irrational events ensue: a barn bursts into flame, a jug crashes to the floor, ghostly presences materialize, people levitate. Heightening the uncanny atmosphere, the actor Margarita Terekhova plays two distinct characters: one based on Maria Tarkovskaya, Tarkovsky’s mother, and the other based on Irma Raush, his first wife. Tarkovskaya is also cast as herself, in scenes set in the present day. At the end, Tarkovsky creates chronological pandemonium by having his mother share the frame with a representation of her much younger self. The situation is ripe for psychoanalysis, which the filmmaker and historian Evgeny Tsymbal, once Tarkovsky’s assistant, supplies in “ReFocus.” One has the sense that Tarkovsky held his mother partially responsible for his father’s departure, and that this feeling perhaps became a source of his warped attitudes toward women. But the film transcends the director’s misogyny on the strength of Terekhova’s expressively harried performance. She holds fast against the tide of male neurosis rising around her.
“Stalker,” Tarkovsky’s final Russian film, has become his most celebrated work, almost a pop-culture phenomenon. It has inspired a brilliant free-associative study by Geoff Dyer—“Zona,” from 2012—as well as a series of first-person-shooter video games. In Tallinn, Estonia, where much of the film was shot, you can take a Tarkovsky-themed bike tour. The cult of “Stalker” is surprising, because, at first encounter, it is the most cryptic of Tarkovsky’s hieroglyphs. Based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s sci-fi novel “Roadside Picnic,” it contrasts an ashen outer world with an eerily verdant place known as the Zone, which appears to have been visited by aliens. Inside the Zone is the Room, where all wishes are said to come true. Although military guards shoot at anyone who tries to enter the Zone, guides known as “stalkers” lead illegal tours. The film follows three men named Stalker, Professor, and Writer, who are played with laconic grit by Alexander Kaidanovsky, Nikolai Grinko, and the hypnotic, hooded-eyed Solonitsyn. Their inching progress across booby-trapped, supernatural terrain unfolds like a slow-motion, hyper-abstract thriller—a zombie apocalypse without zombies.
Nothing in Tarkovsky’s work has elicited more awestruck comment than the sequence in which the travellers pass into the Zone. Claire Denis, in conversation with the director Rian Johnson, said of this moment, “I remember I thought I was going to faint. My heart stopped beating for a second.” The first part of the movie, which shows Stalker leaving home and meeting his clients, is shot in desiccated sepia tones. The trio makes it past the guards and travels toward the Zone on railroad tracks, riding a motorized flatcar. A numbing series of shots of irregular length—forty seconds, ninety-six seconds, seven seconds, seventeen seconds, sixty-two seconds—fixate on the sides and backs of the men’s heads, giving only vague glimpses of the surrounding terrain. The clanking of wheels is at first percussively harsh and then fades into an electronic blur. In an abrupt cut, color replaces sepia, and we find ourselves in a landscape of dark-green vegetation, skewed telephone poles, and abandoned vehicles—a leap into a post-human paradise. The flatcar glides to a halt as the men gaze, rapt. It is, Tarkovsky scholars point out, a bleak homage to “The Wizard of Oz.” As with the censer shot in “Rublev,” the sudden absence of motion generates a kind of internal vertigo, accentuated by an onrush of silence.
Pontara, in his absorbing study of Tarkovsky’s use of music and sound, shows how much of the spell of “Stalker” depends on its extraordinary audio track. Artemyev, who specialized in electronic composition before collaborating with Tarkovsky, devises a seething soundscape in which otherworldly ditties alternate with upwellings of noise. Tarkovsky throws in some classical selections, but they are alienated from their usual ennobling role. When, in the scenes set in Stalker’s home, trains rumble past, railway sounds intermingle with faintly audible strains of “La Marseillaise,” Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” overture, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Landmarks of Western music are reduced to technological detritus. Pontara suggests plausibly that Tarkovsky is exposing the catastrophic failure of industrial and cultural progress alike.
