Worth: $19.00
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Intro:
…a terrifically illuminating and hauntingly beautiful trip through the mind of a filmmaker who was deadly serious about his artistic self-expression (and its cost) and whose innate spirituality imbued his work with a hypnotic sense of awe and mystery.
In 1962, when Soviet Filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky’s first feature Ivan’s Childhood won the Golden Lion at Venice, Soviet authorities were disapproving of the film’s anti-war overtones. Tarkovsky was strident in his perspective of the filmmaker as poet artist, discerning meaning from the mysteries of existence on behalf of the masses. Lyrical expression of his own personal spirituality was intrinsic to his cinematic vision and as such, Tarkovsky smuggled whatever he could of himself into his films. He saw his authenticity as an artist and poet eroded by the centralised (and highly controlled) film production machine in Soviet Russia.
It was not until Tarkovsky’s 1966 follow-up, Andrei Rublev, that the repressive Soviet authorities descended on the filmmaker, going on to make his artistic life hell for years to come. Tarkovsky’s primary concerns with the lyrical and the spiritual were at loggerheads with the demands of the politburo. For the powers that be, they saw his languid, atmospheric visuals and intensely personal themes as edging dangerously close to the indulgent and the religious.
After 1972’s Solaris, 1975’s semi-autobiographical childhood memory-piece Mirror and his much-referenced 1979 masterwork Stalker, Tarkovsky had grown weary of the restraints placed on his work by the Soviet Government. He decamped to Italy to shoot a film and made the choice not to return to his homeland. He would go on to live out his days in self-imposed exile, until his death in 1986.
Tarkovsky’s son Andrey has used old audio recordings and interviews with his late father, as well as footage from his films, intercut with behind-the-scenes footage, to create Andrey Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer. The film encompasses each one of his seven films, though it’s handled more as a thematic collage of sorts, with each film’s imagery bleeding into another as his entire oeuvre is considered as one autobiographical visual expression of his spiritual journey, with Tarkovsky opining at one point that “the meaning of art is prayer”.
Tarkovsky’s cerebral and introspective narration muses on topics ranging from the practicalities of filmmaking under the Soviet regime, to his opinion of critics (“… as usual, they didn’t understand anything”), to the philosophical and spiritual notions he was attempting to tackle in his films. There is also some terrific on-set footage for a number of films, showing Tarkovsky in his element.
The film is broken into chapter headings: Childhood and Youth, Work in cinema, Leaving Russia and The Artist as a Prophet, where Tarkovsky discusses his faith and life’s meaning. Heady stuff indeed.
For fans of Tarkovsky, this is a terrifically illuminating and hauntingly beautiful trip through the mind of a filmmaker who was deadly serious about his artistic self-expression (and its cost) and whose innate spirituality imbued his work with a hypnotic sense of awe and mystery. For the uninitiated, it’s a great access point into the mindset of a filmmaker whose work helped shape modern cinema (and indeed cinematography), fundamentally shifting the narrative cinematic form.
