Andrei Tarkovsky

(YouTube Streaming, August 2021) You wake up. The light is dim, the surroundings are shrouded in fog, the figures around you indistinct. You can only see shades of grey, except in those rare occasions where you think you see a dark shade of colour. There are people; ordinary-looking people, world-weary people; peasants without a shred of refinement to the way they look. The people speak another language, but even seeing subtitles under them merely prolongs your lack of understanding. Their dialogue is crafted, elusive and metaphorical even at the clearest of times. They are preoccupied with matters of some significance but no real importance. They torture themselves with meaning to the point where you wish anyone would crack a joke or even anything sounding like normal human conversation. Your attention is directed in long static shots, sometimes simply panning to something else. But you feel trapped in those long shots, those monochromatic compositions, those overworked expressions. And then it strikes you for its obviousness. You are trapped in a Tarkovsky film. This is all normal. But this is also eternal. Time stretches on to infinity. You will be here forever. This is Nostalghia.

(Criterion Streaming, July 2020) Let’s describe Ivan’s Childhood for you: It’s director Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature, in black-and-white, in Russian, about a child during wartime but intercut with bucolic recollections of an idyllic rural pre-war upbringing. This combination of elements is almost custom designed to get me to tap out of a film, and the result does not disappoint: it’s intensely dull in addition to the excruciating subject matter, and it does nothing to change my opinion of Tarkovsky—in fact, Ivan’s Childhood is one of his dullest films that I can recall, and that’s already saying something.

(Criterion Streaming, December 2019) At this point, I’ve seen enough of Andrei Tarkovsky’s non-Science Fiction films to be able to write the same review every time: Dour, long, dull. Great cinematography, clear mastery of the craft, fine actors, but ultimately not worth the time investment. Mirror almost perfectly fits the bill. It’s in colour, allowing Tarkovsky one more cinematic lever. It’s partially autobiographical, making it an essential part of his filmography to those interested in knowing more about his life. It’s also decidedly non-conventional, and perhaps even more so than many other of his movies: Executed like a poetic collage of images, it moves through time, characters, eras and themes to deliver something far more elegant than a straight narrative. Inward-looking and possibly hermetic to anyone but Tarkovsky, it’s made for the art-house crowd, and so I will leave the film to them.

(Criterion Streaming, December 2019) I have a confession, dear readers: I dozed off somewhere in the third quarter of Andrey Rublyov and only woke up to the film’s final splashes of colour. I will not go back to see what I’ve missed. I regret nothing. I would do it again. I would encourage others not to do the same, but to doze off even earlier. OK, that may be overstating it. But still: As I develop this appreciation of classic cinema as a rough approximation of time travel, there’s the corollary that there are periods to which you really don’t want to go and medieval Russia is high on that list. Andrey Rublev, surprisingly enough for a Soviet film of the Cold War era, talks a lot about religion, faith and sacrifice—no wonder the film was not a favourite of the regime. (And no wonder, perhaps, if western film critics lionized Andrei Tarkovsky as a defiant gesture to the Soviets.)  While snippets of the film approach the ultimate parody of a European historical black-and-white art-house film, other moments show mayhem on an epic scale, with battle sequences involving hundreds of participants, horses and a very wide frame seen from above. Still, the film’s massive length (no less than three hours and 25 minutes) eventually got the best of me, especially since the battle sequences end up forming a comparatively small proportion of the film. While I liked the bell-making sequence, the rest of the film didn’t do it for me: the film’s ponderous rhythm, self-conscious dialogues and art-house aesthetics gradually sent me to sleep. I will not go back to see what I’ve missed. I regret nothing. I would do it again. I’m not the kind of viewer for which Andrey Rublyov was made, and I don’t care about how many best-movies-of-all-time lists include it as a top pick.

(On Cable TV, January 2019) Despite my best intentions, I remain unmoved by Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography. Stalker is often mentioned in “best science fiction movies” lists, but I have to wonder how much of this reputation is due to contrarianism or historical desire to annoy the USSR. (Or, within the written SF community, the excellent standing of its source novel by the Strugatsky brothers.) It’s still true that Stalker is quite unlike most Science Fiction movies even today. At nearly two hours and 45 minutes, it’s a long sit made even longer by the glacial pace of the film—and most of it only features three characters walking around industrial ruins. (Considering this and the sorry state of the set decorations on Solyaris, I have to wonder how much of Tarkovsky’s SF filmography was based on the availability of disaffected Soviet factories.) Tarkvsky, of course, isn’t some kind of rapid-fire auteur—his entire oeuvre is slow paced and you know from the second film what you’re getting into. Still, I didn’t dislike Stalker as much as I wanted to: There are a few good ideas buried under the lengthy shots, and some very clever filmmaking ideas as well—the picture shifts from sepia to colour as the characters enter the mysterious alien “zone” in which the story takes place, and Tarkovsky’s knack for striking images is not to be dismissed easily. Still, it takes an effort of will to avoid fast-forwarding through the entire thing. Tarkovsky could be ten times as interesting if he was twice as concise.