FluxBlog

On the weekend, I went and saw the last of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films I hadn’t seen, Ivan’s Childhood. The Golden Age, a small cinema in Surrey Hills, was playing it.

Ivan’s Childhood was Tarkovksy’s first film. It was released in 1962. Ivan, played by Nikolia Burlyayev, is a twelve year old orphan working as a scout for the Red Army in World War 2. He wants to find the Nazis who are responsible for the death of his parents and enact vengeance, though he doesn’t know what that means, not entirely. He is only twelve, after all, and Tarkovsky never allows you to forget his age and innocence as he struggles against the trauma and violence of the war. The soldiers Ivan works with constantly fret about him, try to have him sent away from the front line, fail, and ultimately keep using him, thinking that they can somehow protect him while they use him. Perhaps unsurprisingly, only tragedy awaits.

Ivan’s Childhood is a first film, even if it is Tarkovsky’s first film. It works, but it’s rough in places. It’s also half a story. It has another half that an older Tarkovsky would have filmed, a half about a young boy sneaking around his enemies, getting caught by Nazis, and spending his final days with other children in a prison. Still, Tarkovsky’s languid, snaking camera is there, his beautiful compositions of space and time, and the echoes of films that will follow, the bells, the water, the lights. Ivan’s Childhood is only ninety minutes long, but it’s got that slow pace of all of Tarkovsky’s other films, the small moments of character and revelation that make so many of his films wonderful.

My favourite Tarkovsky film is his second, Andrei Rublev. The film is based loosely on the life of the 15th Century painter, and features Tarkovsky’s regular collaborator, Anatoly Solonitsyn. Solonitsyn would appear in Tarkovsky’s next three films before his death from cancer in 1982, a cancer that he and others were exposure to while working on Stalker. The same exposure would be responsible for Tarkovsky’s death in 1986. Anyhow: Andrei Rublev is probably the Solonitsyn’s best performance, as the film is focused on his portrayal, and he carries it throughout. The film is about the importance of Christianity in the foundation of identity in Russia, as well as about the freedom of art and faith. Unsurprisingly, the film was originally banned in Russia and wasn’t released until 1971 (and then censored). There are multiple cuts of the film, a 205 minute version, 186 minute version, and a 101 minute version. I can’t imagine what the last looks like, but the later two were restored in 2016, I believe. If you’re curious, the 186 minute version is Tarkovsky’s preferred one.

Andrei Rublev features one of the great cinema experiences, to my mind, which is the crafting of the bell. It takes place in the last part of the film, when the son of a bellmaker is hired to forge a new bell, even though he hasn’t done this before. The son is played by Nikolia Burlyayev, who is excellent here, and the whole sequence is riveting and amazing. Look, I know how it sounds. A scene about making a bell. What exciting cinema. But it’s true. It’s amazing.

My other favourite Tarkovsky is Stalker. It’s probably not all that surprising, given that Stalker is a lot of peoples favourite film, much less favourite Tarkovsky film. It’s also ridiculously influential on not just film, but literature and video games. It is, I think, the best place to start if you haven’t watched any of Tarkovsky’s work. It’s about a smell expedition in the Zone. A man, known only as Stalker, leads two other men, The Writer and The Professor, to a place known as The Room. There, reportedly, your wish will be granted.

Stalker is, legitimately, a great film. It’s also a tragic film. As you watch it, as the film plays out around abandoned hydro power plants and an active chemical plant, you realise you are not just watching the narrative journey of three men through a strange, alien landscape, but three actors and their crew become exposed to toxins within the area. Worse, they’re exposed to this much longer than you would think, because Tarkovsky essentially shot the film three times due to conflicts with his first cinematographer and damaged film stock.

Tarkovsky’s last film, Sacrifice, is also one of his greats. He made it while he was dying and it is about a man who makes a deal with god to save his family, after he hears that World War 3 has begun. It’s a fascinating film, and features a great sequence with a witch, among many others. It’s my third favourite of Tarkovksy’s films and it reminds me, at times, of a stage play. The finals scenes of the final, the burning of the beautiful house, the sacrifice that must be made, echo the making of the bell in Andrei Rublev in a strange way.

What remains of Tarkovsky’s body of work are three films that I like, but don’t love as much as I do others. I sometimes think I am a little hard on Solaris because the fashion of old science fiction films doesn’t always work for me. I should watch it again, I think. The film is about a psychologist who is sent to evaluate an old space station and the people who are on it. There’s a lot to like about it, and in theory, I should like it more than I do. I really should watch it again, I think.

The film that followed Solaris, Mirror, is the most autobiographical of Tarkovsky’s films. It is also, I think, the most difficult of his films to watch. My feeling is that, to properly appreciate it, you need to know some about Tarkovsky’s life. You can follow the film fine without it, and it is, much like all of Tarkovsky’s films, beautiful and fascinating, but I can’t help but feel that to truly enjoy it, you need to know about his life.

The last of these three films, Nostalghia, also has an autobiographical feel to it. It’s about a Russian writer who comes to Italy for research, but finds that he cannot return home. At this stage in his life, Tarkovsky is living in exile from Russia, and the film captures much of that sense about him, while also talking about the inadequacies of translation when it comes language and culture, the sense of isolation that one feels outside their country, and a certain failure to communicate fully.

I’ve gone on for a bit about this so I’ll stop here. These last three films feel like they’ve been short changed a little, but I’m conscious that you all don’t want to spend three hours reading me go on about Tarkovsky’s seven films. This isn’t, y’know, some deep dive five our video that you can watch over six days or something like that (I don’t know how that became a thing, honestly). I figure it’s enough for me to tell you how much I like the films, and how much pleasure watching them has given me. I recommend them to you all. In fact, a great many of them can be found online for free, on the Mosfilm youtube channel. They even have both versions of Andrei Rublev there. The longer version is called The Passion According to Andrei.

Ben.

(Ben Peek is the author of eight books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His ninth book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)

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