To coincide with the forthcoming IFI retrospective, John D. Waldron casts an eye over the career of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.

At the midway point of Andrei Tarkovsky's final film, The Sacrifice (1986), an off-screen voice is heard whispering to the protagonist 'generally, the goal of all poetic striving lies so far from its author that one can hardly believe that it is a man-made creation'. Perhaps, the voice of the director? But perhaps for Tarkovsky, who had at this time defected, his homeland's problems stemmed from the October Revolution's success and the gradual severance with religion. When the Irish people encounter Tarkovsky's films in a major retrospective to be held in the Irish Film Institute this summer, they may feel they are experiencing the films of a man possessed by the supernatural and Occult: a Yeats-like figure who, unlike his father the poet Arseni Tarkovsky, turned to the language of cinema for the expression of his own particular world-view.

False dawn

Tarkovsky's first film, Ivan's Childhood (1962), owes its success to the way it taps into the raw emotions of a war-stricken child, Ivan. It also engages with a theme that resurfaces in almost all of Tarkovsky's films: the death of 27 million Russians during the Second World War. The international success of Ivan's Childhood was in fact a false dawn, for the remainder of his life Tarkovsky would play an ambivalent role in Soviet history. His next film is an epic tale of the eponymous medieval Russian painter, Andrei Roublev (1966), and is generally considered a masterpiece and a counterpart to Tolstoy's War and Peace. Although it was made during a 'thaw' in Soviet society, the film hit a raw nerve with the centre for Soviet film production Mosfilm due to its emphasis on individual rather than 'collective action'. The final cut was shelved for five years.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 105.