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Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky
Born 4 April 1932 Zavrazhye, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union 29 December 1986 (aged54) Paris, France Film director
Died
Occupation
Years active 195886 Spouse(s) Irma Raush (195770) Larisa Kizilova (197086)
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (Russian: ; IPA:[ndrej rsenjvt trkofskj]; 4 April 1932 29 December 1986) was a Soviet and Russian filmmaker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director. Tarkovsky's films include Andrei Rublev, Solaris, The Mirror, and Stalker. He directed the first five of his seven feature films in the Soviet Union; his last two films were produced in Italy and Sweden, respectively. They are characterized by spirituality and metaphysical themes, long takes, lack of conventional dramatic structure, and distinctively authored use of cinematography. Film director Ingmar Bergman said of Tarkovsky:[1] Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.
Life
Childhood and early life
Tarkovsky was born in the village of Zavrazhye in the Yuryevetsky District of the Ivanovo Industrial Oblast to poet and translator Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky, native of Kirovohrad, Ukraine; and Maria Ivanova Vishnyakova, a graduate of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. Andrei's grandfather Aleksander Tarkowski was a Polish nobleman who worked as a bank clerk. Tarkovsky spent his childhood in Yuryevets.[2] He was described by childhood friends as active and popular, having many friends and being typically in the center of action. In 1937, his father left the family, subsequently volunteering for the army in 1941. Tarkovsky stayed with his mother, moving with her and his sister Marina to Moscow, where she worked as a proofreader at a printing press. In 1939, Tarkovsky enrolled at the Moscow School 554. During the war, the three evacuated to Yuryevets, living with his maternal grandmother. In 1943, the family returned to Moscow. Tarkovsky continued his studies at his old school, where the poet Andrey Voznesensky was one of his classmates. He studied piano at a music school and attended classes at an art school. The family lived on Shshipok Street in the Zamoskvorechye District in Moscow. From November 1947 to Spring 1948 he was in the hospital with tuberculosis. Many themes of his childhood the evacuation, his mother and her two children, the withdrawn father, the time in the hospital feature prominently in his film The Mirror. Following high school graduation, from 1951 to 1952, Tarkovsky studied Arabic at the Oriental Institute in Moscow, a branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Although he already spoke some Arabic and was a successful student in his first semesters, he did not finish his studies and dropped out to work as a prospector for the Academy of Science Institute for Non-Ferrous Metals and Gold. He participated in a year-long research expedition to the river
Andrei Tarkovsky Kureikye near Turukhansk in the Krasnoyarsk Province. During this time in the Taiga Tarkovsky decided to study film.
Career
Andrei Tarkovsky Soviet Union in a cut version in 1971. He divorced his wife, Irma Raush, in June 1970. In the same year, he married Larissa Kizilova (ne Egorkina), who had been a production assistant for the film Andrei Rublev (they had been living together since 1965). Their son, Andrei Andreyevich Tarkovsky, was born in the same year on 7 August.[3] In 1972, he completed Solaris, an adaptation of the novel Solaris by Stanisaw Lem. He had worked on this together with screenwriter Fridrikh Gorenshtein as early as 1968. The film was presented at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prix Spcial du Jury and the FIPRESCI prize and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. From 1973 to 1974, he shot the film The Mirror, a highly autobiographical film drawing on his childhood and incorporating some of his father's poems. Tarkovsky had worked on the screenplay for this film since 1967, under the consecutive titles Confession, White day and A white, white day. From the beginning the film was not well received by Soviet authorities due to its content and its perceived elitist nature. Russian authorities placed the film in the "third category" which meant severe limitations on its distribution, allowing it to be shown only in third class cinemas and workers' clubs. Few prints were made and the filmmakers received no returns. Third category films also placed the filmmakers in danger of being accused of wasting public funds, which could have serious effects on their future productivity.[4] These difficulties are presumed to have made Tarkovsky play with the idea of going abroad and producing a film outside the Soviet film industry.[5] During 1975, Tarkovsky also worked on the screenplay Hoffmanniana, about the German writer and poet E. T. A. Hoffmann. In December 1976, he directed Hamlet, his only stage play, at the Lenkom Theatre in Moscow. The main role was played by Anatoly Solonitsyn, who also acted in several of Tarkovsky's films. At the end of 1978, he also wrote the screenplay Sardor together with the writer Aleksandr Misharin. The last film Tarkovsky completed in the Soviet Union was Stalker, inspired by the novel Roadside Picnic by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Tarkovsky had met the brothers first in 1971 and was in contact with them until his death in 1986. Initially he wanted to shoot a film based on their novel Dead Mountaineer's Hotel and he developed a raw script. Influenced by a discussion with Arkady Strugatsky he changed his plan and began to work on the script based on Roadside Picnic. Work on this film began in 1976. The production was mired in troubles; improper development of the negatives had ruined all the exterior shots. Tarkovsky's relationship with cinematographer Georgy Rerberg deteriorated to the point where Tarkovsky hired Alexander Knyazhinsky as a new first cinematographer. Furthermore, Tarkovsky suffered a heart attack in April 1978, resulting in further delay. The film was completed in 1979 and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Film Festival. In the same year Tarkovsky also began the production of the film The First Day (Russian: Pervyj Dyen), based on a script by his friend and longterm collaborator Andrei Konchalovsky. The film was set in 18th Century Russia during the reign of Peter the Great and starred Natalya Bondarchuk and Anatoli Papanov in the main roles. To get the project approved by Goskino, Tarkovsky submitted a script that was different from the original script, leaving out several scenes that were critical of the official atheism in the Soviet Union. After shooting roughly one half of the film the project was stopped by Goskino after it became apparent that the film differed from the script submitted to the censors. Tarkovsky was reportedly infuriated by this interruption and destroyed most of the film.[]
Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky
Filmography
Tarkovsky is mainly known as a director of films. During his career he directed only seven feature films and three short films during his time at the film school. He also wrote several screenplays. He furthermore directed the play Hamlet for the stage in Moscow, directed the opera Boris Godunov in London, and he directed a radio production of the short story Turnabout by William Faulkner. He also wrote Sculpting in Time, a book on film theory. Tarkovsky's first feature film was Ivan's Childhood in 1962. He then directed Andrei Rublev in 1966, Solaris in 1972, The Mirror in 1975 and Stalker in 1979. The documentary Voyage in Time was produced in Italy in 1982, as was Nostalghia in 1983. His last film The Sacrifice was produced in Sweden in 1986. Tarkovsky was personally involved in writing the screenplays for all his films, sometimes with a co-writer. To Tarkovsky, a director who realizes somebody else's screenplay without being involved in it becomes a mere illustrator, resulting in dead and monotonous films.[8][9]
Awards
Numerous awards were bestowed on Tarkovsky throughout his lifetime. At the Venice Film Festival he was awarded the Golden Lion. At the Cannes Film Festival he won several times the FIPRESCI prize, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Grand Prix Spcial du Jury. He was also nominated for the Palme d'Or two times. In 1987, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film to The Sacrifice. Under the influence of Glasnost and Perestroika, Tarkovsky was finally recognized in the Soviet Union in the Autumn of 1986, shortly before his death, by a retrospective of his films in Moscow. After his death, an entire issue of the film magazine Iskusstvo Kino was devoted to Tarkovsky. In their obituaries, the film committee of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Union of Soviet Film Makers expressed their sorrow that Tarkovsky had to spend the last years of his life in exile.[10] Posthumously, he was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1990, one of the highest state honors in the Soviet Union. In 1989 the Andrei Tarkovsky Memorial Prize was established, with its first recipient being the Russian animator Yuriy Norshteyn. Since 1993, the Moscow International Film Festival awards the annual Andrei Tarkovsky Award. In 1996 the Andrei Tarkovsky Museum opened in Yuryevets, his childhood town.[11] A minor planet, 3345 Tarkovskij, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina in 1982, has also been named after him.[12] Tarkovsky has been the subject of several documentaries. Most notable is the 1988 documentary Moscow Elegy, by Russian film director Alexander Sokurov. Sokurov's own work has been heavily influenced by Tarkovsky. The film consists mostly of narration over stock footage from Tarkovsky's films. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky is 1988 documentary film by Michal Leszczylowski, an editor of the film The Sacrifice. Film director Chris Marker produced the television documentary One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich as an homage to Andrei Tarkovsky in 2000.[13] Ingmar Bergman was quoted as saying: "Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [of us all], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream".[1] Film historian Steven Dillon claims that much of subsequent film was deeply influenced by the films of Tarkovsky.[14] At the entrance to the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, Russia there is a monument that includes statues of Tarkovsky, Gennady Shpalikov and Vasily Shukshin.[15]
Andrei Tarkovsky
Influences
Tarkovsky became a film director during the mid and late 1950s, a period during which Soviet society opened to foreign films, literature and music. This allowed Tarkovsky to see films of European, American and Japanese directors, an experience which influenced his own film making. His teacher and mentor at the film school, Mikhail Romm, allowed his students considerable freedom and emphasized the independence of the film director. Tarkovsky was, according to Shavkat Abdusalmov, a fellow student at the film school, fascinated by Japanese films. He was amazed by how every character on the screen is exceptional and how everyday events such as a Samurai cutting bread with his sword are elevated to something special and put into the limelight.[16] Tarkovsky has also expressed interest in the art of Haiku and its ability to create "images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves."[17] In 1972, Tarkovsky told film historian Leonid Kozlov his ten favorite films. The list includes: Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette, by Robert Bresson; Winter Light, Wild Strawberries and Persona, by Ingmar Bergman; Nazarn, by Luis Buuel; City Lights, by Charlie Chaplin; Ugetsu, by Kenji Mizoguchi; Seven Samurai, by Akira Kurosawa, and Woman in the Dunes, by Hiroshi Teshigahara. Among his favorite directors were Buuel, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Bresson, Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Vigo, and Carl Theodor Dreyer.[18] With the exception of City Lights, the list does not contain any films of the early silent era. The reason is that Tarkovsky saw film as an art as only a relatively recent phenomenon, with the early film-making forming only a prelude. The list has also no films or directors from Tarkovsky's native Russia, although he rated Soviet directors such as Boris Barnet, Sergei Paradjanov and Alexander Dovzhenko highly. Although strongly opposed to commercial cinema, in a famous exception Tarkovsky praised the blockbuster film The Terminator, saying its "vision of the future and the relation between man and its destiny is pushing the frontier of cinema as an art". He was critical of the "brutality and low acting skills", but nevertheless impressed by this film.[]
Cinematic style
Tarkovsky's films are characterised by metaphysical themes, extremely long takes, and memorable images of exceptional beauty. Recurring motifs are dreams, memory, childhood, running water accompanied by fire, rain indoors, reflections, levitation, and characters re-appearing in the foreground of long panning movements of the camera. He once said, Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema. Tarkovsky included levitation scenes into several of his films, most notably Solaris. To him these scenes possess great power and are used for their photogenic value and magical inexplicability.[19] Water, clouds, and reflections were used by him for their surreal beauty and photogenic value, as well as their symbolism, such as waves or the forms of brooks or running water.[20] Bells and candles are also frequent symbols. These are symbols of film, sight and sound, and Tarkovsky's film frequently has themes of self-reflection. Tarkovsky developed a theory of cinema that he called "sculpting in time". By this he meant that the unique characteristic of cinema as a medium was to take our experience of time and alter it. Unedited movie footage transcribes time in real time. By using long takes and few cuts in his films, he aimed to give the viewers a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship of one moment in time to another. Up to, and including, his film The Mirror, Tarkovsky focused his cinematic works on exploring this theory. After The Mirror, he announced that he would focus his work on exploring the dramatic unities proposed by Aristotle: a concentrated action, happening in one place, within the span of a single day.
Andrei Tarkovsky Several of Tarkovsky's films have color or black and white sequences, including for example Andrei Rublev which features an epilogue in color of religious icon paintings, as well as Solaris, The Mirror, and Stalker, which feature monochrome and sepia sequences while otherwise being in color. In 1966, in an interview conducted shortly after finishing Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky dismissed color film as a "commercial gimmick" and cast doubt on the idea that contemporary films meaningfully use color. He claimed that in everyday life one does not consciously notice colors most of the time. Hence in film color should be used mainly to emphasize certain moments, but not all the time as this distracts the viewer. To him, films in color are like moving paintings or photographs, which are too beautiful to be a realistic depiction of life.[21]
Vadim Yusov
Tarkovsky worked in close collaboration with cinematographer Vadim Yusov, and much of the visual style of Tarkovsky's films can be attributed to this collaboration.[22] Tarkovsky would spend two days preparing for Yusov to film a single long take, and due to the preparation, usually only a single take was needed.[23]
Sven Nykvist
In his last film, The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky worked with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who had worked closely with director Ingmar Bergman on many of Bergman's films. Nykvist complained that Tarkovsky would frequently look through the camera and even direct actors through it.[23]
References
[1] Title quote of 2003 Tarkovsky Festival Program, Pacific Film Archive [4] Marshall, Herbert. Sight and Sound. Vol 45, no 2. Spring 1976. p. 93. [6] Komsolmoskaya Pravda, "New Tarkovsky documents surface", 15. September 1995, page 23. [15] Panoramio Photo of Monument to Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography famous learner Gennady Shpalikov, Andrei Tarkovsky and Vasily Shukshin (http:/ / www. panoramio. com/ photo/ 26383277) [17] Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2003. [22] List of Noted Film Director And Cinematographer Collaborations: Andrei Tarkovsky Vadim Yusov, Museum of Learning. (http:/ / www. museumstuff. com/ learn/ topics/ List_of_noted_film_director_and_cinematographer_collaborations::sub::Andrei_Tarkovsky_Vadim_Yusov) [23] The films of Andrei Tarkovsky: a visual fugue By Vida T. Johnson, Graham Petrie, p. 79.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Bibliography
Dunne, Nathan (2008). Tarkovsky. Black Dog Publishing. ISBN1-906155-04-6. edited by John Gianvito. (2006). Gianvito, John, ed. Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series). University Press of Mississippi. ISBN1-57806-220-9. Le Fanu, Mark (1987). The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. British Film Institute. Johnston, Vida T.; Petrie, Graham (1997). The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. ISBN0-253-20887-4. Martin, Sean (2005). Andrei Tarkovsky. Pocket Essentials. ISBN1-904048-49-8. Jnsson, Gunnlaugur A.; ttarsson, Thorkell . (2006). Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Cambridge Scholars Press. ISBN1-904303-11-0. revue NUNC (ed.). Dossier Andrei Tarkovsky. n11, 2006. Editions de Corlevour (http://corlevour.fr). Tarkovsky, Andrei (1989). Sculpting in Time. University of Texas Press (http://www.utexas.edu/utpress). ISBN978-0-292-77624-1. Slevin, Tom (2010). "Existence, Ethics and Death in Andrei Tarkovsky's cinema: the cultural philosophy of Solaris". Film International 8 (2): 4962. doi: 10.1386/fiin.8.2.49 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/fiin.8.2.49). Tejeda, Carlos (2010). Andrei Tarkovski. Ctedra, Madrid (http://www.catedra.com/cgigeneral/ newFichaProducto.pl?obrcod=2198374&id_sello_editorial_web=01&id_sello_VisualizarDatos=01). ISBN978-84-376-2666-6. Elmanovit, Tatjana (1980). Ajapeegel. Andrei Tarkovski filmid (in Estonian). Eesti Raamat. Turovskaya, Maya (1991). 7 ili Film Andreya Tarkovskovo (in Russian). Iskusstvo. Alexander-Garrett, Layla (2011). Andrei Tarkovsky: A Photographic Chronicle of the Making of The Sacrifice (in English and russian). Cygnnet (http://www.cygnnet.co.uk/books/?id=4). ISBN978-09-570-4160-8.
External links
Andrei Tarkovsky (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1789/) at the Internet Movie Database Andrei Tarkovsky (http://www.sfi.se/en-gb/Swedish-film-database/Item/?type=PERSON&itemid=87465) at the Swedish Film Database Andrei Tarkovsky (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/tarkovsky/) at Senses of Cinema Works by or about Andrei Tarkovsky (http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n78-10232) in libraries (WorldCat catalog) Website about Andrei Tarkovsky, films, articles, interviews (http://www.andrei-tarkovsky.com/).
License
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