Andrei Tarkovsky
The 1979 film Stalker is a road movie where characters go deeper into their own minds and what worries the deepest hidden corners of their body and soul.
Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, perhaps more than any other film, shows the complexities of dreams, here shown through the eyes of a childhood experiencing the trauma of war.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is ripe with philosophical connotations; here, we discuss some of the film’s more prominent ideas.
The next in our Sculptures in Time series about Andrei Tarkovsky’s films is The Mirror, a film very autobiographical and surreal in nature.
In Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, Kris Kelvin (played by Donatas Banionis) journeys to a space station on the sentient planet Solaris in order to investigate whether the planet is still useful for scientific inquiry. Critics at the time considered Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film as the Soviet answer to Stanley Kubrick’s famed 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, the artist was inextricably joined to his society, both its benefits and its ills. Tarkovsky defined these colloquies between society and an individual artist as “dialectics of personality.” In other words, individual development was indefinably caught-up within personal and distant interactions with a society.
About midway through Andrei Tarkovsky’s feature 1962 film debut of Ivan’s Childhood, in the midst of a Russian battlefield field torn asunder during World II, a cross is backlit by a setting sun. The cross is obscured in shadow and yet its beauty remains. A spiritual man, Tarkovsky was never afraid to ask questions about spiritual matters.
