Andrei Tarkovsky

[kidc85]

I haven't seen a lot of comment on it, but surely the colours on ZERKALO are completely wrong? The pink hue just looks completely bizarre.

Mosfilm have uploaded both versions onto YouTube, SD version here and HD version here. If you skip to around the 6 minute mark (with the mother sitting on the fence looking across the field) the difference is stark.

[Trees]

I was just speaking with a friend, remarking that although many people find Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and/or Mirror two of the greatest films ever made (and I'm in full agreement), seldom do I see or hear his name on the lists of the greatest directors. I once thought it was because he was too idiosyncratic a filmmaker, but so were John Ford, Kenji Mizogichi, Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni! It seems that the works of all the truly great filmmakers are difficult to deconstruct or even analyze in any drectly coherent fashion.

I wonder if Tarkovky's overt Russian Christianity has had some negative effect on his historical stature? The kinds of "intellectuals" whose aggregate opinions author these rankings and lists might not be disposed to promote overtly religious filmmakers, especially not ones from Russia. You could argue that Malick seems to have escaped a similar brush-off from atheist intellectuals, but then again, you don't really see Malick dominating these lists either. Even if such a theory were correct, though, it would only partially explain away the issue ando has mentioned here. It could also be that Tarkovsky's films are indeed very dense and serious pieces of art that have either been overlooked, under appreciated or misunderstood by many film reviewers.

In terms of the question asked on this thread "What film to start with", my opinion is that an average cinephile should start with "Solaris" and "Stalker" and go from there.

[kidc85]

It's a bit odd to read this kind of argument here. I mean, aren't we as a forum a part of these same "intellectuals"?

Maybe things have changed in the past fifteen years but when I was first finding out about film and trying to watch the essentials, even to my shallow and ill-informed research, Tarkovsky was obviously regarded as a giant and one of the greats.

[ermylaw]

I consider Robert Bresson to be an overtly religious filmmaker -- yet he is universally acclaimed. I would guess that Tarkovsky's relative lack of "giant" status (to the extent it is lacking) might have more to do with a lack of availability of his films, which might be related to the fact that Russia was involved in a Cold War with much of the western world during the time when films were being widely circulated internationally and directors were gaining "giant" status. I'm no historian, though, so I could be wrong about that.

[MichaelB]

Maybe this is because I'm based in the UK, but I simply don't recognise this lack of acknowledgement of Tarkovsky. On my side of the Atlantic, he's been regarded as one of the all-time greats for at least the last four decades, and I haven't seen any sign of that reputation lessening.

[zedz]

Yeah, I must say I don't know which isolated pocket of cinephilia relegates Tarkovsky to the sidelines, but it's nowhere near anywhere I've ever been. If anything, his preeminence unfortunately tends to overwhelm the reputations of a bunch of similarly brilliant Soviet filmmakers of the same cohort (e.g. Muratova, Paradzhanov, German).

And much as Tarkovsky would have liked us to believe otherwise, there was never much of a conspiracy against him, either by the Soviet authorities he irritated or by any vague 'Cold War'-waging cultural bodies in the west. One way or another, his features made it to the west - as did he; he continued to receive official funding for extremely ambitious and esoteric films; and he largely dodged the professional and personal reprisals that hobbled the careers of many of his contemporaries.

[Trees]

I consider Robert Bresson to be an overtly religious filmmaker -- yet he is universally acclaimed. I would guess that Tarkovsky's relative lack of "giant" status (to the extent it is lacking) might have more to do with a lack of availability of his films, which might be related to the fact that Russia was involved in a Cold War with much of the western world during the time when films were being widely circulated internationally and directors were gaining "giant" status. I'm no historian, though, so I could be wrong about that.

Bresson gets swept under the rug a bit as well, some might argue, compared to, say, Godard or Truffaut, both of whom were inferior filmmakers to Bresson, at least in my opinion. I think the point that ando was making was that while Tarkovsky has made several of the greatest films ever cut (RUBLEV, MIRROR, STALKER), he does not tend to rank high on many "Greatest Directors of All Time" lists in proportion to the number of great films he made. I'm not sure if that's true or not. The fact that his films had limited distribution in the West likely did in fact play a part in this.

As for my question about whether Tarkovsky's overt orthodox Christianity might cause some film reviewers to ignore him, I will say this: In other forms of art, such literature, painting and music, you do not often see overtly religious artists being promoted by mainstream or "intellectual" reviewers in newspapers and magazines, for example. Whether this is similarly true in films doesn't seem like too far of a stretch, though even I admitted that it was likely only a minor influence on Tarkovsky's perceived lower status among "the greatest filmmakers of all time."

[MichaelB]

Working on Arrow's Hard to Be a God a few months ago, I remember my shock at realising that it was the first commercial video release of any Aleksei German film in the UK, and only two had previously been shown outside film festivals (My Friend Ivan Lapshin had a very limited theatrical release and a TV screening, and Trial on the Road popped up late at night on TV as well, more than twenty years ago). And German is positively high-profile compared with Kira Muratova, who might as well not exist as far as most English-speaking audiences are concerned.

By contrast, Tarkovsky is ridiculously accessible - all his films have been in constant distribution in the UK across multiple media, they had a very healthy big-screen life in repertory cinemas and they couldn't be easier to track down on video in wholly English-friendly form. I simply don't understand the "lack of availability" comment above - unless it relates to the fact that his films took longer than they arguably should have done to cross the Atlantic. But certainly in Western Europe, he's been a rock-solid part of the pantheon for over four decades.

[ermylaw]

I was the one who made the "lack of availability" comment above. As I mentioned, that was a guess on my part since I lack any knowledge of the distribution of Tarkovsky films. I would certainly defer to your firsthand experience with these things.

I have no reason to think that the premise--that Tarkovsky is less esteemed than other directors--is correct. I've been seriously into watching and collecting films for about 10 years now, and he was one of the first international directors that I spent time with. I was able to relatively easily acquire and watch all of this films on DVD here in the US. Relative to other directors whose filmography is much more difficult to find and view, that tends to indicate to me that Tarkovsky's level of popularity is not lacking.

[Michael Kerpan]

I don't believe Rohmer's overt Catholicism hurt HIS reputation in the slightest -- and I have never seen the slightest hint that Tarkovsky's religious viewpoint affected his critical esteem in the West. I have lots of directors I love whose work is far less accessible (or almost completely inaccessible). Most of Tarkovsky's films have been available most of the time on home video in the US for quite some time.

[Altair]

From my perspective, Tarkovsky was, along with Ingmar Bergman, one of the first major European directors I encountered, via screenings on Film4! So I don't think he suffers from neglect (actually, a lot of post-1970 Godard is harder to acquire than Tarkovsky's oeuvre) and seems to be generally seen as one of those arthouse pantheon directors, such as Antonioni, who perhaps, in their undeniable greatness, overshadowed over talented filmmakers. Hell, in the latest issue of Sight & Sound there's an article on Tarkovsky by Nick James, the second paragraph of which begins:

But how did this one filmmaker’s influence come to be so culturally pervasive?

On top of which, the BFI recently just screened the entirety of his filmography. In Sight & Sound's decennial Greatest Films of All Time list, in 2012, Mirror was placed 19th. I think the idea that Tarkovsky is neglected by serious critics is a misnomer, perhaps born from the fact that the internet doesn't talk about him much (but then the internet doesn't talk about anything made before 1990, save for Star Wars, a great deal anyhow).

[Trees]

Try this as an experiment: Go to Google and type in "Greatest Directors of all Time". Open up the first ten links in the results and check out the lists. You will hardly find a trace of Tarkovsky, but you will see Kubrick, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Hitchcock and even Truffaut, Godard, Eisenstein, all over nearly every list. Where is Andrei?

[hearthesilence]

I concur with these remarks - first time I ever became aware of world cinema was in the mid or late '90s, and one of the first key films that popped up was Andrei Rublev. At the time I was reading mostly mainstream articles on cinema - published in mainstream city newspapers and often by Gene Siskel, Michael Wilmington or Roger Ebert, having grown up in Chicago (though my family got the Tribune then). Even in that context, Tarkovsky's name came up as part of the pantheon. Granted, Andrei Rublev got the most attention, probably for a few reasons: it landed in plenty of top ten polls (Sight & Sound, which Ebert always reported on) and it was the most widely screened of his films, and easily available too thanks to Criterion.

[MichaelB]

Try this as an experiment: Go to Google and type in "Greatest Directors of all Time". Open up the first ten links in the results and check out the lists. You will hardly find a trace of Tarkovsky, but you will see Kubrick, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Hitchcock and even Truffaut, Godard, Eisenstein, all over nearly every list. Where is Andrei?

What is this supposed to prove? Out of curiosity, I had a look at the first list that I was served up (the AMC one), and the only people on it whose native language wasn't English are Michael Curtiz, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Roman Polanski, Otto Preminger, Douglas Sirk and Billy Wilder - all of whom, with the possible exception of Lang, are more famous for the English-language films that they made in Hollywood than they are for anything that they made in their native countries.

In other words, Tarkovsky would automatically be disqualified from such a list on grounds that have nothing to do with artistic meric, so his absence from it is utterly meaningless.

[swo17]

The only link I saw that's based on a large enough sample size to mean anything is this one from TSPDT, which rates Tarkovsky at #13.

[hearthesilence]

Try this as an experiment: Go to Google and type in "Greatest Directors of all Time". Open up the first ten links in the results and check out the lists. You will hardly find a trace of Tarkovsky, but you will see Kubrick, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Hitchcock and even Truffaut, Godard, Eisenstein, all over nearly every list. Where is Andrei?

What is this supposed to prove? Out of curiosity, I had a look at the first list that I was served up (the AMC one), and the only people on it whose native language wasn't English are Michael Curtiz, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Roman Polanski, Otto Preminger, Douglas Sirk and Billy Wilder - all of whom, with the possible exception of Lang, are more famous for the English-language films that they made in Hollywood than they are for anything that they made in their native countries.

In other words, Tarkovsky would automatically be disqualified from such a list on grounds that have nothing to do with artistic meric, so his absence from it is utterly meaningless.

So you're telling me the Kardashians are not the most important people in civilized history?

[ermylaw]

^ This suggestion is blasphemy. As your penance, you must listen to every Kanye West album in reverse order of release date.

Anyway, that TSPDT list linked above has Scorsese and Coppola above Tarkovksy (it has Coppola above Ozu!). If that is the sort of slight that has prompted this discussion, then it does seem like something people need to be talking about. If there were a petition to correct that injustice, I'd surely sign it.

[domino harvey]

Your subjective taste isn't better or worse than any other intelligent and well-educated person on this topic. I think Coppola's a better director than Ozu too. But both are great. The distinction between the two, and ranking in general, is meaningless anyways. And I don't care that much for Tarkovsky. Does that make me an automatic Gawker reader? The moral of the story is people are indeed watching and enjoying these films, and if you find yourself swept away by being overly concerned with what Others (however you define that) like best, you'll never be happy or satisfied. Trees et al: Like what you like, spread the good word where you can, and understand and accept why others may not rank your favorites as highly as you.

[AlfredKralik]

Try this as an experiment: Go to Google and type in "Greatest Directors of all Time". Open up the first ten links in the results and check out the lists. You will hardly find a trace of Tarkovsky, but you will see Kubrick, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Hitchcock and even Truffaut, Godard, Eisenstein, all over nearly every list. Where is Andrei?

FWIW, Tarkovsky's #29 on this list: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls003412733/. (Bergman's #1.)

[zedz]

As for my question about whether Tarkovsky's overt orthodox Christianity might cause some film reviewers to ignore him

Considering Tarkovsky believed his career and life had been mapped out for him by the ghost of a dead poet, you might want to reconsider the orthodoxy of his Christianity!

[Cremildo]

^ This suggestion is blasphemy. As your penance, you must listen to every Kanye West album in reverse order of release date.

Anyway, that TSPDT list linked above has Scorsese and Coppola above Tarkovksy (it has Coppola above Ozu!). If that is the sort of slight that has prompted this discussion, then it does seem like something people need to be talking about. If there were a petition to correct that injustice, I'd surely sign it.

Why are you treating Coppola and Scorsese as if they were Chris Columbus or Rob Cohen?

[kidc85]

Anyway, that TSPDT list linked above has Scorsese and Coppola above Tarkovksy (it has Coppola above Ozu!). If that is the sort of slight that has prompted this discussion, then it does seem like something people need to be talking about. If there were a petition to correct that injustice, I'd surely sign it.

Being considered in the top 15 directors of all time is a slight? 7 of his films made the main TSPDT list. As in, 100% of his main feature film output.

[Michael Kerpan]

Lists of bests are -- at best -- tools that might be useful. Worrying about who is on (and not on) lists is -- at best -- pointless. Like what you like, try to find others who share some of those likes, try to introduce people who might be interested to your likes. And stop worrying.

[ermylaw]

My taste is definitely meaningless to anyone other than myself and sometimes even to myself since my taste changes from day to day and year to year.

[Numero Trois]

In other forms of art, such literature, painting and music, you do not often see overtly religious artists being promoted by mainstream or "intellectual" reviewers in newspapers and magazines, for example.

And your examples, please? Off the top of my head one modern religious artist that comes to mind is Arvo Pärt- he certainly has not lacked for press coverage in the NY Times Arts section or other publications for that matter.

I wonder if Tarkovky's overt Russian Christianity has had some negative effect on his historical stature? The kinds of "intellectuals" whose aggregate opinions author these rankings and lists might not be disposed to promote overtly religious filmmakers, especially not ones from Russia

I totally doubt that any serious writer would discount a worthwhile artist over religious beliefs. You protest far too much. Again, concrete examples are needed rather than big amorphous suppositions.