Lucidno
Isolation in Cinema – Part II:
Andrei Tarkovsky: Themes and Influence
Russian director Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (1932–1986), despite only completing a modest total of seven feature films, had a monumental oeuvre which has exuded a lasting fascination in the higher echelons of film criticism. Continuing the theme of Isolation in Cinema, this article will take a chronological journey through Tarkovsky’s inter-filmic world to cite his influences, his contemporaries and the films that he had an influence on. Most of all, it will underline how Tarkovsky made use of the displacement that was possible through the film medium to create visual narratives, with protagonists in extreme states of isolation.
Tarkovsky graduated from the state film school in Moscow with a mid-length film called The Steamroller and the Violin (Katok I Skripka, 1960), which shows one day in the life of Sasha, a thoughtful boy who prefers his violin to playing football. This leads to his schoolmates mocking him and, though much lighter than his subsequent work, hints at the psycho-solitary situation of his main protagonist (and not least the outsider status of the director) that would be a continuing theme of his films.
The first feature Tarkovsky made, Ivan's Childhood (Iwanowo Detstwo, USSR, 1962), is set during the Second World War where twelve-year-old orphan Ivan comes across the Red Army in the Dnieper region and finds himself persuaded to work behind enemy lines as a spy and courier for the Soviet troops. Speaking later of the film, Tarkovsky would say that Ivan's Childhood was, "…the story of a character who is born as a result of war and ends up being consumed by it". The director weaves together the plot of the film with Ivan's dreams, memories, and fantasies, and this formal structure would come to be a reoccurring element of his subsequent films.
Forward to more than twenty years later and we find that Ivan’s Childhood would have a conspicuous echo of story and structure in Come and See, the 1985 Belarusian anti-war film filmed in the Soviet Union and directed by Elem Klimov, from his screenplay with Ales Adamovich. It is based on the book I Am from the Fiery Village (1977) of which Adamovich was a co-author. The film had to fight eight years of censorship from the Soviet authorities before it was finally allowed to be produced in its entirety. It was also made in the same year that Tarkovsky was making his final film, The Sacrifice (Offret, Sweden-France, 1986), a film that bookends Tarkovsky’s depictions of war in his films and its effect on humanity, in a similar vein to Ivan’s Childhood.
Come and See focuses on the Nazi German invasion and occupation of Belarus in 1943 and the events as witnessed by a young Belarusian partisan teenager named Flyora, who - against his mother’s wishes - joins the Belarusian resistance movement, and thereafter depicts the Nazi atrocities and human suffering inflicted upon the villages' inhabitants. The film combines hyper-realism with an underlying surrealism, and philosophical existentialism that alludes to Tarkovsky, along with its poetical, psychological, political and apocalyptic themes. Where Come and See differs to the almost Fellini-like representation of Ivan fighting the partisans is in the deliberately slow stark vividness of the memorable and harrowing scenes that reflect the events.
Although it was made a few years earlier Tarkovsky did not release his second film, Andrei Rublev, until 1969. While it continues the individual spiritual journey of Ivan’s Childhood, this is a more monumental work that portrays the legendary religious icon painter and enlightened humanist artist who lived around 1360–1430, on the cusp of the modern era, and is split into eight chapters. Rublev and the state clash as the violence of the medieval society and the power politics of his employer plunge him into a profound creative crisis. The result is a powerful and unforgettable depiction of the complex situation of the isolated artist on the fringes of society during the Middle Ages that is the first film of Tarkovsky to draw allusions to Ingmar Bergman and particularly The Seventh Seal (1957).
Following the use of source material for his first two films, Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) also took its inspiration from literature and here it is based on the novel of the same name by Stanislav Lem. The story focuses on the journey undertaken by a psychologist named Kelvin when he is sent to the enigmatic sea-covered planet of Solaris in order to investigate reported strange occurrences at the research station there. What Kelvin will gradually discover is that the mysterious ocean on Solaris is capable of making the dreams, fears, and regrets of the men on the space station take a material form.
Released four years after Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, there are varying comparisons with Solaris to Kubrick’s film, but it’s still largely considered to have had an influential impact on Tarkovsky’s film. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, a group of astronauts undertakes a voyage to Jupiter after the discovery that a featureless alien monolith has been reported to have affected human evolution. Questioning the evolution of humanity, and on a much grander scale than Solaris’ more intricate Sci-Fi story, 2001 deals with grander themes of existentialism, technology, artificial intelligence (the rebellious computer HAL memorably features), and ultimately the seeking of extra-terrestrial life.
The reason that 2001 is still highly regarded over fifty years later is because of its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, its pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery, the latter of which was to influence Solaris. In both films, sound and dialogue are used sparingly and often in place of traditional cinematic and narrative techniques, which helps create an attentive and hypnotic effect. It was also critically lauded because of its dark apocalyptic tone in contrast to an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of humanity. In spite of this it was still very popular with audiences and critics, nominated for four Academy Awards of which Kubrick won for visual effects.
Despite making use of literary sources and historical events, there was consistently an underlying introspective element to the main protagonist of Tarkovsky’s films, a parable of his own progressively marginalised status working as an experimental director that was considered too obscure for the authorities in the USSR. By the time he made The Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975), there was autobiographical elements incorporated, and with the protagonist is in search of lost time and his own identity. The Mirror is also notable for moving from narrative into a (Alain) Resnais-like approach of intercutting memories (of childhood under Stalin and World War II) with enigmatic scenes of the present day that for its effect depends less on narrative than on the ‘poetic’ juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images. Slowly, the son of divorced parents reveals his life, memories, fears and obsessions, while his private fate is both paralleled and considered a causal effect of the traumas and upheavals in Soviet society from the 1930s to the 1970s.
