RETROSPECTIVE
The long road to freedom
Ian Christie investigateshow
Andrei Tarkovskv's placeas
the USSR's highest-profile
directorshapedhis cinema
Did Andrei Tarkovsky nurse a secret
passion for junk movies? Possibly.
On his first visit to London in 198I
he didn't want to see the current
arthouse hit,Alain Resnais' My
American Uncle,but was intrigued
by James Glickenhouse's The
Exterminator,a sub-Death Wish
vigilante flick briefly notorious
for its gore and sadism. This was
definitely not art, but it clearly
intrigued a Soviet film-maker usually
insulated from such fare.
Tarkovsky is now generally
acknowledged to be a great artist,
with a memorial retrospective and
an exhibition of his photographs
about to open in London. But it
is worth recalling just how much
his genius owed to the limitations
and freedoms of being a Soviet film-
maker. Back in 1981, well before the
Soviet edifice began to crumble and
before his own defiant departure into
exile, Tarkovsky walked a tightrope
between being the USSR's highest-
profile director and a standing
reproach to its values - somewhat
like Boris Pasternak when he had
to refuse the Nobel Prize as the
price of remaining in Russia. Not
that Tarkovsky's dissidence took
any overtly political form except
a refusal to allow any ideology to
pollute his art In this he belonged
to an old tradition among the Russian
intelligentsia of maintaining a stance
Though a glass daody: one of Tarkmks Polaroids
10 1Sight &Sound IJanuary 2008
'Solaris' benefited from the Soviet vogue
for sci-fi and from an association with the
space programme. Tarkovsky used the
genre to deal with the "transcendental"
of 'inner freedom', which had
infuriated the Tsars as much as
Lenin's heirs.
Soviet cinema provided
remarkable opportunities for
the youngsters of the 'Thaw'
generation, following Khrushchev's
denunciation of Stalin in 1956.
Tarkovsky and his film-school
contemporaries in the late 1950s felt
able to challenge everything their
parents had had to accept as the price
of survival. The result, in Tarkovsky's
debut feature Ivan's Childhood(1962),
I by the Mongol invasion. Official
is a haunting, poetic evocation
of innocence brutally betrayed.
But what makes the film even
more startling is the absence of
traditional Soviet propaganda and the
extraordinary freedom with which
it explores young Ivan's dreams,
as well as showing in documentary
style the shattered remains of the
Nazi regime. Certainly it helped that
Tarkovsky wasn't challenging the
sacrificial image of Russia's Patriotic
War- indeed he was refreshing it. But
the film remains remarkable proof
of the young director's determination
to have his cake and eat it.
A similar claim could be made
for the two major genre pieces he
produced during the mid-ig6os and
early 197os, Andrei Rublev and Solaris.
Taking the medieval period as a
spectacular setting in which to play
out an elemental drama was in many
ways less risky than trying to make
a contemporary story in the USSR.
Eisenstein had done it in Alexander
Nevsky, producing a timely rallying
call against German militarism in
1938. In many ways the painter-
monk Rublev was as much a blank
page as Nevsky, allowing Tarkovsky
to create his own fable of an artist
following an inner vision against
the background of Russia laid waste
nervousness about the film&s message
of artistic freedom would delay its full
release for nearly a decade after it was
finished in 1966. Yet Andrei Rublev is
still stunning proof of Soviet cinema's
willingness to back a director's vision,
with no demand to prettify or balance
the film's grim view of medieval life.
Tarkovsky's space mystery Solaris
(1972) benefited from the Soviet
vogue for science fiction as well
as from an association with its
actual space programme. Although
disdainful of sci-fi in general on his
visit to London, Tarkovsky admitted
that it was "a genre with one
quality", which was to deal with the
"transcendental"- "where once there
was religion, you've now got science
fiction." Speculative fiction, such as
that of the Strugatsky brothers, gave
Tarkovsky a framework for the kind
of semi-religious questioning he was
increasingly drawn towards. And for
me, Stalker(1979), however loosely
based on the Strugatskys' Roadside
Picnic,is a more resonant and
truly disturbing work than either
Nostalghia(1983) or The Sacrifice
(1986), both of which lack any
real narrative base. Stalker had to
be largely re-shot after the original
film stock was wrongly processed,
and such was Tarkovsky's standing
that this was immediately agreed,
giving the director the unexpected
opportunity to rethink.
Russian culture of the Soviet era
was Tarkovsky's culture, despite
his contempt for its pettiness and
mendacity. And it was this multi-
layered culture of secrecy and
ambiguity that produced his finest
film, The Mirror(1974).Here
Tarkovsky really was dancing on
eggshells, dealing with the legacy
of Stalin's Terror as he had known it,
growing up as the son of intellectuals
in the late 193os. Naturally, the
fim caused panic among Soviet
bureaucrats, but it was made exactly
as Tarkovsky wanted - complete with
dreams and his father's poetry - and
reached both a large domestic and
foreign audience, for all its difficulty.
Tarkovsky's diaries are full of
musings about high culture and
religious enlightenment, though
he insisted that films should not
be justified by ideas but must work
on us directly through images and
sounds. As we pay tribute to his
short and almost unbelievably
consistent career, I would also like
to remember the film-maker who
admired John Ford and had a decent
curiosity about schlock.
0 Afestivalof Tarkovsky'sfilms runs
at the Curzon Mayfair,London,from
7-13 December,then tours,with talks
and masterclassesat other venues; an
exhibition of Tarkovsky's Polaroidsis
at the White Space GallergA London,
until20 January
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TITLE: The long road to freedom

SOURCE: Sight Sound ns18 no1 Ja 2008

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