Background

Andrei Tarkovsky was born on April 4, 1932, in the village of Zavrazhye in the Yuryevetsky District of the Ivanovo Industrial Oblast, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Union (modern-day Kadyysky District of the Kostroma Oblast, Russia).

Members of the Tarkovsky family were members of the Russian intelligentsia. His mother, Maria Ivanova Vishnyakova, worked as a corrector, and his father, Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky, was an eminent poet and translator. He had a sister named Marina Tarkovskaya.

When the future famous director was only five years old, his father left the family. The family lived in poverty, and the house was cold all the time. According to the director, it was a very difficult time. The boy missed his father all the time. In 1941, as the Second World War progressed, his father voluntarily enlisted in the army. In 1943, he returned home with a severe injury in his leg. His leg was later amputated, as gangrene had set in.

During the war, the family was evacuated to Yuryevets. Andrei's mother constantly had to go across the river on thin ice to get potatoes to the neighboring village. But soon she managed to get a job in Moscow. The whole family began to live in the capital, where Andrei went to school.

Education

According to the recollections of his classmates, Tarkovsky already had a sense of being chosen, aristocratic in childhood. He was always neat and fresh among the boys, in his youth, he dressed provocatively fashionable, although the family was very poor, especially after his father left. He went to Moscow School No. 554. He also attended a music school and an art school.

After high school graduation, from 1951 to 1952, Tarkovsky studied Arabic at the Oriental Institute in Moscow. Soon he lost interest in this specialization and did not finish his studies. He participated in a research expedition to the river Kureikye near Turukhansk in the Krasnoyarsk Province. During this time in the Taiga Tarkovsky decided to study film.

Upon return from the research expedition in 1954, Tarkovsky applied at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). It was one of the most prestigious Universities in Russia and Andrei had to pass a very tight competition. He successfully passed the entrance test and was admitted to the film-directing-program. The early Khrushchev era offered new opportunities for young film directors.

Before 1953, annual film production was low. After 1953, more films were produced, many of them by new directors. The Khrushchev Thaw opened Soviet society and allowed, to some degree, Western literature, films, and music. It gave Tarkovsky the chance to see films of the Italian neorealists, French New Wave, and of directors such as Kurosawa, Buñuel, Bergman, Bresson. These directors became a very important influence on Andrei.

Tarkovsky's teacher and mentor was Mikhail Romm, who taught many film students who would later become influential film directors, such as Shukshin and Konchalovsky. In 1956, Tarkovsky directed his first student short film, The Killers, from a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

An important influence on Tarkovsky was the film director Grigori Chukhrai, who was teaching at the VGIK. Impressed by the talent of his student, Chukhrai offered Tarkovsky a position as assistant director for his film Clear Skies. Tarkovsky initially showed interest, but then decided to concentrate on his studies and his own projects. He earned his diploma in 1960.

Career

In 1956, Tarkovsky co-wrote and directed the short film The Killers. This was his first film as a student. The following year, he co-scripted and co-directed another short movie, There Will Be No Leave Today, which was released in 1959. In 1958, he completed the screenplay titled Concentrate. The following year, he co-wrote the script Antarctica - Distant Country.

Tarkovsky's first feature film was Ivan's Childhood in 1962. He had inherited the film from director Eduard Abalov, who had to abort the project. Completed in 1962, it immediately brought Tarkovsky international fame. The film tells the story of a 12-year-old boy whose mother (played by Tarkovsky's wife, Irma Rausch) is murdered by the invading Germans during World War II and who subsequently serves as a scout for the Soviet army.

The film earned Tarkovsky international acclaim and won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in 1962. This resulted in high expectations for his second feature Andrei Rublyov (1969), which was banned by the Soviet authorities until 1971. The Soviet authorities did not approve of many portions of the movie. He had to edit it several times, which led to a lot of versions of the film with varying lengths.

Finally, a truncated version of the film was widely released in 1971. Tarkovsky and scenarist Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky - Tarkovsky's friend since his VGIK days and also a well-known director - worked on the script for two years before filming began.

Meanwhile, critics hailed it as a masterpiece: in 1969 it was shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival and awarded the Federation Internationale de la Presse Cinematographique (FIPRESCI) award, and two years later it was named best foreign film by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics.

In the film Tarkovsky made use of both black-and-white and color stock, the latter at the end of the film as the camera slowly pans on actual icons painted by Rublev in the 15th century. Grounding the film, in reality, provides a powerful ending to a dramatic story that reconnects art - and the film itself as a work of art - to its own spiritual beginnings.

During his five-year battle with the Soviet bureaucracy, Tarkovsky began working on his next film, Solaris, based on the science-fiction novel of the same name by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. The film had an easier ride, being acclaimed by many in Europe and North America as the Soviet answer to Kubrick's 2001 (though Tarkovsky himself was never too fond of it).

In 1974, he completed Mirror, a movie loosely based on his life. It was a dense, personal web of autobiographical memories with a radically innovative plot structure. His father was involved in this movie as a narrator. His father’s poems were used in the movie. Andrei clashed with the Russian authorities for this film, too. The same year, he finished the script titled Hoffmannia, but it never saw the light of day.

In 1977 Tarkovsky took a break from film directing to stage a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet that was poorly received by Moscow critics. This setback had little effect on his career, and he was soon immersed in his next film, 1979's Stalker. Based on the science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic, by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Stalker proved to be Tarkovsky's most problematic film from a production standpoint and the finished film required no cuts from Soviet censors.

Numerous complications dogged filming of Stalker, not the least of which was that in April of 1978 Tarkovsky suffered a heart attack. Furthermore, he was unhappy with his shooting script; worse still was the revelation that more than halfway through the shooting it was discovered that the film stock was defective. Tarkovsky received permission to reshoot everything and the Strugatsky brothers rewrote the script to suit him. Their efforts were worth it; Stalker won the Ecumenical Jury prize at Cannes in 1980.

In 1979 Tarkovsky worked in Italy directing the television film Tempo di Viaggio (Time of Travel). He also met with his friend, screenwriter Tonino Guerra, a colleague of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. Tarkovsky and Guerra had been planning a film for years, but little had come of it; now the two began planning what was to become the film Nostalghia (Nostalgia, 1983).

New trouble with Soviet authorities arose when he applied for an exit visa for himself and his family to work in Italy: he and his wife were allowed to go but their son, Andrei, was denied a visa on the assumption that if they were together abroad the Tarkovskys would then apply for asylum. Nevertheless, Tarkovsky would direct Nostalghia and when it was completed he did indeed decide to remain in Western Europe.

After Nostalghia Tarkovsky remained in Western Europe. He shot what would be his final film Offret (The Sacrifice, 1986), in Sweden with cinematographer Sven Nyquist. Offret revolves around a man's sacrifice to avert a nuclear holocaust, but Tarkovsky again plays with dreams and reality to keep the viewer off-balance. At Cannes in 1986 Offret won the Ecumenical Jury prize, the Jury grand prize, and the FIPRESCI award, and went on to win a British Academy Award for the best foreign film two years later.

His last film, The Sacrifice (1986) was shot in Sweden with many of Ingmar Bergman's regular collaborators and won an almost unprecedented four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. He died of lung cancer at the end of the year.

Achievements

• 

  Andrei Tarkovsky has been praised as one of the greatest moviemakers by highly acclaimed film directors and film historians. He shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. Overnight Tarkovsky's name became known to cineastes around the world.
  
  His concern for spiritual questions echoed in powerful images would be manifested in many films after him. Ingmar Bergman, who handled similar questions in his filmmaking and knew Tarkovsky, called him the foremost filmmaker of the twentieth century. Posthumously, he was markedly recognized by the Russians for his contribution to filmmaking. He was honored with the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988 and Lenin Prize, also posthumously, in 1990.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Sculpting in Time

    (Andrey Tarkovsky, the genius of modern Russian cinema - h...)

    1987
  • Time within Time: The Diaries, 1970–1986

    (Time within Time is both a diary and a notebook, maintain...)

    1993

• movie

  • The Sacrifice

    (As a wealthy Swedish family celebrates the birthday of th...)

    1986
  • Nostalghia

    (The Russian poet Andrei Gorchakov travels through Italy a...)

    1983
  • Stalker

    (Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphys­ica...)

    1979
  • Andrei Rublev

    (Tracing the life of a renowned icon painter, the second f...)

    1966
  • Solaris

    (Ground control has been receiving mysterious transmission...)

    1972
  • Voyage in Time

    (This intimate film chronicles Tarkovsky as he searches lo...)

    1983
  • Ivan's Childhood

    (Ivan's Childhood is an evocative, poetic journey through ...)

    1962
  • The Steamroller and the Violin

    (Seven-year-old Sasha practices violin every day to satisf...)

    1961
  • The Mirror

    (The film shows a man's thoughts and confession. In the fi...)

    1975

Religion

Andrei Tarkovsky was a deeply devoted Orthodox Christian.

Politics

Andrei Tarkovsky loved his country and never wanted to leave. Unfortunately, he had to move to Europe due to constant criticism and pressure from the Soviet government. Tarkovsky hated being called a dissident. Unconfirmed sources claimed that his death had been orchestrated by the KGB, the secret police of the Soviet Union.

Views

Andrei Tarkovsky considered cinema to be the only art form that is truly capable of conveying the endless fluidity of time, which partly explains his extra-long shots and measured pace of storytelling. Tarkovsky’s films were notable for their striking visual images, their symbolic, visionary tone, and their paucity of conventional plot and dramatic structure.

Quotations: "My purpose is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness."

"The only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise."

"Cinema is an unhappy art as it depends on the money. Not only because a film is very expensive but is then also marketed like cigarettes, etc."

"The artist has a right to any fiction; that's why he's an artist. He does not misrepresent his depiction as the truth of life. He battles only for the truth of the problem and the truth of the conclusions which he presents. And the fact that art is based on fiction is proven loudly by its entire history, from its very sources."

"Movement is made more meaningful in the context of stillness."

"Cinema should capture life in the forms in which it exists and use images of life itself. It is the most realistic art form in terms of form. The form in which the cinematic shot exists should be a reflection of the forms of real life. The director has only to choose the moments he will capture and to construct a whole out of them."

"Man needs Man."

Personality

Tarkovsky was an admirer of the films of Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman. Both older filmmakers later praised Tarkovsky's own films. His other favorite filmmakers were Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson, Kenji Mizoguchi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Vigo, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. His ten favorite films are; Journal du curé de Campagne (1951), Mouchette (1967), Nattvardsgästerna (1962), Smultronstället (1957), Persona (1966), Nazarín (1959), City Lights (1931), Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), Shichinin no Samurai (1954) and Suna no Onna (1964).

Quotes from others about the person

• "Tarkovsky is the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream." - Ingmar Bergman

Interests

• Writers

  Alexander Pushkin

• Artists

  Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson, Kenji Mizoguchi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Vigo, Carl Theodor Dreyer

• Music & Bands

  Modest Mussorgsky, Johann Sebastian Bach

Connections

Andrei married Irma Raush, his classmate at VGIK, in April 1957. Their son, Arseny Tarkovsky, was born on September 30, 1962. However, the couple legally separated in June 1970. He then married Larisa Tarkovskaya, a Russian actress, in 1970. He had been living with her since 1965. Andrei and Larisa had a son, Andrei Andreyevich Tarkovsky, born on August 7, 1970.

Father:

Arseny Tarkovsky

Mother:

Maria Vishnyakova

ex-wife:

Irma Raush

Son:

Arseny Tarkovsky

Wife:

Larisa Tarkovskaya

Son:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Sister:

Marina Tarkovskaya

Acquaintance:

Andrei Voznesensky

Friend:

Tonino Guerra

References

• Tarkovsky
  2008
• Andrei Tarkovsky A concise study of the work of the most celebrated Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein, and one of the most important directors to have emerged during the 1960s and 1970s Considering the whole of Tarkovsky's oeuvre, this book covers everything from the classic student film The Steamroller and the Violin, across the full-length films, to the later stage works and Tarkovsky's writings, paintings, and photographs.
  2005
• Andrei Tarkovsky
  2010