The Passion According To Andrei

Andrei Tarkovsky’s whole new percept of cinema helped discovering newer boundaries to the medium and aided the formation of some of the greatest directors of the future. Undoubtedly, Tarkovsky is one the immovable pillars in the palace of the seventh art. Tarkovsky’s features are often condemned to be inaccessible and too cerebral. In fact, it is Tarkovsky’s films that expect the users to eschew interpretation and “live the film”. These are films that require viewing with the heart and not the mind. Hence, his films become more of an experiential journey

 My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how. Tarkovsky is for me 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 (1918 - 2007)

Such words coming from a person who has been unanimously hailed as the greatest intellectual of our times is a phenomenon by itself. Andrei Tarkovsky’s whole new percept of cinema helped discovering newer boundaries to the medium and aided the formation of some of the greatest directors of the future. Undoubtedly, Tarkovsky is one the immovable pillars in the palace of the seventh art.

Tarkovsky’s features are often condemned to be inaccessible and too cerebral. In fact, it is Tarkovsky’s films that expect the users to eschew interpretation and “live the film”. These are films that require viewing with the heart and not the mind. Tarkovsky was of the opinion that the audience must be shown as little as possible with the viewers filling in the gaps with their own memories and past experiences. Hence, his films become more of an experiential journey than intellectual. As a result, viewers get a unique feeling of the films depending on their own past, present and emotional functions, differing even on subsequent viewings. This, in fact, is the key to all of his works. And it is for this radically different perception of the medium that the director is celebrated worldwide, in spite of his extremely small oeuvre.

Followers of Bergman and other European masters try to decipher the films and assign a meaning to every gesture in them. It should be noted that interpreting Tarkovsky is like translating Dostoyevsky. One false move can take you nowhere. Tarkovsky believed that images were superior to symbols in cinema. By construing a meaning to a symbol, the viewer no longer associates to the object. Images, on the other hand, arouse a visceral relation and hence are ingrained in the viewer’s subconsciousness. Though his films still carry multiple meanings with these images, there are no metaphors for metaphor’s sake. As a result, the images still linger the spectator’s minds and one does not tend to look at them differently.

Right from The Steamroller and the Violin, down to his final film The Sacrifice, all of his major works have autobiographical elements in them. This perhaps is a direct consequence of his opinion of cinema. In his advice to young film makers in Voyage in Time, Tarkovsky urges the latter not to view life and work differently. He asks them to bridge the gap between both and therefore justify their positions as artists. Thus, knowledge about Tarkovsky’s own life helps when watching his films. Though not as troubled as Parajanov or Kieslowski, Tarkovsky’s ventures were consistently thwarted by the Soviet government and recognitions were duly averted by officials even as senior as director Sergei Bondarchuk. This, visibly, impacted Tarkovsky deeply and led to his exile to the west. This, along with his lovely childhood at the countryside, manifests itself in various forms throughout his canon of work.

The protagonists in his films are caught between two contradicting and conflicting worlds – both inner and outer - and straddle them in search of consolation. Yearning for the past and a fear of the future, Rationality based on science and search for faith, bucolic pleasantness of the countryside and defunct lifestyle of the post-modern world, joy and innocence of childhood and distress and banality of adulthood, geographical distance between motherland and present location, disparity between art and life, dreams and reality & mind and heart in general form the basis of the struggles. Needless to say, these were the exact issues in the life of the director himself who was prompted to put them on screen.

If one has watched even one or two of Tarkovsky’s features, he/she would not fail to observe Tarkovsky’s incessant thriving on still objects for imagery. It feels as if he was of the opinion that these immobile objects carried more life than the animate ones. Apples, water jugs and furniture often form a vital part of his mise en scène. Also images animals, especially horses and dogs, are recurrent in his works and dogs, many times, act as links between the two worlds of the protagonists. But most importantly, Tarkovsky’s canvas is fraught with nature and its elements. Rain and still water bring up a sense of ablution and cleansing of the soul, without being symbolic. Fire, in the form of bonfires and candles, also stirs up feelings of purification and restoration of faith.

Being a very religious man himself, Tarkovsky made his films, almost all of them, populated with religious figures and elements. As Tarkovsky seemingly became aware of his cancer, he used elements of the Apocalypse consistently. Starting from Stalker, all his films delineated the central character to be immersed in fear of faithlessness and end of the world because of the same. These characters also seem to believe that an intense personal sacrifice, triggered by a petty ritual, would be required to save the whole society. Regularly, these characters would be holy fools who have been outcast and even condemned insane. Like Karin of Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Tarkovsky seems to suggest that these so called “mad people” are closer to the truth and have a less flawed vision of Him.

Sergei Eisenstein had revolutionized the medium by his montage theory and almost all of the Russian directors were quick to lap up the idea. It seemed that editing was the life of film making until Tarkovsky had changed the perception completely. He completely disregarded montage and took to extremely long shots, some even around 10 minutes. Opposed to his American equivalent Stanley Kubrick who felt that editing was the only entity that separated it from other arts, Tarkovsky employed the long shot to effectively capture the essence of the world that the audience is going to live in and succeeded in capturing “truth” (to borrow Godard) like no other director.

Finally, Tarkovsky’s reverence for artists and their significance is unparalleled. He believed that artists were essential for the society to realize faith and move closer to God. For him, an artist was a connecting link between the divine and the pedestrian. The artist is but a medium of contact between the two. Artists also appear within his films in the form of writers, painters and actors. Artists, for him, capture the essence of the era and facilitate in progressing forward, much like himself.

These are but some of the spectacular facets of Tarkovsky’s cinema. Pages could be filled about his employment of music and silence and his love for distorting time, space and reality and his ability of entrancing the audience in his unique world and giving them a feel (not an idea) of the enigma that was Andrei Tarkovsky.