The filmmaker whom Ingmar Bergman described as "the greatest, the one who invented a new language," Andrei Tarkovsky, died of cancer this past December in a Paris hospital. In a life of fifty-three years Tarkovsky had made only seven films in a career spanning a quarter-century. But those seven films stand as a mighty testimonial to the enduring power of belief in the Almighty in a land whose official credo is atheism.
The son of a renowned Soviet poet, Tarkovsky was just 30 when his first feature film, the lyrical Childhood of Ivan, won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962. Although the film nominally dealt with a subject - the horrors of World War II - much favored by the Soviet establishment, Tarkovsky by showing the war through the eyes of a twelve-year-old lent a touchingly human dimension to the subject.
The winning of a top prize at a major international film festival insured Tarkovsky a certain freedom and indulgence from Mosfilm, particularly since the coauthor of the scenario of his new project was Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, a man whose family is, and continues to be, singularly well protected in Soviet society. The film, Andrei Roublev, the life of a fifteenth-century icon painter, completed in 1965, was, despite the Konchalovsky connection, shelved by Soviet authorities. The directors of the Cannes and Venice film festivals who knew of the film's existence kept requesting it for their festivals. The Soviet authorities stonewalled, claiming it was not finished.
Terrifying Panorama
Finally a showing was "authorized" out of competition at the 1969 Cannes Festival. A magnificent, stirring, and terrifying panorama, the film created a sensation. Its protagonist, Andrei Roublev, a monk and artist, is shown persisting in his work as an artist no matter how difficult the conditions and pressures of life about him. His religious faith sustains him in his struggles. It was not difficult to read the film as a kind of parable of the condition of the artist in the contemporary Soviet state.
Years later, writing about Andrei Roublev, Tarkovsky made clear what he was trying to do in his film.
It looks at first sight as if the cruel truth of life as he [Andrei Roublev] observes it is in crying contradiction with the harmonious ideal of his work. The crux of the question, however, is that the artist cannot express the moral ideal of his time unless he touches all its running sores, unless he suffers and lives these sores himself....Art could almost be said to be religious in that it is inspired by commitment to a higher goal.
That the Soviet state understood all too well the underlying message of Andrei Roublev may be seen by the fact that the film was briefly and discreetly released in Moscow only in 1972. The state did not - could not - approve of a film showing an artist refusing to create for an official church, no matter that that church was long vanished.
Tarkovsky, perhaps because of his connection with the powerful Konchalovsky clan, was permitted to continue working. His Solaris won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1972. His next film, The Mirror, a highly stylized autobiography of life in the
...
Read Full Article
|
