“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

I first came across Andrei Tarkovsky when I was 15, reading a review in The Radio Times of a film called Rosie Dixon – Night Nurse (Justin Cartwright, 1978). The quote which caught my eye was that this film made “Carry on Doctor look like a Tarkovsky movie”. I had no idea at the time who Tarkovsky was, but because of this quote, I wanted to find out. Shortly after this, I went to live in France, where luckily for me, Tarkovsky’s films are shown on the telly.

Whilst not a member of any avant-garde movement, Tarkovsky was without question experimental, non-linear and defiantly elliptical in his approach to film-making. How one reacts to a Tarkovsky film depends for the most part on whether the viewer is “willing or ready to consider the meaning and aim of their existence in any higher sense” when going to the cinema. For him, an unwillingness to do so “is often masked by the vulgarly simplistic cry, ‘I don’t like it!’ ‘It’s boring!’ – like the utterance of a man born blind who is being told about a rainbow. He simply remains deaf to the pain undergone by the artist in order to share with others the truth he has reached.”

Right. So having established, therefore, that we’re not in Ron Howard territory, what of the films themselves? Well what one cannot sensibly deny, is Tarkovsky’s mastery and invention in terms of the creation of imagery – the language of Cinema. Each sequence of a Tarkovsky film may resonate with many other art forms, such as painting, poetry, theatre and ballet, but it also differentiates itself and distinguishes itself from them. His use of timing, movement, camerawork and the integration of sound to create images that remain unforgettable is beyond doubt – whether they mean anything to you, unaccompanied as they are by conventional plotting, characterization or dialogue, is for you to find out.

Tarkovsky’s breakthrough film (and his most accessible) was a moving account of the life of the tortured 15th Century Russian artist Andrey Rublyov (1966), unveiled this week as one of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s two favourite films*. He followed this with his most popular film, Solyaris (1972) based on a short story by science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Both pictures marked him out as a filmmaker who believed utterly in the primacy of the image (or the sequence of images) to communicate with the viewer, over the script. This appeared entirely excusable in the case of Solyaris, a genre film, but the long takes, lack of cutting, variable pacing and cavernous silences, punctuated by occasional, disquietingly disconnected bursts of classical music, came to characterise his entire body of work, which later dealt only with humanity at its rawest.

The impact of Tarkovsky’s films at first was one of massive polarization of interest: between those who were interested and those who weren’t. On the one hand leading European critics recognised and hailed a modern master; on the other hand came a massive, baffled shrug of shoulders from cinemagoers. It was never going to be a money-spinner. Tarkovsky once said that he “loathe[d] the concept of ‘entertainment’ in the Cinema, as it degrades the author and the viewer”. You don’t say, Andrei.

What Tarkovsky saw as the meaning of Cinema was “juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, relating a person to the whole world.” The last image of Solyaris, with the camera drawing back into the sky, revealing the principal character’s house and the wasteland around it, to be merely a tiny island in a world otherwise entirely underwater, illustrates this vision rather well. Silence, solitude, but also simplicity, abound in his work.

Like many other filmmakers, Tarkovsky was evangelical in his belief that the genius of an artist is revealed not in the absolute perfection of his work, but in absolute fidelity to himself and in commitment to his own passion. We often say we prefer a film-maker’s ‘personal films’, but for Tarkovsky, there could be no other kind.

Of the later films he completed before his premature death of lung cancer in a Parisian hospital in 1986, three are now acknowledged masterpieces of 20th Century Cinema: Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983) and Offret (The Sacrifice, 1986). The SMIC comes from my own personal favourite, Zerkalo (The Mirror, 1975). In Zerkalo, a writer who is dying seeks to conjure up images from his childhood. Insodoing, his memory becomes like a camera and plays the tricks a camera plays, heightening certain details which otherwise appear irrelevant and interspersing the images with precise sounds. The images that he conjures up are of course always striking (or they would have been forgotten) and they may be accurate or may not: they reside half way between a dream and an eyewitness account.

I urge anyone with an open mind who hasn’t already done so, to devote 120 minutes of their time to a Tarkovsky film. As the man himself would have it:

“Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.”

*[...the other favourite being The Muppet Christmas Carol (Brian Henson, 1992) , which erodes the prelate’s credibility somewhat – surely The Muppets Take Manhattan (Frank Oz, 1984) is superior?].