The Playlist’s Andrei Tarkovsky Retrospective
The Playlist looks back over the life and career of the famous director, and offers assessments of his feature films. Endlessly fascinated by the spiritual, the metaphysical, the texture of dreams and memory, Tarkovsky eschewed conventional narrative and plot, and instead sought to illuminate the essence of the unconscious through a patient, enigmatic and reflective cinema that for many borders on poetic divinity. [...] Creating only seven features in twenty-four years, Tarkovsky... Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom: Excerpt 4 – Tarkovsky
From Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky: I think that one of the saddest aspects of our time is the total destruction in people’s awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the beautiful. Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being. But the artist cannot... Read More
“Revisiting Tarkovsky”: Lincoln Center, July 7-14
Revisiting Tarkovsky July 7 – July 14, 2009 The Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center, New York Okay, so maybe New Yorkers are right after all: Manhattan really is the centre of the universe. To heck with the Empire State Building, they’ve got MOVIES! Years back I salivated over the two-month cinematic smorgasbord that was “The Hidden God” – the accompanying volume of essays is one of the indispensable books on faith and film. During my first trip to La... Read More
Andrei Rublev: The Passion According To Andrei (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
I’ll never paint again. Because it’s of no use to anyone. That’s all. This film doesn’t pander. It barely accommodates. You can watch for an hour, you might even make it all the way to the end, without being entirely sure which of the grim Russian monks is the title character. They look all alike, and names are rarely spoken. In the opening sequence, a mob tries to prevent a man from taking flight in a hot air balloon made of animal skins. He soars headlong... Read More
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