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.
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Creating only seven features in twenty-four years, Tarkovsky allowed his films to breathe, and then some—they are often characterized by their exorbitant length (“Andrei Rublev” is 3 hours and 25 minutes), their unhurried pace and the use of extended tracking shots that could last from 7-10 minutes, all of which habitually lent his pictures a somnolent, hallucinatory, hypnotic atmosphere. Tarkovsky believed cinema was the only art form that could truly preserve the flow of time—which perhaps explains the length of his films somewhat—and while his mesmeric dream tenor and sedative pacing can send the average moviegoer off to sleep, his “sculpting of time” ethos (the name of his posthumous 1989 book) generally inspires awe, wonder and a sense of the beautiful ambiguity with those with the patience and curiosity enough to give themselves over to the experience. As John Gianvito put it in his 2006 Tarkovsky Interviews book, the corpus of his work is the “near-messianic pursuit of nothing less than the redemeption of the soul of man.”