October 17, 2009

Flashback #68

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USSR, Flashback | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Katok I Skripka (1960) (aka The Steamroller And The Violin)
Andrei Tarkovsky
Russian

“He’s a musician.”

 

The Steamroller and the ViolinThere is no other way of seeing Andrei Tarkovsky’s diploma film Katok I Skripka (The Steamroller and the Violin, 1960) at VGIK other than as a scratchpad for a would-be master of cinema. As a result, one is only preoccupied with filtering out the Tarkovskian elements of the film from the rest and somehow hammering it to conform to his/her understanding of the director’s oeuvre. However, it must also be acknowledged that the movie is more rewarding if you are indeed familiar with the director’s work. Shot in no less than the prestigious Mosfilm studio, The Steamroller and the Violin is a little gem that is at times prophetic, at times contradictory and at times surprising, when one considers the films of Tarkovsky that were to follow. But one just cannot fail to note the unmistakable signature of the hand that made works such as Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and Andrei Rublev (1966) in this film.

The Steamroller and the Violin follows a day in the life of young Sasha (Igor Fomchenko) who learns violin at the local music school. Everyday, he has to sneak past the gang of local bullies that tries to rip him apart. On this fortunate day, he is, however, saved even after being caught by them, by a young worker named Sergei (Vladmir Zamansky), who is working at a construction site nearby. Sasha, then, proceeds towards the music school, stopping once at the window of a curio shop where he witnesses the city through images gathered on the mirrors placed there for sale. After getting berated during a music test for playing the violin according to his imagination and not sticking to the notes provided, Sasha returns to the streets to meet Sergei once more. Following this, Sasha embarks on a little adventure of sorts where he operates the steamroller, roams around the city with Sergei, witnesses an old building being razed down, plays violin for Sergei and even gets into a small fist with a boy bigger than him. Sergei, meanwhile, keeps ignoring a girl who tries to flirt with him. Sergei and Sasha also make plans to go to the movies that evening, but, alas, Sasha’s mother won’t let him go.

Despite the romantic nature of its script, The Steamroller and the Violin remains a neo-realist film. But its neo-realism is not of the confrontational kind driven forth dogmatically by the Italian theorists and filmmakers, but of the stylistic one championed by Bazin in his essays. The film’s realism lies in not committing itself to the study of the society (which it never does), but, rather, in the respect it has for the integrity of time and space of its world. Tarkovsky extensively employs deeply focused shots so that large chunks of action can unfold in a single, undivided unit of film. For Tarkovsky, this meant a step away from montage and hence, automatically, from the founding stones laid by film pioneers of his country. Although, later, he would master the art of non-division of a shot even if it called for Herculean perfection and risk, deep focus proves to be a very viable option for Tarkovsky, here, to let the audience choose key actions of a sequence without having to direct their attention artificially. Furthermore, with this freedom that he gives to his audience, a la Orson Welles, Tarkovsky is able to bathe the film with ambiguity, thus turning upside down both the technique and the intention of the dominant Soviet cinema of yesteryear.

The Steamroller and the ViolinI might be giving the impression that the film is far more revolutionary than it actually is, but it is difficult not to applaud Tarkovsky’s ideology of taking art away from political exploitation. His vision couldn’t possibly have crystallized if Stalin, who insisted that art be used only for activist purposes, with no margin for ambiguity in its message, was still ruling the USSR. For Stalin, the artist existed for the worker and never as an independent entity in the society. Everyone had to stick to the positions in the society they were given irrespective of what their choice was. In Tarkovsky’s film, Sasha is conditioned by his teacher to play his violin in the way she wants. His mother prevents him from going to the movie. Instead, he has to stay home to meet some guests (and probably play some classical piece for them). Sasha wants to drive the steamroller, he wants to play the violin like he wants it and he wants to go to the movie whenever he wants. But, unfortunately, he has to assume the role of an artist that he never wants to be.  Also, conversely, Sasha will never be able to replace the worker (and vise-versa). Nor will he be able to parry off his bullies like Sergei wants him to. All he can do, and with much satisfaction, is to play the violin for Sergei to make him happy for a few minutes.

Although Tarkovsky’s stance, here, regarding the role of the artist in a worker-oriented society remains open to interpretation, it is clear that he is appealing for an environment where art can stand on its own legs and eventually finds an independent voice. In other words, Tarkovsky seems to be wanting the evolution of an art form of whose universe the artist is the centre and in which his “inner demands” propel the work of art rather than socio-political policies – art to exist for its own sake. He succinctly puts it in his book Sculpting in Time:

“How wonderfully apposite is Tolstoy’s remark in his diary on March 21, 1858: ‘The political is not compatible with the artistic, because the former, in order to prove, has to be one-sided.’ Indeed! The artistic image cannot be one-sided: in order justly to be called truthful, it has to unite within itself dialectically contradictory phenomena.”

“It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good; any more than they can learn how to be faithful wives by following the ‘positive’ example of Pushkin’s Tatiana Larina. Art can only give food—a jolt—the occasion—for psychical experience.”

More so than the neo-realist films of Italy, Tarkovsky’s film is reluctant to succumb to the needs of a drama. For most part, The Steamroller and the Violin is a plotless film. There is no dramatic epicenter to the events that unfold in it. Causality vanishes and we merely witness episodic encounters between Sergei and Sasha taking place at various geographic locations. Events happen in the film not to progress a preformatted story line but because they, well, “happen”. Furthermore, unlike the neo-realist movies, there isn’t even an objective for our protagonists. All that Sasha and Sergei want are to spend the day together. There are no hurdles, no conflicts and no turning points or threats to this wish. And the camera (handled by director of photography Vadim Yusov, who would go on to film the next three Tarkovsky features) obliges them by simply documenting them along with their surroundings. What is nowadays cornered into terms like “dead time” is the very thing that Tarkovsky calls “life”. Again, he elucidates his staunch position against artificial standards of theatrical drama (even if backed by naturalism) in his book:

“I wanted to demonstrate how cinema is able to observe life, without interfering, crudely or obviously, with its continuity. For that is where I see the true poetic essence of cinema.”

“I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful and poetic of art forms. Certainly I am more at home with them than with traditional theatrical writing which links images through the linear, rigidly logical development of the plot.

That sort of fussily correct way of linking events usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience to some abstract notion of order. And even when this is not so, even when the plot is governed by the characters, one finds that the links which hold it together rest on a facile interpretation of life’s complexities. But film material can be joined together in another way, which works above all to lay open the logic of a person’s thought. This is the rationale that will dictate the sequence of events, and the editing which forms them into a whole. The birth and development of thought are subject to laws of their own, and sometimes demand forms of expression which are quite different from the patterns of logical speculation. In my view poetic reasoning is closer to the laws by which thought develops, and thus to life itself, than is the logic of traditional drama. And yet it is the methods of classical drama which have been regarded as the only models, and which for years have defined the form in which dramatic conflict is expressed.”

Apart from the cinematography, what stands out technically in Tarkovsky’s film is the production design (by Savet Agoyan) which helps Tarkovsky, though being unusual for him, to use a slightly expressionistic mise en scène which should perhaps be deemed academically remarkable. The conservatory and Sasha’s house – the centers of restriction in the film – are allotted dark colours and are populated by rigid, oppressive furniture that seem to choke the frame, Even the cat at the conservatory is black and ominous. The only sign of life at that place seems to be the little girl.  On the other hand, the exteriors – where Sasha seems really happy to be – are unusually bright, with vibrant coloured vehicles (The red tractor seems to have become the Soviet symbol of sorts), clear skies and people with cheerfully coloured clothes. The interiors at Sasha’s and at the music school, again, are lit by small isolated beams of sunlight whereas the sun is up and shining whenever Sasha is out with Sergei. Even though Tarkovsky would never again make such cerebral use of his mise en scène (and also a few flashy techniques like the ones utilized during the building-demolition and the final dream scenes), it still remains praiseworthy for a student film – the kind of cinema that almost always retains its jittery and attention-gathering qualities.

The Steamroller and the ViolinPerhaps the most striking Tarkovsky trait apparent in The Steamroller and the Violin is the director’s use of water throughout the film. For a very large part, water seems to be present in every frame of the film. Tarkovsky floods the movie with images of water found in one form or the other in everyday life. For him, water wasn’t just a symbol or a token of life, it was life. For Tarkovsky, water’s reflective, meditative, serene, cleansing, cathartic and mystic qualities were nothing short of the magic of life itself. In this movie, however, his use of water, unusually, takes up the job of indicating free life, rather than being present for just what it is. Although one can argue that this strategy is close to becoming symbolism that Tarkovsky would later oppose, it is to be accepted that he has used it very efficiently. Throughout the film, we see water being employed to make a commentary on life in that particular environment. Water is seen flowing smoothly on the streets when Sasha and Sergei bond. The same water is forced and confined into water jugs in the conservatory and at Sasha’s home. Water appears in the purgative form of a rain during the quintessentially Soviet sequence in the film, where a building is brought down with a soundtrack marked by expressionist music. And water is seen in its softest form in a puddle gently continuing to reflect its surroundings, like it would in the director’s later movies, as Sasha and Sergei descend into a free-flowing small talk.

Additionally, there are many images and facets in The Steamroller and the Violin that one would also see in Tarkovsky’s films that were to follow. The basket of apples that the woman in the city drops takes us directly to the cart of apples in Ivan’s Childhood. The contemplative interior where Sergei and Sasha sit for lunch shows up in almost every subsequent Tarkovsky film.  The autobiographical aspect of the absence of the father figure and the presence of a strong and demanding mother in the movie is unmistakably Tarkovskian. The question about the role of the artist is a clear precursor to his masterwork Andrei Rublev. Although not blown to full scale, Tarkovsky’s elliptical editing, which would be stretched to the limits later, makes sure that superfluous actions are weeded out and the audience is left with the bare minimum to hold on to and develop into a whole. We see the bullies approach the violin with awe. But it would become our responsibility shortly to understand that these kids never actually wanted to harm the violin, but just to taunt the artist. We see Sasha give an apple to the little girl at the conservatory and that she eats it by the time Sasha leaves, but it is up to us to decide why she was reluctant in the first place.

“The method whereby the artist obliges the audience to build the separate parts into a whole, and to think on, further than has been stated, is the only one that puts the audience on a par with the artist in their perception of the film. And indeed from the point of view of mutual respect only that kind of reciprocity is worthy of artistic practice.”

 

September 12, 2008

Sculptures In Time

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Italy, Cinema of Sweden, Cinema of the USSR | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Mirror

Though Andrei Tarkovsky’s canon consisted of only seven features, three student films, one documentary and a couple of stage plays and there were more unrealized projects than filmed ones, each of the ideas that were completed were gems and remain unparalleled to date. Looking back, each one seems hand picked and “sculpted” second by second and without doubt, the experience just improves with multiple viewings. Of course, Tarkovsky means different things to different people and the section just attempts to give a universal outline of the projects.

Andrei Tarkovsky and his classmates Alexander Gordon and Marika Beiku, on the suggestion of the former, decided to collaborate and adapt the Ernest Hemingway short story. The Killers (1956) is Tarkovsky’s first documented work and is, for most of the runtime, un-Tarkovskian. The quarter hour long thriller consists of three scenes with the first and the last scenes directed by Tarkovsky. The film has a pretty conventional execution and carries a film noir feel with it. Its open ended nature and stress on off-screen events would ring a bell for one who has watched Ivan’s Childhood before. Apparently, the film was praised by Tarkovsky’s professor at VGIK.

Tarkovsky’s next collaboration with Alexander Gordon at the VGIK, There Will Be No Leave Today (1958), is larger in scope and vision than its short predecessor. Written on the lines of the Clouzot classic The Wages of Fear (1953), the film revolves around a group of soldiers who try to transport a very sensitive bunch of weapons to an explosion area. The thrill never wanes even for a minute and screenplay is kept as taut as possible. This was possibly an influence of the very many thrillers from France and the USA at that time and Tarkovsky’s style was yet to be revealed to the world.

The Steamroller and the Violin (1959) would be Tarkovsky’s first independent venture and was presented as his graduation film at the VGIK. The Steamroller and the Violin does show some characteristics of a Tarkovsky film, especially the emphasis on the seclusion of the artist from the society and the subsequent bonding of the Artist and the Worker.  The film’s use of music, however, seems to be inspired by the Russian directors (Kalatazov et al.) of that time with tones of opera standing out. Also, the restriction on the colour palette, which would become stricter with subsequent films, is let loose and the film poses a childlike vivacity, much like the protagonist himself. The film won the best film at the New York Student’s film festival in 1961.

Tarkovsky’s first commercial feature, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), would be the starting of depiction of major autobiographical elements. Tarkovsky himself had spent a large part of childhood at the country side due to the war and he felt that many children who had such wonderful childhood were forced to witness the cruelty of the war. Pregnant with typically Tarkovskian imagery, the film remains one of the best anti-war films till date. The elements of nature depicted on monochrome are just perfect for the somber atmosphere it builds. Rather than showing the direct impact of violence on their minds, Ivan’s Childhood consists of the titular character’s life in between missions interspersed with dreams of the past. Ivan’s Childhood won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival and would be his last film to win an award without any haggle.

1966 would witness Tarkovsky’s magnum opus, Andrei Rublev. Ingmar Bergman called it the best film he had seen till then and the world hailed it unanimously as a masterpiece of epic proportions. Indeed, Andrei Rublev is massive in its vision and execution and one does not hesitate to place it in the same league as Ran (1985), Spartacus (1960) and the like. Though set in the medieval era of Russia, Andrei Rublev is very much a contemporary film and serves as a commentary on art, the artist, his duty and his obstacles. Co-scripted by director Andrei Konchalovsky, the film shows that a true artist should not merely practice his art, but he should find faith in his work, connect with the natural and the supernatural and hence bridge them both with compassion. Tarkovsky favorite, Anatoly Solonitsyn plays the title character with perfection. Clearly, the film alludes to Tarkovsky’s own struggles in the Soviet that would exacerbate in the following years.

Dubbed as the Soviet reply to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) is much more human and much less of a science fiction than the former. Tarkovsky’s spat with co-writers continued for a third time, this time the reason being his departure from hardcore sci-fi of the book to the version he completed. Tarkovsky distorts time, space and reality like never before and disorients the viewer form any trace of rational explanation, perhaps mirroring the very nature of human memory. He shows how our own memories, past and experiences are inescapable and become an integral part of our own personality. True to its theory, Tarkovsky’s trauma of a fractured personal life directly shows in the relation between Kelvin and Hari. Tarkovsky describes how human love is still a complex phenomenon and even in this advanced age of science. The film also argues that knowledge should be based on morality and the fragility of both inner and outer nature must be respected.

Tarkovsky’s next feature Mirror (1974) is by far his most personal work and the most enigmatic too. Most of the events, locations and characters in the film are autobiographical and Tarkovsky makes a very personal mark on screen with them.  His pining for lost beauty and innocence of childhood is evident. Repeatedly, Alexei tries to enter his dream as if to revive the past. He also sees the image of his mother and the absence of his father. This is contrasted with Alexei’s constrained relationship with his wife, who incidentally resembles his mother and his negligence towards his son. The most striking aspect of mirror is its use of past and historical events in the form of newsreels, perhaps suggesting that history, like the past, is ineluctable and forms a part of us. Through undifferentiated images of the past and the present, Tarkovsky blurs the line between dreams and reality and yet provides a stark contrast between the two. This poem of a film is hailed by many as his best work.

Stalker (1979) is arguably Tarkovsky’s most accessible work as far as its themes are concerned. The film takes us into the journey of a writer, a professor and a stalker into the Zone where one can realize one’s innermost wishes. The journey is that of discovery of faith with the professor representing the rational brain, the writer representing the intuitive heart and the stalker himself representing the doubting soul. The Zone, much like the Ocean of Solaris, is a reason-defying place that acts as the human mind and “changes by the minute”. The film’s amazing production design captures the spiritual decay in modern world effectively with its narrow colour range. Stalker, in more than one way, marks Tarkovsky’s transition from his earlier works to his trademark style that would be visible in the subsequent years. First off, Tarkovsky’s use of extremely long shots shows its roots here. Also, the quest for faith in a rotting post-modern world, that was also Tarkovsky’s own, would go on to become the primary theme in his next films.

During his journey to Italy in the early eighties, Tarkovsky shot his only documentary, Voyage in Time (1980), in collaboration with writer Tonino Guerra. Though not deliberately filmed for that purpose, Voyage in Time serves well as a companion piece to Tarkovsky’s next film Nostalgia. Not only does one get a partial insight into the mind of one of the most mysterious directors, but also gets to know how life and film was not much different for the director, the advice that he gives in the film for budding filmmakers The measured style of Tarkovsky is retained and one can see how Tarkovsky uses his experience and memories to reconstruct, almost exactly, the required situations and locations into his films. Voyage in Time lets us know the directors that Tarkovsky considered great, with the film never once feeling like a plain interview.

If one were to pick one film from Tarkovsky’s filmography that embodies all of his styles, ideologies and trademarks, it would most definitely be Nostalgia (1983). A deeply multi-layered film that conveys much more upon contemplation. The film follows, ironically, a translator Gorchakov who is unable to relate to his new country and yearns for return to past. He fails his Italian assistant who craves for his attention and eventually splits. Once again, Tarkovsky places his protagonist between inner and external conflicts. Gorchakov struggles to abolish internal and external boundaries in order to come to peace with himself. He finds faith with the help of Domenico, an outcast who asks the former to carry a candle across the pool in order to save the world. Nostalgia mirrors the director’s own struggles to believe and come to terms with his exile to Italy. The 9 minute shot of Gorchakov carrying the candle across is not just a revelation for the character but the viewer himself.

In 1986, Tarkovsky went on to make what would become a befitting end to a majestic career. The Sacrifice is out and away the most verbose of Tarkovsky’s films. Perhaps Tarkovsky, a person who had been consistently accused of being inarticulate and self-indulgent, foresaw what was to come and tried to express what he wanted to as clearly as possible. Taking off from Gorchakov’s act of faith in Nostalgia, The Sacrifice demands Alexander to make a large sacrifice in exchange for restoration of peace within himself and outside. Shot beautifully by Bergman favorite Sven Nykvist (both of whom passed away recently), Sacrifice takes Tarkovsky’s theory of “time-sculpting” to new heights with the film comprising of just 115 shots. The film is dedicated to Tarkovsky’s son, who wasn’t allowed to return to his father in exile, and like Bergman’s The Silence (1963), The Sacrifice hopes that sanity and belief will be restored by the new generation.

Tarkovsky died in the December of 1986 months after the premiere of The Sacrifice. In retrospection, it looks as if he had known his end (a psychic once told him that he would make no more than 7 films) and had it transformed on screen. With his demise, a whole new chapter in the history of Soviet cinema came to an end. His legacy was passed on to budding directors like Alexander Sokurov, who has carved a niche for himself in world cinema. Through films of directors like Kiarostami and Sokurov, one is time and again reminded how massive Tarkovsky’s contribution to cinema was and how, in his own words, “There’s no death, there is immortality. Time is one and undivided.”

 

September 9, 2008

The Passion According To Andrei

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TarkovskyMy 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.