Description:
Documentary on the final years in the life of director Andrej Tarkovsky, who died in 1986, including his exile in Western Europe. The film shows the degree to which the themes of his films, NOSTALGHIA and the SACRIFICE almost literally came to encapsulate the director’s own life and death.Read More »
Synopsis
An expansive Russian drama, this film focuses on the life of revered religious icon painter Andrei Rublev. Drifting from place to place in a tumultuous era, the peace-seeking monk eventually gains a reputation for his art. But after Rublev witnesses a brutal battle and unintentionally becomes involved, he takes a vow of silence and spends time away from his work. As he begins to ease his troubled soul, he takes steps towards becoming a painter once again.Read More »
Quote:
One of the most frequent charges against science-fiction is that it replaces emotion with intellect. Its characters are people who live by and for the mind, and their personal relationships are likely to be stifled and awkward, That’s probably true enough of most s-f novels (although exceptions range from Fredric Brown’s “The Lights in the Sky are Stars” to a lot of the work by Theodore Sturgeon), but it’s even more true of science-fiction movies.Read More »
Description: A 40 minute documentary discussing the friendship of Tarkovsky and Parajanov and their contrasting filmmaking styles and personalities, including interviews with friends and associates.Read More »
Quote:
Widely recognized as a masterpiece, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 205-minute medieval epic, based on the life of the Russian monk and icon painter, was not seen as the director intended it until its re-release over twenty years after its completion. The film was not screened publicly in its own country (and then only in an abridged form) until 1972, three years after winning the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Calling the film frightening, obscure, and unhistorical, Soviet authorities edited the picture on several occasions, removing as much as an entire hour from the original.
Presented as a tableaux of seven sections in black and white, with a final montage of Rublev’s painted icons in color, the film takes an unflinching gaze at medieval Russia during the first quarter of the 15th century, a period of Mongol-Tartar invasion and growing Christian influence. Commissioned to paint the interior of the Vladimir cathedral, Andrei Rublev (Anatoli Solonitsyn) leaves the Andronnikov monastery with an entourage of monks and assistants, witnessing in his travels the degradations befalling his fellow Russians, including pillage, oppression from tyrants and Mongols, torture, rape, and plague. Faced with the brutalities of the world outside the religious enclave, Rublev’s faith is shaken, prompting him to question the uses or even possibility of art in a degraded world. After Mongols sack the city of Vladimir, burning the very cathedral that he has been commissioned to paint, Rublev takes a vow of silence and withdraws completely, removing himself to the hermetic confines of the monastery.
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SYNOPSIS
With Zerkalo (The Mirror), legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky crafts perhaps his most profound and compelling film. What started off for Tarkovsky as a planned series of interviews with his own mother evolved into a lyrical and complex circular meditation on love, loyalty, memory, and history. Time shifts and generations merge as a single extraordinary actress (Margarita Terekhova) plays the narrator’s former wife as well as his mother. Tarkovsky’s memories as well as those of his mother are intermingled as a dark, sumptuous, and dreamlike pre-World War II Russia is evoked, accompanied throughout by the voice of Tarkovsky’s father reading his own elegiac poetry. The spectacle of nature and its ubiquitous and ever-shifting presence is captured by Tarkovsky’s camera as if by magic–the family cabin nestled deep in the verdant woods, a barn on fire in the middle of a gentle rainstorm, a gigantic wind enveloping a man as he walks through a wheat field–all creating indelible images with deep if mysterious emotional resonance. As the timeline shifts between the narrator’s generation and his mother’s, newsreel footage of Russian wars, triumphs, and disasters are juxtaposed with imagined scenes from the past, present, and future, crafting a silently lucid cinematic panopticon of memory, history, and nature. (Rotten Tomatoes)Read More »
From wikipedia
There Will be No Leave Today (Russian: Сегодня увольнения не будет, Sevodnya uvolnyeniya nye budyet) is a 1959 student film by the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky and his fellow student Aleksandr Gordon. The film is about members of the Soviet army during a time of peace. It was Tarkovsky’s second film, produced while being a student at the State Institute of Cinematography.Read More »
Eduard Artemiev – Tarkovsky movies OST (Solaris-The Mirror- Stalker)
Eduard Artemiev
In the latter part of the 1950’s, the engineer and mathematician Yevgeniy Murzin had a problem. He had just realized his life long dream of constructing music synthesizer (then called “ANS”) but knew no musician with sufficient imagination to explore its vast potential. In 1960, upon meeting 22-year-old Edward Artemyev, a recent graduate of the Moscow conservatoire, Murzin immediately felt he had found what he was searching for in the young composer, who embraced the new instrument and quickly mastered its many subtleties. Artemyev has since composed numerous works varying from electronic avant-garde to film music. He is probably best known for his collaboration with A. Tarkovskiy composing music for his films: “SOLARIS” in 1972, “THE MIRROR” in 1975 and “STALKER” in 1979; and with such filmmakers as Andrei Mikhalkov-Kontchalovskiy and Nikita Mikhalkov.Read More »