Tarkovsky

[Tyler]

Open Culture has made most of Tarkovsky's films (all except The Sacrifice) available for free online. I haven't checked all the links, but this seems to be legit.

It includes 3 of his early student films, as well.

Edited April 15, 2013 by Tyler

[Anders]

Open Culture has made most of Tarkovsky's films (all except The Sacrifice, I believe) available for free online. I haven't checked all the links, but this seems to be legit.

Of course the one I haven't seen is the one that isn't there. (I'm still waiting on the Blu-ray disc from my dvd mailing service, Zip.ca).

[Attica]

Vadim Yusov obituary

 

Russian cinematographer whose work with the director Andrei Tarkovsky produced poetic and powerful films

 

"It is sometimes difficult to assess how and how much directors of photography contribute to films. However, nobody watching Andrei Tarkovsky's visual masterpieces Andrei Rublev (1966) and Solaris(1972) could fail to be struck by the remarkable cinematography of Vadim Yusov, who has died aged 84."

[Attica]

I think I'm going to give Andrei Rublev a go tommorrow in memoriam.  The cinematography in that film really does rank amongst the best.

[J.A.A. Purves]

Jeffrey, it looks like you just took your question down, so you may not need a response now.

 

But if you want to, you can respond to your questioner with the following:

 

It can be confidently stated that Tarkovsky was not a Marxist.  His films Mirror and Stalker were both suppressed, in one way or another, by the Soviet authorities (probably because of how they portrayed life in the Soviet Union).  They also refused to release his film Andrei Rublev (1966) until later in 1971.  Another film, The First Day, was shut down by the Soviet government on the grounds that it was critical of atheism and, after that, Tarkovsky essentially had to live in exile for the rest of his life.

 

There is also some evidence that members of the Soviet government considered Tarkovsky’s films as anti-Communist propaganda, while Tarkovsky himself did not.  He writes about how art should never be used as propaganda, and ironically enough, it was that very viewpoint that was considered to be anti-Communist by the authorities.

However, it would probably also be unfair to call Tarkovsky a capitalist.  His fight with Communism was over Marxist philosophy on the arts, not over economics or politics.  Lenin wrote that “Cinema is for us the most important of all the arts” because it could be one of the most powerful forms of propaganda.  This is the Marxist point of view that Tarkovsky was against.  This conflict heavily influenced him and actually limited the number of films he was able to make.

[Overstreet]

Yeah, I took my question down when I remembered the excellent CT article about Tarkovsky from a short while back. Plus, it gave me a chance to recommend Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky. Neither of these are really the "short answer" I was looking for, but they're great. Thanks, though. I'll share your response anyway.

[Overstreet]

Andrew Stanton wins all of the Twitter awards today for sharing this...

[Kinch]

As of this Christmas I own DVDs of all seven of Tarkovsky's features.

(This has strengthened my secret wish for Criterion to buy out so many rights that Kino has right now. Tarkovsky 75-86, Derzu Uzala, Nosferatu, Metropolis, Buster Keaton, Les Bonne Femmes, Sokurov...ahh, it's just a pipe dream.)

[Peter T Chattaway]

[John Drew]

The comparison is one that has been written about before, but I like this visual side by side comparison.