The Sacrifice is Andrei Tarkovsky’s final, visually intoxicating and profoundly spiritual masterpiece about the end of the world. The film’s initial image sets the tone for Tarkovsky’s deeply personal statement on humanity’s self-destruction. There is a close-up of a painting depicting an offering (to the haunting, threnodic oratorio of Johann Sebastian Bach). The camera then […]
If the neorealist cinema of Vittorio de Sica and Federico Fellini explored the empirical essence of a man’s primordial soul, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia is the poetic expression of the spiritual soul. Andrei Gortchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), a Russian author, is on an Italian research expedition with his beautiful translator, Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) to retrace the journey […]
Ground control has been receiving strange transmissions from the three remaining cosmonauts aboard the Solaris space station: Dr. Snouth (Yuri Yarvet), Dr. Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn), and Dr. Gibarian (Sos Sarkisyan). The Solaris program is at a crossroads, and psychologist Dr. Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) has been assigned to visit the crew, report on their mental […]
Mirror is Andrei Tarkovsky’s visually transcendent, artistically revelatory autobiographical film on lost innocence and emotional abandonment. Presented as a languidly paced, achronological cinematic montage of modern day life, personal memories, historical news footage, and dreams, Mirror is an introspective journey through the course of human existence, hope and despair, success and frailty: a television broadcast […]
On an idyllic summer day, a 12 year old boy named Ivan (Nikolai Burlyayev) ventures into the woods and spots a cuckoo. He begins to levitate above the forest, rejoins his mother (Irma Raush Tarkovskaya), and begins to share his discovery. Then the peaceful reunion between mother and son is truncated by Ivan’s rude awakening […]
The abstract opening sequence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev reflects the mystical undercurrent that flows throughout the film: a peasant sneaks into a tower to ride aboard a primitive hot air balloon. He succeeds in briefly soaring into the atmosphere, only to crash violently into the ground. To dissect every frame of Andrei Rublev and […]