LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Andrei Tarkovsky
built 666 days ago
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was one of the great poets of world cinema. A fiercely independent artist, Tarkovsky crafted poignantly beautiful films that have proven inscrutable and been bitterly disputed. These qualities are present in abundance in Andrei Rublev (1966), Tarkovsky's first fully mature film. Ostensibly a biographical study of Russia's most famous medieval icon-painter, Andrei Rublev is both lyrical and epic, starkly naturalistic and allegorical, authentically historical and urgently topical. While much remains mysterious in Andrei Rublev, critics have recently begun to reappraise it as a groundbreaking film that undermines comfortable notions of life and spirituality.
Source:
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 masterpiece, like his earlier Solaris, is a very free and allegorical adaptation of an SF novel, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic. After a strange meteorite hits the earth, the region where it's fallen is sealed off; known as the Zone, it is believed to have magical powers that can grant the secret wishes of those who enter it, but it can be penetrated only illegally and with special guides. One such guide (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky), the stalker of the title, leads a writer and a professor (Nikolai Grinko and Anatoli Solonitsin) through the grimiest industrial wasteland you've ever seen to reach the epiphany. What they find is pretty harsh, and it has none of the usual satisfactions of SF quests. But Tarkovsky, who regards their journey as a contemporary spiritual quest, does such remarkable things with his mise en scene--particularly very slow and elaborately choreographed camera movements--that you may be mesmerized nonetheless. With Alice Friendlich.
Source:
The most famous Soviet film-maker since Sergei M. Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky (the son of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky) studied music and Arabic in Moscow before enrolling in the Soviet film school VGIK. He shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivanovo detstvo (1962), which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. This resulted in high expectations for his second feature _Andrei Rublyov (1969)_ , which was banned by the Soviet authorities until 1971. It was shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival at 4 o'clock in the morning on the last day, in order to prevent it winning a prize - but it won one nonetheless, and was eventually distributed abroad partly to enable the authorities to save face. Solyaris (1972), had an easier ride, being acclaimed by many in the West as the Soviet answer to Kubrick's '2001' (though Tarkovsky himself was never too fond of it), but he ran into official trouble again with Zerkalo (1975), a dense, personal web of autobiographical memories with a radically innovative plot structure. Stalker (1979) had to be completely reshot on a dramatically reduced budget after an accident in the laboratory destroyed the first version, and after Nostalghia (1983), shot in Italy (with official approval), Tarkovsky defected to the West.
Source:
"In his later films, Andrei Tarkovsky develops a compelling language based on sound's potential for ambiguity and abstraction. He probes sound's ability to function both literally - attached to an object - and abstractly - independent of any recognizable source. In these films, sound moves beyond its traditional role as secondary support for the image, at times surpassing the visual in its ability to convey certain types of meaning.
Source:
For Andrei Tarkovsky the journey of Andrei Rublev from conception to screening was long and difficult. In 1961, even before he had finished his first feature film Ivan's Childhood (1962), he submitted a proposal to the studio for a film on the life of Russia's greatest icon painter, Andrei Rublev. Tarkovsky and his co-writer Andrei Konchalovsky worked on the script for over two years, and this script came to be known as 'The Three Andreis'. A premiere screening for the film industry at Dom Kino in late 1966 met with mixed critical reaction, and the film did not get a public release. In 1969 it was requested for the Cannes Film Festival and was finally able to be screened in an out-of-competition, unofficial screening where it was awarded the International Critics' Prize. But its notoriety continued and a Russian release was further delayed until 1971.
Source:
Early student effort from the great Andrei Tarkovsky ("Solaris") tells of an unlikely friendship between a young boy and a city worker, a macho steamroller driver who protects the boy from a gang of neighborhood bullies. With Igor Fomchenko and V. Zamansky; co-written by Andrei Konchalovsky ("Runaway Train"). 43 min. Standard; Soundtrack: Russian Dolby Digital mono; Subtitles: English; biography; filmography. In Russian with English subtitles.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Andrei Tarkovsky