Dir: ANDREI TARKOVSKYCountry: SOVIET UNION/WEST GERMANY
The films of Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky are challenging and often inscrutable. The images presented in his films are enigmatic and the layers of meaning unfathomable but at the same time stimulating. The narratives of his films regularly play out in a linear fashion, but details of plot are often obscured by his meditative and dignified use of the camera. The editing strategy employed in his cinema often creates a sense of temporal confusion, a blurred netherworld in which memory and reality do battle in a war of representation. A world in which cinematic space is manipulated to become strange and otherworldly. His films walk a thin tight rope between commercial generic material (two of his most famous works have been positioned as science fiction) and an avant-garde style that is peculiarly his own. His films often betray a yearning for escape. The harsh realities of Soviet communism and the national trauma of World War Two dispersing into the realm of the visionary, into a sphere of dreams and half constructed recollections. Tarkovsky’s films are subjective ruminations and they reflect the confusion and fallibility of the human mind.
