Russian filmmaker, author of seven feature films in twenty-four years and the central religious-philosophical filmmaker of the late Soviet period. His cinema is held together by long takes, slow camera movement, dream and memory structures, and an insistence — stated explicitly in his book Sculpting in Time (1986) — that film is properly a spiritual art, continuous with prayer, poetry, and icon painting rather than with novelistic storytelling or journalistic reportage.
Tarkovsky was the son of the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, trained at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) under Mikhail Romm, and made his first feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), at thirty. It won the Golden Lion at Venice. The subsequent films were produced with increasing difficulty against Soviet film bureaucracy: Andrei Rublev (1966), the three-hour fresco of the medieval icon painter, shelved and re-edited for years before release; Solaris (1972), from Stanisław Lem's novel, as an argument with Kubrick's 2001 about whether human interiority can be left behind; Mirror (1975), the autobiographical film of his own childhood and his mother; Stalker (1979), in and around the Zone of an unnamed catastrophe; Nostalghia (1983), made in Italy; and The Sacrifice (1986), made in Sweden with Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist and Bergman's actor Erland Josephson, shortly before Tarkovsky's death from lung cancer at 54.
What Tarkovsky's films argue, across their very different surfaces, is consistent: that the material world is saturated with spiritual reality, that time and memory are the proper medium of that reality, and that the mechanized, materialist, instrumental modernity (Soviet or Western) to which the filmmaker is opposed has partly destroyed the capacity to see this. The influence outside of Soviet and Russian cinema is considerable — on Bergman (who admired him above any other living filmmaker), on Béla Tarr, on Lars von Trier, on Alexander Sokurov and on a wider contemplative strand in world cinema — but the work itself stands at a distance from any school.
Tarkovsky belongs on the graph because the Russian religious imagination under Soviet rule — the territory of the Dostoevsky / Solzhenitsyn axis — is one the graph already carries, and Tarkovsky is its cinematic voice. Andrei Rublev, Stalker, and The Sacrifice put that material into an image.