SUBVERSION FROM WITHIN:

Analyzing Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet Status

By Julia Butareva

Columbia University

 

On October 8, a panel on the life and films of Andrei Tarkovsky was held in the Weill Art Gallery at the 92^nd Street Y. The program included a diverse array of panelists, but its focus was on Solaris, Tarkovsky’s most well-known film. The first speaker was Mikhail Iampolski, a Comparative Literature professor at NYU.  He talked about the special position that Tarkovsky occupied in the Soviet Union.  Tarkovsky’s movies were elitist, individualistic, and brilliant, but Iampolski pointed out that they were also full of very overt spirituality, which is unusual in an atheist country, to say the least. To make his point, he played clips of Andrei Rublev, in which the icon painter’s faith and awe are crucial to his work, and Stalker, where the messiah-like title character quotes the Bible at length.

 

Equally interesting was Iampolski’s position on the uniquely privileged role of the artist in society.  The view that an artist had something to offer that was not reproducible or commeasurable with anything else runs through Tarkovsky’s entire body of work, starting with his first film, The Steamroller and the Violin.”  In that film, a sensitive young boy who plays the violin is protected by a worker who drives a steamroller.  It is, Iampolski said, “an early sign that intellectual labor was beginning to be valued.”

 

Tarkovksy’s cinematography was also deliberately and distinctly un-Soviet: for example, the director hated and criticized Eisenstein and associated the technique of montage with crude propaganda. Iampolski noted that Tarkovsky was “opposed to the system of shocks” and tried “to create a more subtle relationship between the film and the spectator,” opting for long, drawn-out takes that eased viewers into his films rather than jarring them. Tarkovsky was conscious of the fact that even his gentle cinematography was inherently coercive toward the viewer, but in his films, unlike in Eisenstein’s, “the spectator’s perception never feels coerced.”

 

Iampolski empasized the implicit, if sometimes negatively expressed, recognition that Tarkovsky received.  “All [were] absolutely conscious that Tarkovsky was a genius,” even those who tried to “shelve his films.” He was “an object of permanent jealousy,”  and quite conscious of his own genius. A telling fact that Iampolski brought up was that Tarkovsky dreamed of establishing a school for great directors like Fellini and Antonioni, in which he would teach them to imbue their films with spirituality.  But despite his skill with the language of film, he needed the help of the film critic Aleksandr Sokurov to express his ideas when he wrote his book Sculptor in Time.

 

Iampolski did not overlook the unavailability of Tarkovsky’s films in the Soviet Union at the time. Andrei Rublev was not released until five years after its completion, and The Mirror was nearly impossible to see.  His work was always scathingly reviewed in the official press, despite the fact that it continued to bring international awards. When Tarkovsky was dying of cancer in Paris, his family had a great deal of difficulty coming from the Soviet Union to see him.

 

And yet his position was unmistakably privileged.  He was permitted to make the autobiographical film The Mirror, which, as Iampolski pointed out, was highly unusual for a Soviet director. And when he was dissatisfied with Stalker, he was given money to move the production to Estonia and reshoot. Like an Olympic athlete or an astronaut, he was an object of national pride.  He showed the world that Russia could produce cinematic art as great as that of Fellini and Antonioni and win countless awards at Cannes.

 

Tarkovsky remains a recognizable name in the West to this day. Solaris was the only Soviet film remade by Hollywood and was discussed at length by David Gurevich, the second panelist at the event. A Russian writer living in New York, Gurevich writes film reviews for publications such as Images and has written Travels with Dubinsky and Clive, Vodka For Breakfast, and From Lenin to Lennon. Unfortunately, his discussion of the two films was a glib and shallow rant. In addition to making sneering, racist remarks about the “American political correctness” of making one of the scientists on the Solaris space station a woman and giving her “Rambo-style” lines, he seemed to misunderstand Tarkovsky’s version completely.  He talked at length about the way George Clooney’s Kris Kelvin exists in the film “to fix his personal problems” and “do right by his woman,” while Donatis Banionis’ Kris is there to “make Contact.” But Tarkovsky was quite explicit about downplaying the science fiction aspects of his film and using it as a vehicle for exploring precisely those relationships between human beings that Gurevich derides Soderbergh for attempting to treat. Among the most powerful lines Banionis’ Kris utters are “Man needs Man” and “What we really want is a mirror.” In his autobiographical documentary “Voyage in Time,” Tarkovsky even expressed frustration with the film for being “unsuccessful in being without genre.” He was not interested in either science fiction or in creating a faithful adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel. According to Lem’s web site, the writer himself “never really liked” Tarkovsky’s version. 

 

The final speaker was Boris Yusov. His son, Vadim, played the role of the young son of Henri Berton, the pilot who is the first to report odd occurrences on Solaris.  He was noticed because he was in the Young Pioneers with the son of Vladimir Naumov and Aleksandr Alov, film directors and friends of Tarkovsky. Unemployed at the time for political reasons to which he only vaguely alluded, Boris Yusov was hired as his son’s guardian. The filming took place in Zvenigorod, and father and son shared a house with Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, the actor who played Berton. Yusov’s reminiscences about the dinner parties the cast and crew would hold – sometimes at Tarkovsky’s residence, sometimes at his and Dvorzhetsky’s – were tantalizing, but vague. Yusov had agreed to give his talk, and was, after all, the major attraction here, but he seemed reluctant to give details about the filming or to flesh out his hazy, worshipful sketch of Tarkovsky himself.  “You felt that there was a presence in this person,” he said. In the end, all that one could glean was that Tarkovsky adored his father and was a great dinner companion.

 

In spite of the reticence of the one person present who actually knew Andrei Tarkovsky, a portrait of the man eventually emerged. He was infinitely energetic, ambitious and intuitive: he even edited his last film from his deathbed. His presence must indeed have been powerful and difficult to describe. And despite his consciousness of his own genius and privilege, he never took advantage of it except in the service of his art. According to One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, a recent documentary about his life, Tarkovsky is supposed to have claimed that the ghost of the poet Aleksandr Blok came to him in a dream and told him that he would make just seven films – but all of them good ones. He did, in fact, make exactly seven, not counting his student works. And all of them just so happen to be remarkably good.