Andrei Tarkovsky

Until recently, the only movies I'd seen by Andrei Tarkovsky were Steamroller & Violin, his student film, and Ivan's Childhood.

Steamroller & Violin was an interesting movie. Made in the late '50s, it seemed like it was a bit under an hour long. This was his "graduation film", made as he completed film school. Interesting how much better Soviet film students were than those of the sad wretches we have toiling away in the universities of this country.

It had a theme that I've noticed in other Soviet films---a fatherless boy befriending a strange man. Not surprising in a country that lost about 30 million men in World War Two.

To get to his violin lesson, the kid has to slip past the violent kids who live in his apartment building. But it was interesting that the kid leaves his violin lying there. The tough kids see it. I thought they'd destroy it. But they open the case and look at it in awe.

I always imagined that Soviet children were better disciplined than these young ruffians.

Ivan's Childhood was a great movie, I thought, about a kid whose mother and sister were killed by the Nazis. He has joined the partisans and acts as a scout for the Soviet Red Army during World War Two. It was hugely successful. It had audiences in the Soviet Union in tears which wasn't surprising. But I hear Tarkovsky never liked it.

I get the impression he was the Stanley Kubrick of the U.S.S.R. Vaguely high brow, but making these big budget movies that are critically acclaimed but are cold and not very well liked.

Now we have people attacking the U.S.S.R., claiming they repressed poor Tarkovsky. I haven't seen the movies he made after he left the Soviet Union. What were the capitalist movie studios willing to bankroll? I can't imagine he would have done that well in Hollywood.

For one thing, he was opposed to color film. He thought movies should be in black & white.

The Soviet movie industry had the same problems Hollywood did and then some. They had to compete with television, they had movie ratings to contend with, and the Soviet government wasn't going to subsidize them. If the studios wanted to continue to function, they had to sell tickets. In fact, while MGM was opening a casino and Disney and Universal studios were running theme parks and George Lucas was making a fortune off merchandising, Soviet studios had nothing to rely on but ticket sales. And, unlike Hollywood, the Soviets had to compete with Hollywood. The U.S.S.R. showed a lot of foreign films, something that never posed to threat to the American movie industry.

But here they had Tarkovsky making quasi-high brow movies nobody liked. In one case, he spent six months and around a million dollars (in 1975 dollars) making The Mirror, which went into limited release as sort of an art film.

I recently watched Stalker and Solaris, and I liked both of them, although, for some reason, it's hard for me to get too excited about science fiction. I don't know why. I can't take them that seriously. If I thought about, I'd either realize I was completely wrong or I would have a clear explanation for what I already knew intuitively. I don't know which.

Hollywood did a re-make of Solaris which grossed $14 million against a $47 million budget. Tarkovsky did better than that anyway.