Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky was born on 4 April 1932 in Zavrazhye (close to Moscow). His father Arseny Tarkovsky was a prominent poet during the Soviet era and had previously worked as a translator of poems from Turkoman, Georgian, Armenian and Arabic. He left the family in 1937 when Andrei was still a young boy and volunteered for the Russian army in 1941. Andrei then moved with his sister to Moscow.

During the Second World War, the family fled Moscow and stayed with Andrei’s grandmother in Yuryevets. After the war, the family returned to the city, where, in November 1947, Andrei was admitted to hospital for a number of months with tuberculosis. The major and violent events of Tarkovsky’s youth resurface in a number of his films. 

After aborting his studies in Arabic and undertaking an expedition to Siberia, Tarkovsky enrolled in 1954 in the directing programme at the film academy in Moscow. In 1957 he married Irma Rausch, an actress who played in his films Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and Andrei Rublev (1966). During the Khrushchev era of the early 1950s, censorship was temporarily relaxed, allowing literature, films and music from Europe and the US to reach the Soviet Union. That gave Tarkovsky an opportunity to see films by authors who heavily influenced his later work, among them Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson and Kenji Mizoguchi.

Tarkovsky’s graduation work at the film academy in Moscow, The Steamroller and the Violin (1960), brought him instant success and renown. The film won the first prize at the New York Student Film Festival in 1960. Ivan’s Childhood, his first feature film, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1962 and won the Golden Lion. The Soviet authorities were less impressed, which meant that the film received almost no attention and enjoyed very limited circulation. His second feature film, about the life of the fifteenth-century iconographer Andrei Rublev (1966), enjoyed a better reception in the West than in his own country. The film was among the prize-winners at Cannes Film Festival but had to be shortened a number of times before being released in the Soviet Union.

In 1970, Tarkovsky married his second wife, Larissa Kizilova, who had been production assistant on the film Andrei Rublev. Their son, Andrei Andrejevich, was born that same year. It wasn’t until The Mirror (1974), his highly autobiographical masterpiece which he had been working on since 1967 but which he could only film in 1973-1974, that he got into serious difficulties with the censors. The authorities placed the film in the ‘third category’, ensuring it had an extremely limited distribution and also that the maker was in danger of being accused of wasting public money.

Tarkovsky’s difficulties with the Soviet authorities foreshadowed his eventual defection to Europe. Before he definitively left the Soviet Union, Tarkovsky made Stalker (1979), which turned out to be an instant classic. In 1982, he relocated permanently to Italy.

Tarkovsky made another two films, Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986), both of which were very well received internationally and won various accolades. He died of cancer in a Paris hospital on 29 December 1986.