Russian film series celebrates Tarkovsky

John Santos Guest Writer

In the next two months, the Russian Department will screen all of Andrei Tarkovsky’s works in Blodgett Auditorium on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. As with their screenings of Russian movies last year, it is apparent that this is a labor of love by the Russian professors, made out of a simple passion for Tarkovsky’s movies. This film retrospective could be seen as a repartee to some of the movies that the Film League and the Film Department shows, and a good counterpoint to those who claim movies such as The Constant Gardener are worth watching.

The series started two weeks ago, with Tarkovsky’s adaptation of The Killers and his 45-minute The Steamroller and the Violin. Although only the most obsessed will try to find any semblance of auteur-ship in the former’s callowness, The Steamroller and the Violin is a condensed preview of what Tarkovsky is to offer later in his career. Its use of almost saturated color and reflective surfaces gives a sense of transcendence, a life worth living in the face of challenges, in this case a tyrannical mother and poverty. This is repeated in Solaris, whose pensive look at the simplest things becomes indicative of the movie’s themes of discovery and the limitations thereof. These, and his use of Sven Nykvist’s usually cold cinematography to represent spiritual renewal in The Sacrifice and the poetically rich representation of a man’s lonely search for himself through his art in Nostalghia represent a cinema of ecstasy, where revelations occur not in plot complications, but in mere rapture of the image itself.

Tarkovsky’s legacy lives on in a few filmmakers, namely Alexsander Sokurov, Mike Leigh, and Béla Tarr. That the movies of these filmmakers are not widely seen (especially in a school such as ours) is sad, because the alternative is cold and empty, more interested in having an opinion about humanity rather than experiencing it.

Most certainly, the movies Vassar students usually salivate over—those of Tarantino and Fincher—take their cue from the lesser Stanley Kubrick, whose coldness and asininity in 2001 prompted the creation of Solaris. For once, an experience of this spiritual cinema may begin the reconsideration of Kubrick’s legacy, even if such reconsiderations end at our gates.