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Sean
Martin.
Andrei
Tarkovsky.
Pocket
Essentials, due Nov 2005.
ISBN
1904048498.
Paperback.
178 x
111mm.
256pp.
Publisher's
recommended price £6.99
Andrei Tarkovsky is the
most celebrated Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein, and one of the most
important directors to have emerged during the 1960s and 70s.
Although he made only seven features, each one was a major landmark in
cinema, the most well-known of them being the mediaeval epic Andrei Rublev – widely regarded as
one of the greatest films of all time – and the autobiographical Mirror, set during the Russia of
Stalin’s purges in the 1930s and the years of stagnation under
Brezhnev. Both films landed Tarkovsky in considerable trouble with the
authorities, and he gained a reputation for being a tortured – and
ultimately martyred – filmmaker. Despite the harshness of the
conditions under which he worked, Tarkovsky built up a remarkable body
of work.
He burst upon the international scene in 1962 with his debut feature Ivan’s Childhood, which won the
Golden Lion at Venice and immediately established him as a major
filmmaker. During the 1970s, he made two classic ventures into
science-fiction, Solaris,
regarded at the time as being the Soviet reply to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and later
remade by Steven Soderbergh, and Stalker,
which was thought to have predicted the Chernobyl disaster. Harassed at
home, Tarkovsky went into exile and made his last two films in the
West, where he also published his classic work of film and artistic
theory, Sculpting in Time.
Since his death in Paris in 1986, his reputation continued – and
continues – to grow.
In this book, Sean Martin considers the whole of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre,
from the classic student film The
Steamroller and the Violin, across the full-length films, to the
later stage works and Tarkovsky’s writings, paintings and photographs.
Martin also seeks to demystify Tarkovsky as a "difficult" director,
whilst also celebrating his radical aesthetic of long takes and
tracking shots, which Tarkovsky was to dub "imprinted" or "sculpted"
time, and to make a case for Tarkovsky’s position not just as an
important filmmaker, but also as an artist who speaks directly about
the most important spiritual issues of our time.
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