Spazju Kreattiv at St James Cavalier will be showing a series of films by iconic filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose style is synonymous with long takes, unconventional dramatic structure, distinctly authored use of cinematography and spiritual and metaphysical themes.

The SacrificeThe Sacrifice

Sculpting Time: Andrei Tarkovsky Retrospective, will show seven of the acclaimed director’s more known works between September and February.

The series kicks off on September 7 with Ivan’s Childhood, a 1962 Soviet war drama that tells the story of orphan boy Ivan and his experiences during World War II. Ivan’s Childhood was one of several Soviet films of its period, such as The Cranes Are Flying and Ballad of a Soldier, that looked at the human cost of war and did not glorify the war experience as did films produced before the Khrushchev Thaw.

The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962 and the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1962.

Mirror (Class: U), a loosely autobiographical, unconventionally structured work that incorporates poems composed and read by the director’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky, screens on September 14. The film features Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Alla Demidova, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky’s wife Larisa Tarko-vskaya and his mother Maria Vishnyakova, with a soundtrack by Eduard Artemyev.

His style is synonymous with long takes, unconventional dramatic structure and spiritual and metaphysical themes

Mirror is noted for its loose and nonlinear narrative. It unfolds as an organic flow of memories recalled by a dying poet (based on Tarkovsky’s own father Arseny who, in reality, would outlive his son by three years) of key moments in his life both with respect to his immediate family as well as that of the Russian people as a whole during the tumultuous events of the 20th century.

In an effort to represent these themes visually, the film combines contemporary scenes with childhood memories, dreams, and newsreel footage... its cinematography slips, often unpredictably, between colour, black and white,and sepia. The film’s loose flow of visually oneiric images, combined with its rich – and often symbolic – imagery has been compared with the stream of consciousness technique in Modernist literature.

The series continues on September 28 with Solaris, (Class: 12) a 1972 adaptation of Polish author Stanisław Lem’s novel. The film, which was co-written and directed by Tarkovsky, is a meditative, psychological drama occurring mostly aboard a space station orbiting the fictional planet Solaris.

MirrorMirror

The scientific mission has stalled because the skeleton crew of three scientists have fallen into separate emotional crises. Psychologist Kris Kelvin travels to the Solaris space station to evaluate the situation, only to encounter the same mysterious phenomena as the others.

The original science fiction novel is about the ultimate inadequacy of communication between humans and other species.

In loyalty to the novel’s complex and slow-paced narrative, Tarko-vsky wanted to bring a new emotional and intellectual depth to the genre, viewing most of western science fiction as shallow. The ideas which Tarkovsky tried to express in this film are further developed in Stalker.

The film won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and the Fipresci prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and was also nominated for the Palme d’Or. It is often cited as one of the greatest science fiction films in the history of cinema.

November 9 sees the screening of The Sacrifice (12).

Starring Erland Josephson, it centres around a middle-aged intellectual who attempts to bargain with God to stop an impending nuclear holocaust. The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky’s third film as a Soviet expatriate, after Nostalghia and the documentary Voyage in Time, and was also his last, as he died shortly after its completion. Like Solaris, it won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

SolarisSolaris

The film opens on the birthday of Alexander (Erland Josephson), an actor who gave up the stage to work as a journalist, critic and lecturer on aesthetics. He lives in a beautiful house with his actress wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), stepdaughter Marta (Filippa Franzén), and young son, ‘Little Man’, who is temporarily mute due to a throat operation.

Alexander and Little Man plant a tree by the sea-side, when Alexander’s friend Otto, a part-time postman, delivers a birthday card to him. When Otto asks, Alexander mentions that his relationship with God is nonexistent.

After Otto leaves, Adelaide and Victor, a medical doctor and a close family friend who performed Little Man’s operation, arrive at the scene and offer to take Alexander and Little Man home in Victor’s car.

However, Alexander prefers to stay behind and talk to his son. In his monologue, Alexander first recounts how he and Adelaide found this lovely house near the sea by accident, and how they fell in love with the house and surroundings, but then enters a bitter tirade against the state of modern man.

Stalker (PG) runs on January 18, with a screenplay written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and loosely based on their novel Roadside Picnic.

The cinematography slips, often unpredictably, between color, black-and-white, and sepia

The film features a mixture of elements from the science fiction genre with dramatic philosophical and psychological themes, depicting an expedition led by a figure known as the Stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) to take his two clients – a melancholic writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) seeking inspiration and a professor (Nikolai Grinko) seeking scientific discovery – to a site known simply as the Zone.

The Zone contains a place within it with the supposed ability to fulfil a person’s innermost desires.

The trio travels through unnerving areas filled with the debris of modern society while engaging in many arguments, facing the fact that the Zone itself appears sentient, while their path through it can be sensed, but not seen. In the film, a stalker is a professional guide to the Zone, someone having the ability and desire to cross the border into the dangerous and forbidden place with a specific goal.

Ivan’s ChildhoodIvan’s Childhood

The film has received many positive reviews, being labeled as one of the best drama films of the latter half of the 20th century, and ranks Number 29 on the British Film Institute’s 50 Greatest Films of All Time poll.

Nostalghia, (Class: 15) a film about the Russian writer Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky) travels to Italy to research the life of 18th-century Russian composer Pavel Sosnovsky, runs on January 15.

Together with his comely interpreter Eugenia, he travels to a convent in the Tuscan countryside to look at frescoes by Piero della Francesca. However, Andrei decides at the last minute that he does not want to enter.

Back at the hotel Andrei feels displaced and longs to go back to Russia, but unnamed circumstances seem to get in the way. Eugenia is smitten with Andrei and is offended that he will not sleep with her, claiming that she has a better boyfriend waiting for her.

Andrei meets and befriends a strange man named Domenico (Erland Josephson), who is famous in the village for trying to cross through the waters of a mineral pool with a lit candle. He claims that when finally achieving it, he will save the world. Both men share a feeling of alienation from their surroundings and Andrei later learns that Domenico used to live in a lunatic asylum until the post-fascistic state closed them down, forcing him to live on the streets.

Andrei Rublev (Class: 15) concludes the series on February 8. This film is loosely based on the life of Andrei Rublev, the great 15th-century Russian icon painter, and features Anatoly Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, Ivan Lapikov, Nikolai Sergeyev, Nikolai Burlyayev and Tarkovsky’s wife Irma Raush. Savva Yamshchikov, a famous Russian restorer and art historian, was a scientific consultant of the film.

Set against the background of 15th-century Russia, it seeks to depict a realistic portrait of medieval Russia. The film’s themes include artistic freedom, religion, political ambiguity, autodidacticism, and the making of art under a repressive regime.

Because of this, it was not released domestically in the officially atheist and authoritarian Soviet Union for years after it was completed, except for a single 1966 screening in Moscow.

A version of the film was shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Fipresci prize. In 1971, a censored version of the film was released in the Soviet Union. The film was further cut for commercial reasons upon its US release through Columbia Pictures in 1973. As a result, several versions of the film exist.

Although these issues with censorship obscured and truncated the film for many years following its release, since being restored to its original version, Andrei Rublev has come to be regarded as one of the greatest films of all time and has often been ranked highly in the Sight & Sound critics’ and directors’ polls.

www.kreattivita.org/en/

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