Parky at the Pictures (DVD 9/6/2011)

The son of poet Arsenii Tarkovsky, Andrei was born in Zavrazhye and raised in the town of Yuryevets until the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. Having been abandoned his father in 1937, Andrei was raised with his sister Marina by their mother Maria. After enduring wartime evacuation, he completed his schooling in Moscow, although he also spent time in hospital with tuberculosis and the traumas of his youth would inform his 1975 film, Mirror.

In 1951, Tarkovsky enrolled at the Oriental Institute in Moscow to study Arabic. However, he dropped out after a year to begin prospecting and spent several months on the to the River Kureikye near Turukhansk in the Krasnoyarsk. It was here that he decided to devote himself to cinema and he returned to the capital to train at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) under acclaimed directors Mikhail Romm and Grigori Chukrai. He met and married fellow student Irma Raush and forged a creative partnership with Andrei Konchalovsky, who shared his interest in such non-Soviet auteurs as Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Andrzej Wajda, Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, as well as the Italian neo-realists and the iconoclasts of the nouvelle vague.

During his period at VGIK, Tarkovsky completed three shorts - The Killers (1956), There Will Be No Leave Tomorrow (1958) and The Steamroller and the Violin (1960) - and it's a shame they were not added to Dmitry Trakovsky's 2008 documentary, Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky, among the extras. However, this seven-disc collection does contain all of his feature films, starting with his debut, Ivan's Childhood (1962).

Inspired by a novella by Vladimir Bogomolov and opening with a flashback to happy times, as a small boy rushes to his mother to share the joys of the cuckoo's song, the action quickly returns to the living nightmare of the war and 12 year-old Nikolai Burlyayev returning through the swamp from a dangerous reconnaissance mission somewhere in the Ukraine. His parents and sister were killed by the Nazis and such was his determination to avenge them that he was adopted as a mascot by a Red Army company that includes colonel Nikolai Grinko, captain Valentin Zubkov, lieutenant Yevgeni Zharikov and corporal Stepan Krylov. Now he insists on volunteering for perilous operations and threatens to desert to the partisans unless he is kept at the front.

Zubkov is particularly fond of Burlyayev (although he is distracted during a birch wood tryst with nurse Valentina Malyavina). But the boy is most devoted to Krylov, with whom he has shared his greatest dangers. However, when he is killed, Zharikov is ordered to accompany Zubkov and Burlyayev on a river trip behind the German position to retrieve the corpses of two Russian scouts that have been left hanging from trees on the bank.

The fact that Tarkovsky can switch focus so dispassionately from his eponymous hero to the surviving Zharikov strikingly conveys the cruelty of combat and the fact that, while the sacrifice of the fallen will never be forgotten (hence the closing reverie of Burlyayev gamboling on the water's edge), it is the survivors who represent the hope on which the future must be built. Yet, even in the harshest sequences, Tarkovsky and cinematographer Vadim Yusov borrow from the visual style that Sergei Urusevsky had achieved on Mikhail Kalatazov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957) to create a poetic minimalism that is much more austere and respectful than the gauche heroics associated with the state-approved style of Socialist Realism.

Despite Kremlin misgivings during the making of the film, it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and earned Tarkovsky an important champion in Jean-Paul Sartre, who defended him against left-leaning critics who accused him of formalism and the betrayal of the working class. However, he would depart dramatically from this aesthetic approach as he became intrigued by the possibility of capturing time.

Divided loosely into 10 chapters, Andrei Rublev (1966) is less a monochrome chronicle of icon painter's life between 1400-25 than a meditation on the responsibility of the artist and mankind's inveterate response to war, chaos and oppression. `I do not understand historical films which have no relevance for the present,' Tarkovsky once wrote and, thus, it's easy to see why the film was withheld from Soviet audiences after it was completed in 1966.

He had actually begun working on the screenplay with Andrei Konchalovsky before he had finished Ivan's Childhood. But, despite its favourable reception at Cannes in 1969, Leonid Brezhnev refused to sanction the picture's domestic release. Although some critics have suggested that the depiction of the pitiless Mongol-Tartar tyranny angered the Party, a contemporary newspaper averred that the film had slandered a national hero by showing him as a self-doubting craftsman rather than an instinctive genius who had helped to spark a Russian renaissance in the face of philistinic repression.

Epitomising the ideas contained in Tarkovsky's book, Sculpting in Time, Andrei Rublev has been interpreted in many ways, with some seeing it as an allegory of the director's own struggle to produce enduring beauty in a hostile environment. But what it certainly isn't is a factual biography, as Rublev (Anatoli Solonitsyn) remains an elusive enigma who is as often absent from the screen as he is at the centre of events. He may feud with a rival over God's relationship to humanity and kill a man to protect a deaf-mute girl in the church that has been vandalised by barbaric iconoclasts. But Tarkovsky is more concerned with images than deeds and it's the balloon flight over the Breughelesque countryside, the pagans carrying torches through the woods, the casting of the bell and the various still life landscapes, interiors and visages that linger like the colour fragments of Rublev's frescoes in the climactic coda.

Having endured the opprobrium of the Kremlin, Tarkovsky found himself at loggerheads with Stanislas Lem over the adaptation of his 1961 sci-fi novel, Solaris. Lem was particularly unhappy with the dacha opening and the romantic triangle devised with co-scenarist Friedrich Gorenstein and Tarkovsky was forced to accept some of his demanded changes in order to prevent the author from disowning a film already hamstrung by the halving of its budget. But stars Donatis Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk proved equally difficult and Tarkovsky (who was never an admirer of the genre) always considered this 1972 picture to be his least accomplished work.

Nevertheless, whether viewed as an allegory on the failing Communist experiment or a treatise on man's potential for salvation, this mesmerising drama is vastly superior to Steven Soderbergh's 2002 remake. Its discussion of passion and obsession, regret and reconciliation is consistently challenging and offers few easy answers.

Despite scaling down its operation, the Soviet Union retains a space station above the newly discovered planet of Solaris. Cosmonaut Vadislav Dvorzhetski has just returned to Earth after two colleagues disappeared while exploring the planet's gas ocean and he argues with psychologist Donatis Banionis prior to his flight to the ship, as he fears he will recommend its decommissioning. However, having rendezvous'd crew members Yuri Jarvet and Anatoli Solinstin, Banionis becomes distracted from their respective taciturnity and eccentricity by a sobering tape left by suicided scientist Sos Sarkissian and the spectral reappearance of his wife, Natalya Bondarchuk, who poisoned herself after he deserted her some years previously.

Banionis is unnerved by this reunion and attempts to return Bondarchuk to Earth. But she returns to his bed that evening and even survives an explosion because she is now constructed entirely of neutrinos. The couple grow closer, but Bondarchuk fears that Banionis will abandon her again and she attempts to kill herself by drinking liquid nitrogen. However, she has lost the ability to die and it's only after he experiences a delirious reverie and Jarvet informs him that positive test results have come from Solaris that he feels ready to decide whether to remain in orbit or resume his previous existence.

Notwithstanding the imposing authenticity of Mikhail Romadin's oppressively sterile sets, Tarkovsky refuses to be tempted by the sci-fi staples to which even Stanley Kubrick succumbed in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), so while the sets are evocative, they're not fetishistically futuristic. Nor is the action peppered with set-pieces designed to sex up Banionis's painful resolution of his relationship with his dead wife. Instead, Tarkovsky concentrates on time, memory, science, philosophy, faith and the eerie realisation that there's nothing more terrifying out in space than our own selves.

Inspired by a recurring dream of the house in which he was born, Tarkovsky's fourth feature, Mirror, began its life in 1964, as a proposed novella about childhood. However, by the time he and Alexander Misharin completed the script for what was then-called Confession in 1968, the emphasis had shifted away from youth and on to motherhood. When Mosfilm rejected the project, Tarkovsky reworked the material into the short story, `A White Day', which was published in 1970 and prompted producer-director Grigori Chukhrai to commission a screenplay.

Aware that this was his most personal picture and sensing that it would also be his most artistically significant, Tarkovsky found the film very difficult to make. He constantly revised the text during the protracted shooting process and then produced 20 different edits, with Ludmilla Feiginova. But while he was eventually satisfied with his work, the authorities were not. Thus, branded an `artistic failure', Mirror was released with no fanfare in 1975 and its subsequent international acclaim proved something of an embarrassment for Goskino.

Divided into three main timeframes - the 1930s, the Second World War and the present - the film used alternating colour and monochrome sequences to convey a series of memories and dreams whose poignancy and lyricism was intensified by the verse and classical music on the soundtrack. Even newsreels of historical events like the Spanish Civil War and the Cultural Revolution and such Soviet landmarks as the 1934 balloon record attempt and Chkalov's 1937 flight over the North Pole were employed to bind the historical and the personal in this spellbinding life of a mind.

Yet, Tarkovsky doesn't always make it clear whose visions we are sharing and whose voice his poet father Arsenii is supposed to represent. Consequently, this has always been considered a difficult watch. Regardless of its dense intellectual and autobiographical content, however, Mirror can still be appreciated as an attempt to capture the human soul and to show that, for all our diverse individual experiences, we still have much in common on an emotional and spiritual level.

The number three plays a curious role in the production of Stalker (1979), the first film in the apocalyptic triptych that would conclude with Nostalgia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). Three characters pass through a landscape not wholly dissimilar to the three levels of Dante's Divine Comedy in a scenario that was devised by Tarkovsky in collaboration with Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the authors of the source novel, Roadside Picnic. Known during its production as The Wish Machine, Stalker went through three art directors (Tarkovsky himself and the uncredited Alexander Boym and Shavkat Abdusalamov) and three cinematographers (Georgy Rerberg, Leonid Kalashnikov and Alexander Knyazhinsky). It was also delayed three times each because of natural causes (an earthquake in Tajikistan, which forced the location to relocate to Estonia; Tarkovsky's heart attack in April 1978; and a relapse while editing in February 1979) and for technical reasons (the stock used for the first Estonian shoot proved faulty and all the footage was lost; Tarkovsky's equipment had to be replaced when it was found to be deficient; and a cash shortage prompted Tarkovsky to revise the screenplay, which then had to secure official sanction).

The soundtrack even contained three pieces of classical music (by Beethoven, Ravel and Wagner) and three poems, by Arseni Tarkovsky, Fyodor Tyuchev and Tarkovsky himself, paraphrasing the Tao Te Ching. And the film itself was open to three interpretations - science-fiction dystopia; political allegory; and spiritual search. Tarkovsky certainly wished to express his concerns about the future of the planet and while it's implied that the Zone had been created by a meteorite, the intervention of careless humanity can't be discounted. Tarkovsky also transferred the novel's action from North American to a nameless wilderness that had all the hallmarks of a soulless Iron Curtain environment (indeed, some even claim that Tarkovsky anticipated the Chernobyl disaster here), while the trek to the Room could also represent Stalker's struggle to find faith, an act that recalled the Arthurian quests for the Grail. Whatever its ultimate meaning, this is a complex, challenging work of rare beauty and power whose elusiveness is part of its fascination.

Tarkovsky began contemplating Nostalgia while shooting the TV documentary, Tempo di Viaggio, in 1976. Initially, the focus was to fall on the man who had incarcerated his family for 40 years for fear of the apocalypse. However, the musicologist storyline began to develop in collaboration with veteran Italian scenarist Tonino Guerra, who had perfected the art of depicting strong woman and urban alienation with Michelangelo Antonioni. What emerged was one of Tarkovsky's simplest narratives, which was characterised by a haunting stillness that was reinforced by the settings, all of which were found locations, including St Catherine's Pool, where the candle sequence that Krzysztof Kieslowski declared a cinematic miracle was shot in one nine-minute take.

The story is deceptively simple. In Italy to research the life of an exiled Russian composer, Oleg Yankovskiy dreams of distant wife Patrizia Terreno, exasperates smitten translator Domiziana Giordano and befriends Erland Josephson, an eccentric activist who sets him a redemptive task.

Problems with the budget and the Kremlin delayed shooting until March 1982, while illness and travel restrictions respectively prevented Anatoly Solonitsyn and Alexander Kaidonovsky from taking the role that went to Oleg Yankovsky, who embodied the film's themes with an affectingly melancholic inertia that was born out of homesickness and a longing to start afresh. By coming to accept Giordana's determination to live for today and Josephson's fearful faith, Yankovsky unified the dualities that dominated the action - Russia/Italy, past/present, sanity/madness, belief/doubt and poetry/music - along with the dreams and flashbacks, which were filmed in monochrome and sepia to detach them from the scholar's colour reality.

On viewing the final print, Tarkovsky was surprised to discover Nostalgia's unmediated gloom. However, Gorchakov's situation very much reflected his own, for not long after completing the project he learned that he would no longer be allowed to work in the Soviet Union and, consequently, he announced his defection to the West. Yet, Tarkovsky also shared Josephson's views about humanity's slow destruction of the planet and this increasing divergence from nature would inform his final feature.

Nostalgia was attacked by many critics for attempting to disguise its lack of depth with a surfeit of beauty. However, it has since been seen as an agonising study of loneliness and confusion by an artist in the process of being disowned by his homeland. The Sacrifice, however, was hailed as a masterpiece on its release.

Accompanied by the aria `Erbarme dich' from Bach's St Matthew Passion, the opening shots pass from Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished `The Adoration of the Magi' to an old man and a boy placing their faith in the future of Earth and humanity by planting a tree. Retired professor Erland Josephson is celebrating his birthday and unfaithful wife Susan Fleetwood and home help Valerie Maitresse have organised a small party. Among the guests are the couple's children, Filippa Franzen and Tommy Kjellvqist, postman Allan Edwall, doctor Sven Wollter (who is Fleetwood's lover) and Icelander Gudrun S. Gisladottir, who may or may not have supernatural powers.

As they celebrate, the news breaks of an impending nuclear war and the power cuts following a colossal explosion. Josephson prays that he will renounce his worldly goods if his family can survive. However, Edwall suggests that he should sleep with Gisladottir as a gesture of atonement and Josephson falls in with his plan. But, when he wakes the following morning after a tortuous night of apocalyptic dreams and apparitions, he is cognisant of his pact with God and burns down his luxurious home, leaving the audience to question whether he is a holy man who has sacrificed everything for the sake of his fellow beings or a maniac who has allowed his fears, emotions and delusions to get the better of him. With its location (Fårö), themes (alienation, faith and death), cinematographer (Sven Nykvist) and star (Erland Josephson) all primarily associated with Ingmar Bergman, the Swede's influence is all-pervasive throughout this sombre drama. But the Soviet visionary's tormented lyricism is also very much in evidence, both as he suggests the horror of nuclear war through Josephson's desperate, Faustian reaction to the terrible broadcast and as he presents the possibility of redemption, through the intercession of the mystical mailman.

The rigid formalism and uncompromising detachment may alienate some viewers - although most will be awestruck by the ethereal intensity of the desaturated imagery that Nykvist achieved by combining colour and monochrome duplicate negatives in an optical printer. But Tarkovsky (who had originally written a story about a cancer victim being cured by a witch) insisted that film didn't have to be enjoyable to be valuable and this measured and highly personal treatise on humanity's need for something to believe in proved an apt valedictory pronouncement.