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After seeing the first film of Tarkovsky, I was filled with wonder. Suddenly, I found myself on the threshold of a room the keys to which I was denied so far. There, where I only dreamed to get to, he moved around quite easily. I felt some support and encouragement: somebody had already expressed what I always dreamed about, but did not know how. Tarkovsky for me is the greatest because he introduced into the cinema a new language, allowing him to capture life as a reflection, life as a dream.
In his relatively brief life, the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) made just seven films (each winning prestigious prizes at international film festivals): Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1971), Solaris , Mirror , Stalker (1979), Nostalgia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). These films build a bridge between the era of the Soviet Union and the lost epochs of pre-revolution Russian culture. Perhaps the foundation, the piers of this bridge, was the poetry of his father, Arseny Tarkovsky, connecting us with the cultural heritage of 19th century Russia.
Andrei Tarkovsky said: ‘I can make good work based only on three things - blood, culture, and history’ (Misharin 1989, p. 64). Blood1, culture and history - all this was torn asunder by the time of the Revolution, civil war and Soviet power. His penultimate film, Nostalgia, was made in Italy and subsequently Tarkovsky decided not to return to the Soviet Union, dying in France on completion of his Swedish-made The Sacrifice.
Paradoxically, Tarkovsky's films are both very Russian and universal. Tarkovsky believed that to be a Russian means not to belong to an outline of a political map but to experience a ‘kilometre-long volume’ of doubt and faith (Abdusalamov 1989, pp. 267-302). This combination of both a huge amount