Biography for
Andrei Tarkovsky

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Date of Birth

4 April 1932, Zavrazhe, Ivanono, USSR (now Russia)

Date of Death

29 December 1986, Paris, France (lung cancer)

Birth Name

Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky

Mini Biography

The most famous Soviet film-maker since Sergei M. Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky (the son of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky) studied music and Arabic in Moscow before enrolling in the Soviet film school VGIK. He shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivanovo detstvo (1962), which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. This resulted in high expectations for his second feature _Andrei Rublyov (1969)_, which was banned by the Soviet authorities until 1971. It was shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival at 4 o'clock in the morning on the last day, in order to prevent it winning a prize - but it won one nonetheless, and was eventually distributed abroad partly to enable the authorities to save face. Solyaris (1972), had an easier ride, being acclaimed by many in the West as the Soviet answer to Kubrick's '2001' (though Tarkovsky himself was never too fond of it), but he ran into official trouble again with Zerkalo (1975), a dense, personal web of autobiographical memories with a radically innovative plot structure. Stalker (1979) had to be completely reshot on a dramatically reduced budget after an accident in the laboratory destroyed the first version, and after Nostalghia (1983), shot in Italy (with official approval), Tarkovsky defected to the West. His last film, Offret (1986) was shot in Sweden with many of Ingmar Bergman's regular collaborators, and won an almost unprecedented four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. He died of cancer at the end of the year.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Michael Brooke

Esposo/a

Larisa Tarkovskya	(1964 - 29 December 1986) (his death) 1 child
Irma Raush	(1960 - 1963) 1 child

Trivialidades

One of his teachers at VGIK was Mikhail Romm.

Friend of Sergei Parajanov, who was best friends with Mikhail Vartanov. All were graduates of the legendary Russian film school VGIK and met many times; the latter's Russian Academy Award-winning Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992) features a poetic chapter on the the friendship of Parajanov and Tarkovsky.

Father of Andriosha Tarkovsky, son of Arseni Tarkovsky.

Although it was his most widely seen film outside of the Soviet Union, he reportedly regarded Solyaris (1972) as his least favorite of the films he directed.

He said that children understood his films better than adults.

Tarkovskiy was born in Zavrazhye village, Yuryevets area, Ivanovo Region, Russian SFSR, USSR. That place goes now by the address of Zavrazhye, Kadyy area, Kostroma Region, Russian Federation.

Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1982.

"Dear Andrei Retrospective" held at the 2007 Navarra International Documentary Film Festival with Marina Tarkovsky and Alexander Gordon in attendance.

Buried in Orthodox Graveyard for Russian Emigrés in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, France.

Profiled in "Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick and Wong Kar-Wei" by Thurston Botz-Borsnstein. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008.

Personal Quotes

My purpose is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness.

Always with huge gratitude and pleasure I remember the films of Sergei Parajanov which I love very much. His way of thinking, his paradoxical, poetical . . . ability to love the beauty and the ability to be absolutely free within his own vision.

An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn't exist, for the artist doesn't live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world. This is the issue in Andrey Rublyov (1969).

[on directing] No "mise en scène" has the right to be repeated, just as no two personalities are ever the same. As soon as a "mise en scène" turns into a sign, a cliché, a concept (however original it may be), then the whole thing - characters, situation, psychology - become schematic and false.

The only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.

Instead of attempting to capture these nuances, most unpretentious 'true-to-life' films not only ignore them but make a point of using sharp, overstated images which at best can only make the picture seem far-fetched. And I am all for cinema being as close as possible to life - even if on occasion we have failed to see how beautiful life really is.

So much, after all, remains in our thoughts and hearts as unrealized suggestion.

I think in fact that unless there is an organic link between the subjective impressions of the author and his objective representation of reality, he will not achieve even superficial credibility, let alone authenticity and inner truth.

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