We’ve penetrated the center of this great director’s ouvre by gazing into his “Mirror” (1974). Might as well go wide now by contrasting his first feature, “Ivan’s Childhood,” (1962) with his final one, “The Sacrifice” (1986). From there, we’ll work our way back to the core.
It was not a totally random choice to compare Tarkovsky’s first film with his last. One is set in WWII, the other in WWIII. They both begin and end with a boy and a tree. “Ivan’s Childhood” opens at the base of an evergreen. A child walks out of the frame and the camera cranes upward along its trunk to the top. Tarkovsky’s final feature begins with practically the same image, except the boy doesn’t walk out of the shot; the camera leaves him. In another deviation from Ivan, with Sacrifice, the camera stops before we reach the top.
The film was dedicated to his son. I suppose that last shot was a self-portrait, of sorts, dreamed up by the poet and left behind to be remembered by. By the time principle photography on “The Sacrifice” had commenced, Tarkovsky was terminal with cancer and knew he would never attain old age. This barren tree, appearing late in his last opus is rueful, in the context of its prominence in the opening of his first film, when the camera floats all the way to the growing tip of a sapling with all promise of genius in full bud.
Experience accumulates and organizes itself as knowledge along great forked trunks and on down the branched, limbed, twigged networks in our minds. Tarkovsky’s camera conducts itself along similar lines. He employs very long takes, with camera in motion, inducing perceptual shifts, drawing us even deeper in with mirrors and other reflections, rooms within rooms, frames within frames, mimicking the natural paths of attention and accumulation of awareness.
For this filmmaker, capturing a passing moment with motion in space is sculpting in time. His cinematic chisel consistently modulates, like good music, between finite and cosmic. What a poet expresses with choice words, a composer does with appropriate musical instruments. Tarkovsky plumbs the possibilities of leitmotif with trees, wind, rain, water, milk, mirrors, snow, ash, stairs, ladders, mist, steam, smoke, fire, gravity, weightlessness and on and on. In his first film an expansive forest of birch stands like a great intersection of chords in a high mass. In his final one, a solitary tree soothes like a Japanese flute riffing in a solitary key.
The outcome of both is tragedy within triumph. In Sacrifice, an aging artist forfeits position and possession to reverse a cataclysm. In Ivan war orphan lays down his life behind enemy lines to repel the Nazi’s. But Ivan is not a common infantryman. He’s a scout, resigned to beat the enemy singlehandedly if necessary.
The boy soldier’s winning qualities are instantly recognizable in scene one when he behaves as if he outranks the officer assigned to interrogate him. In the quality of sheer bravery, he does outrank everyone. Our diminutive hero exudes formidable cheek and grit with anyone that threatens to stand in his way. He is so traumatized by war he can neither digest food, nor rest without reliving what’s lost in his past. He seems only able to counter it by leading the heroics.
His adoptive kin are all army officers trying to protect him. It just so happens the battalion could really benefit from some good intelligence, at the moment and Ivan’s age and size provide an edge.
Despite his sacrifice, Ivan’s not a Christ and this is not a passion play in military drag. We encountered that hybrid about a year ago in another Soviet era masterpiece, Larissa Shepitko’s “The Ascent.”
I’ve heard Tarkovsky criticized for wearing his religion on his sleeve. What religion? Nothing is entirely black or white in his works except some film stock. His complete works demonstrate that opening doors of perception is this filmmaker’s fascination, not deifying invisible entities. For example, during the transition to a flashback early in the first act, Ivan is tri-located for an instant. He is catching some rest in an army bed and he is waking up in the bottom of a well and finally, he is caught in the memory of standing over the well with his mother before she was killed.
“If a well is deep enough,” she tells Ivan, “you can see a star even on the brightest day.” “What star?” He asks. “Any star,” she answers. Notice that Ivan and his mother are gazing deep into the earth in search of something far out in space. Poetic inversions abound in Tarkovsky’s films. An exquisite communion of opposites is achieved with this one. Other than the veritable yin/yang symbol itself, what more all-inclusive vision could convey such otherwise unspeakable insights?
Almost immediately upon searching, Ivan declares he can see a star as he reaches down the mouth of the well. Suddenly is relocated there, caressing its reflection on the surface of the water. Here is an early bit of evidence of the boy’s exceptional gift for observation, so we can appreciate it is not just raw revenge that qualifies him for his vocation, but a child’s eye opened wide on the world.
For added fascination, notice the view down the well is not the reflection of a star as Ivan sees it but the POV of Ivan and his mother looking back at us. It’s a magnificent shot. Where’s the camera? We’re looking straight into it. The actors are too, right down the barrel of the lens, but we see their reflection backed by the sky above and encircled in the mouth of the well. The camera is looking at us as well, but from what position? This is just the first of countless fresh flourishes that supercharge Tarkovsky’s films, front to back.
The spell of memory is evoked by the artist with this deep yet simple scene, buoyed by equally evocative talk. “It’s daytime for you and me,” Ivan’s mom explains, “but nighttime for the star.” Every single sequence in Tarkovsky;s films seems embedded with counterpoint such as this. The image of star in full daylight is a kind of epigram. Tarkovsky is conditioning us for deep shifts to come. Our preconceptions will be subverted, time and again, with fascinating, alternate conceptions in abundant variation. Once again, I am reminded of the great Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. Appreciate with me how paintings of his such as “The Enchanted Domain,” (1952), “The Kiss” (1951) and “The Blank Page” (1952) assist our senses in with radical realizations about reality.
“Ivan’s Childhood” proposes that children possess the courage that adults lack. Chimes play on the soundtrack while Ivan looks out over the prow of the rowboat on his final mission. The choice reminds us of the hero’s immaturity even as he is about to act.
While Tarkovsky’s movies distinguish themselves for being planned and executed with consumate craft, there are some scenes so uncanny, surely they must be a result of sheer luck. For instance, just as Ivan makes landfall, says farewell and slips behind enemy lines for the last time, an enemy flare lands in the background. It’s grey column of smoke remains perfectly slender and vertical like one of the trees as it drifts on an invisible draft like a silent bludgeon sneaking between scattered black trunks, on a rendezvous with Ivan. The convergence takes place just as he disappears in the dark.
In the end, we are told Ivan was hanged. The final shot tilts down out of the clear sky, descending a dead tree on the riverbank with Ivan, before the war, in the foreground. The last shot of the film refers back to the first. The camera tilts down the length of a tree, this time and fading out on a war scorched trunk.
This description may read like bad poetry but my feeble effort is to blame. If what I’m talking about could have been conveyed in writing, Tarkovsky would not have bothered to commit it to film Much like Ivan, Andre was a scout at heart; his films probe the frontiers of poetic potential. Ivan’s attitude and actions shame fellow soldiers for not showing greater courage. Andre criticized most filmmakers for not taking full advantage of their art form. Precious few heard.
It seems like I’ve heard “Ivan’s Childhood” mentioned less often than other motion picture child memoirs of the era such as Truffaut’s “400 Blows,” (1959) or Schlondorff’s “The Tin Drum” 1979. I’m not sure why, Ivan is every bit as compelling. It contains Tarkovsky’s most straightforward narrative with an unforgettable central character whose predicament is loaded with tragic irony and portrayed with deep humanity, boundary pushing style and heartrending detail.
I will leave a choice center-cut of this complex and beautiful film for you to form your own unfettered opinions and keep my analysis to its edges. Next up, “The Sacrifice” which comes in second, of all Tarkovsky’s films, with regard to clarity of story. The balance of his output plays checkers with structure. This coming November, at Open Channel Content, Tarkovsky contemplates nuclear winter.
I’m certainly not the first cinephile that wishes they could have had a conversation with Tarkovsky. Back in the nineteen eighties, I’ve recently figured out, we were in Italy at the same time. I was just writing my first travel journal. He was writing his book “Sculpting in Time.” Our paths would not converge there. I was not quite half his age and only recently introduced to world cinema . He was writing his testament, “Sculpting in Time. ” In it he says, “If there are cinema-goers for whom it is important and rewarding to enter into dialogue specifically with me, that is the greatest stimulus I can have for my work.” If he were alive today, I’d look him up.
In reading from chapter seven in his book “Sculpting in Time,” I am gratified to find so much confirmation in his writings of my own thoughts with regard to his films. The subject is of the artist’s responsibility. I have written about it in several previous posts, most lately in relation to pornography, screen violence and theater of cruelty. In any discussion about an artist’s social obligation Chapter VII of “Sculpting in Time,” should be quoted aloud and “Stalker” should be required viewing.
What I gather from Tarkovsky’s philosophy is that any image rendered in service to truth is worthy of projection. Most often, according to him, it is rendered in service to money. Tarkovsky likens the makers of modern entertainment to merchants of commodities rather than artists. That was due to the high cost of filmmaking in the days of celluloid, but modern digital tech has leveled the playing field. Anyone can make a movie that could be seen by millions of viewers nowadays. What hasn’t changed, however, remains what is most important. The intention of the filmmaker determines whether what they make will contribute more to culture or commerce. Tarkovsky speaks of art as an act of sacrifice for the sake of love and as a potential unifier of humankind. What a thing to say in a book about filmmaking.
“Cinema uses the materials given by nature itself, with the passage of time, manifested within space”Andre Tarkovsky.
Here’s one thing that sets this filmmaker above the lot. He builds perceptual provocation into every shot. The long take, by its very nature, affords the viewer plenty of time to reevaluate their first impression. When someone as fine tuned as Tarkovsky lavishes each frame with purposeful detail, there is no getting back to the mindset you occupied when the shot first struck your retina. Tarkovsky’s cinema, like no other, conspires to take us on a journey of no return, and regarding the filmmaker’s intention, no film more than “Stalker” (1979) shows higher concern.
A typical Tarkovsky image constantly evolves, constantly challenging us to reconsider what we think we know. What we assimilate at first, by the effect of a moving camera, is a space filled with currents that move at deliberately devised rates. Almost the same way composers uses notes, Tarkovsky busies himself making intervals of time stand out to our sight. His layers of complexity compare and contrast with each other, over and under, to drive out lazy assumptions, bring our senses around, restore a sense of intimacy and wonder.
“Failure to develop the audiences capacity to criticize our own judgments is tantamount to treating them with total indifference.” Andre Tarkovsky
Film snatches events from the unconditional world and this skilled film director constructs an image of whole truth with captured fragments from such stuff. Tarkovsky goes to all this trouble to help the audience recover ‘lost past’. Assuming that a movie projector, as I have suggested in a previous post, is a kind of celluloid clock, Tarkovsky sculpts time inside that beam that connects the filmmaker’s heart to the audience’s brain. We’ve delved into this subject in a previous post, “A Camera is Simply a Clock with a Lens.” (OCC March 2012)
It’s not enough to call Tarkovsky a filmmaker or even an artist. We have reached the core of this beloved humanist’s work with his fifth film “Stalker” (1979), the greatest dystopian drama of all time. It is the last of his films we will discuss in this year-long series focused on the greatest Russian artist of the 20th century.
Andrey Tarkovsky was harassed by Soviet critics but praised by the proletariat. I think his written remarks about masterpieces of art being immune to association or else prone to infinite association, which is the same thing, was an evasive action taken by a misunderstood genius trying to be bullet proof. Who can blame him?
It’s not that I disagree with his enlightened presumption, but I’m pretty sure that analyzing its components in order to discover layers of meaning in art is as natural for audiences as our search for meaning. No masterpiece can elude our need to break it into digestible units. To discourage us from analyzing complex works of art, when the human brain is conditioned to do it, is ludicrous. Great movies are displayed on the high altar of a movie screen, after all, like some blessed sacrament. Absorb as much of their greatness as possible; digest, assimilate, amen!
Surely Tarkovsky is warning us to not get carried away with the sound of our own digestion. Regarding analysis of jazz, Duke Ellington was quoted as having said, “too much of that kind of talk stinks up the place.” In other words, let the art speak for itself. If words could say everything, then we would need nothing else.
Why then, do I analyze films? Not to make definitive pronouncements on their merits. In discussing anybody else’s work, I try to limit myself to specifics that might provoke a common response or well-meaning debate. I don’t write to be quoted, but simply hope that someone reading this might discover the movie for themselves. If they’ve already discovered it, perhaps I will provide them an excuse to look again.
Tarkovsky’s suggestion that infinite associations can be provoked by a single masterpiece, is not entirely relevant, in my opinion, since the likelihood of most humans making identical associations is much greater than us making unique ones. Art reaches us through our imagination and through our senses. Our senses are all going to have a common reaction to certain stimuli. That’s one thing great art understands. It seems to me an artist depends on the fact that essential associations eventually will carve predictable lines through common precincts in our brains.
Getting back to Tarkovsky’s second film, as Act III of “Andre Rublev” unfolds, the narrative line shifts radically and our attention switches from the floundering faith of a monk/painter Rublev to the budding prodigy of an orphaned son of a bell maker Boriska. Rublev shifts to a supporting role, however we are still viewing the action through his eyes, so Tarkovsky really isn’t hanging the narrative out to dry.
How important is it for the audience to experience Boriska’s initiation from Rublev’s point of view? Critical. Rublev, the conflicted monk/artist, gets his religious faith and creative inspiration super-charged by witnessing the unknown craftsman take a quantum leap.
The ringing the enormous bell at the finale becomes an audio/visual talisman to forever remind us a truly great artist works in service to the people. A truly great artist’s and any truly holy mystic’s responsibility are one in the same. Both are pioneers, confronting the fact that whatever any of us does ripples through the culture with consequences.
What worker in the realms of imagination would not relate to their process as a fire burning off superfluous matter; getting out of the way and becoming a conduit for a greater power? Rublev receives a summons from the prince but procrastinates and waits for the juice to come down from God–the artist’s conscience, in other words–he is rewarded with the privilege of witnessing someone else step into their genius. this, in fact, melts the last of Rublev’s resistance. Observing the good vibe that Boriska’s sacrifice generates, Andrei rededicates himself and his talents to a life of service.
In the aftermath of the fiery rite of passage, mud takes the place of blood and coats the crowning shot’s pieta-like design. Borisky remains mired in regret, even though he has greatly succeeded. He gambled with his talent and won, but can scarcely comprehend such luck.
He’d have been beheaded if he’d failed. Instead his bell sends good vibrations out over the land. The royals ride off to party. Common folk take the day off as well, but pitiful Boriski weeps and wails for what he thinks he lacks. Mirrors in Tarkovsky’s movies come in many guises. Rublev looks down at this one, realizes Boriska is his reflection and lifts him out of the mud.
Tarkovsky did his best over the expanse of his short career to call out the best in his fellow artists. He was blessed with some consummate craftsmen with which to collaborate, capturing all the intricately designed and timely processes of his magnum opus. Nevertheless, political censorship bogged down this film after its premiere, dishonoring its great director as well as the top-notch crew that made it. While the Soviet’s government sealed the country’s fate as a failed state, their artists bequeathed us some of the greatest works ever made.
Next month “a summersault into the unknown” beginning with “Nostalghia” (1983)
If I had seen Tarkovsky’s sixth film, “Nostalghia,” in the year 1986 when it was released, it probably would have infuriated me, but I was only twenty-six. It’s easier to comprehend after half a century’s worth of experience.
In Act I, the poet and his female interpreter arrive in a Tuscan village near a chapel with a miraculous fresco and some steamy, natural, healing baths. The couple stays dry and bickers over which one of them better understands the other’s culture. He tells her to throw away the book of translated poems she’s reading because “poetry, the whole of art in fact, is untranslatable.” This is Tarkovsky’s retort to the Soviet censors whose State he has fled in his quest for artistic freedom.
However, the conviction expressed by the poet in that little exchange of dialog flatly contradicts an opinion the director wrote in his book, “Sculpting with Time.” Tarkovsky proposed that the more successfully the artist’s views are hidden, the greater a work of art will be. Yet, here is a case where the main character blatantly expresses a view that the director lays claim to publicly.
So it appears he is contradicting himself, but perhaps there is an untranslatable view hidden within all of this. To help us get at it, I supply a quote from composer Paul Hindemith. I came across it decades ago in a very helpful book entitled, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” by Betty Edwards. This quote evokes what Tarkovsky might be saying regarding what remains untranslatable.
“We all know the impression of a very heavy flash of lightening in the night.
Within second’s time we see a broad landscape, not only in its general outlines but with every detail. Although we could never describe each single component of the picture, we feel that not even the smallest leaf of grass escapes our attention. We experience a view, immensely comprehensible and at the same time immensely detailed, that we never could have under normal daylight conditions, and perhaps not during the night either, if our senses and nerves were not strained by the extraordinary suddenness of the event…”
The quote goes on to say that a bona fide master is capable of holding such an impression in his imagination and construct it with his chosen medium, remaining engaged in the task unto the very last detail. Tarkovsky worked that way.
Returning to our current film, no matter how beguilingly she offers it, the Botticelli-like beauty of the Italian translator fails to seduce the enigmatic Russian poet. Why has he brought such a desirable woman along and then arranged for separate rooms? This seems not quite right. He could have hired a friar for less. We won’t be attempting to answer that question here, although I invite you to.
It is clearly not what she had in mind when the poet retires to his quarters. He peruses the room, alone. The windows, walls, and furnishings are like living lines in a poem. Shift to black and white; a dark-haired woman beams at him in some recurring dream or vivid reverie. An adolescent girl gambols barefoot with her German shepherd dog on the edge of a pond.
When he snaps back to the present the light spectrum expands with him, but what’s the difference? Light is scarce. Colors are subdued. He pokes his head out a window. It’s raining, he closes the blinds. He turns on a wall switch then turns it off. He crosses in front of a whitewashed wall, past an iron bed. He pauses, framed in the dark doorjamb of a lighted bathroom, then goes in. On the wall hangs a mirror over a sink. The poet practically brushes it with his cheek as he bends for a drink, but never glances at himself. In the third act, he takes a rather long look in a mirror, making this one echo even more mysteriously, in retrospect, lit such as it is so deliberately, almost like the ring of Saturn.
At this time, the cinematic master begins riffing variations on a familiar pattern. He makes chords with objects and their resonances. For example the next visual harmony in the key of H2O is impressive. It involves rain that’s been shut outside, a stream that flows freely from a faucet and a bottle of aqua mineral standing still on the dresser.
Before we leave the bathroom, notice this dark sliver along the left limb of that disk-shaped mirror. Tarkovsky’s lens insinuates all possible depths. He does so by concealing the camera in a shot and then pointing it at you. What that black slit reflects, to the poets left, is a cleft where the audience sits. Go ahead, stare back at yourself with us, behind the man’s back. We share a magic wall with him and his double. You’re hiding inside there too, along with the camera and the director.
In shots we have already analyzed, from both “Mirror,” “Ivan’s Childhood” and “The Sacrifice,” it is evident that Tarkovsky loves to crowd three dimensions with illusion of more. Here in “Nostalghia,” he imbues the mirror with a total of ten.
Now there’s something for the imagination to stretch out in.
He is riffing comfortably on this water triplet, we’ve already described. Then he inserts this little variation for mirror and lens that opens like an accordion, but with a cinematic instrument, not music. If two mirrors opposed each another here it would demonstrate what is known as the Droste Effect.
Exchange one of those mirrors for a lens and hide it inside the other. Now we are not confined to look from one end to the next through a score of dead reflections, but can penetrate the image with our mind while each layer of the telescoping reflection penetrates in a backwards direction, through our perceptions, one after the other. We are introduced, through the vivid suggestion of this superficial edifice, to the intricate pleats of a hand-made, ingeniously embedded, pre-digital hologram.
The room you occupy at present happens to be connected to this bathroom on a movie set where the actor stood in a bygone time and place. Thanks to the filmmaker’s device we can locate ourselves peering out from behind that blind, decades later in a completely different physical space. You think I’m making this up? For more on this preoccupation, listen to postman Otto spin his yarn about a widow and her unfortunate son at RT 38:10:00 in Act I of “The Sacrifice” (1986 – Criterion 2011 Ed.).
Now let the rest of us proceed to RT 21:48:00 in “Nostanghia” (1983 – Kino Lorber 2014 Ed.) Help me decipher the number of dimensional thresholds through which we are looking. Glance backward, for a moment, through the camera, hiding in that dim sliver, is if your eyes were the lens. Behind it is some film in a compartment where the impression is fixed. Now see if your imagination will let you climb onto that image and travel with it wherever it goes. For no longer than it takes to fall in and out of a daydream there are nine coils packed in this jack in the box, hung vertically on the screen for your senses to expand through. You think I’m full of it? I don’t blame you. Let’s have a closer look.
In the center of this multidimensional point of view, a poet’s image subdivides. Right behind his back, in the same frame, find yourself looking both outward and inward. Through the clever, cinematic, domain-shifting telescope, witness how it simultaneously projects into dimensional recesses on screen and bounces backward through your irises and off the back wall of your brain.
Three distinct thresholds, on either side of the glass, delineate four dimensions; each counts as one volume and its twin for a total of ten domains stacked, unpacked, rewound, played and multiplied again and again, every time this clip is selected.
When I first saw this, I turned the movie off and went to bed pondering the rare perspective. Behind those indelible thirty-three seconds of film time Tarkovsky’s secret is protected.
Tarkovsky may have known that “The Sacrifice” would be his last film, but it would be trite to say that he was putting himself up on screen as its tragic hero. Certainly the filmmaker would not deny a common bond with that man. Both are confronting the hour of their death.
I think what the filmmaker was revealing about his own personal drama, coping with terminal illness, was that he felt like the wrong side was dying. Their reputations were made off of his. His critics were a cancer, not him. They claimed his work as justification for their own and were forever trying to rebuild his art in their image.
But in Tarkovsky’s universe there surely should be some sort of natural law to spare the poet before the critic. At the same time, I can understand where any dying man might entertain the hope, wish, fantasy, whatever you call it, that a sacrifice of sufficient magnitude should bring about salvation for his loved ones. Here, I believe, is the common coordinate point where Alexander the main character of “The Sacrifice” and Andre, the director’s, predicaments overlap.
“The Sacrifice” it’s about WWIII and the hero is an aging intellectual, not some hunky, wisecracking superstar in a carnival costume. Even more interesting, this one’s a film critic. In the last act, the critic barters his reputation and all his material possessions away, to God, in exchange for the salvation of his loved ones. Then he sneaks off and sleeps with a witch. Next morning, we can’t possibly guess which desperate act did the trick, but something did. One senses it was a bit of both. In any case, in the end, his family is spared and Alexander has to fulfill his part of the bargain.
It appears as if Tarkovsky means to humble his critics, but in the end, a critic, saves the world? Consider how he did it. By giving up his reputation and all that it bought for him. Ironically, the message becomes that a critic’s highest achievement is to censor them self. The filmmaker sends this poor slob out into the world homeless, mute, stripped of reputation, literally escorted out of the picture by the men in white coats. With the great conflagration at the end of his movie, one could conclude Tarkovsky’s dying wish, at least as an artist, was to burn those critical voices out of existence.
The opening title cards of “The Sacrifice” play over a detail in a reproduction of an unfinished painting “Adoration of the Magi,” by Leonardo. Meanwhile, we listen to The “St. Mathew’s Passion” by Bach. As the titles conclude, the squeal of seagulls fades up. Eventually it will become evident that we are in an upstairs room in Alexander’s Swedish seaside sanctuary. For now, the camera cranes up on a lushly depicted tree in the painting, on a wall. The tree towers over the rest of the composition. The action cuts from that image of a tree, to an actual tree by the seashore, where seagull sounds make more sense.
Already, we are being invited to distinguish between a picture of a tree and an actual tree, Painter René Magritte did a similar thing with a pipe and caption in his “The Treachery of Images,” (1935).
After a few more frames, we will be supplied with the story of a tree to add to the equation, in order to thoroughly uproot any preconception that art is interchangeable with the things it presents. Besides a preview of the end of the world, we are being availed of an opportunity to challenge our preconceptions in a way that only cinema can supply.
It’s Alexander’s birthday and with the help of a very young boy whom everyone calls Little Man, an old man planting a barren tree by the sea. The little one is too young to comprehend a story the old one is telling. It’s about an elder monk that plants a barren trunk with his protégé. After much nurturing by his pupil, the monk’s tree eventually blossoms.
Alexander concludes his monk’s tale with a digression on how a method or a system can be applied to change virtually anything. No matter how insignificant an action is, if done consistently with focused intent, it will change the world. He proposes, one could simply rise up out of bed at precisely the same hour every morning, draw a glass of water from the sink, flush it down the toilet and that would tip the scales of change.
Smells positively Zen-like on the surface, but with a peculiar after scent. I’m almost certain it is a veiled insult, mocking censors who prefer their own idly formulated prejudices over an artist’s hard fought insights. Andre strikes back, making one of them admit how absurd their occupation really is. I didn’t fit these frames together until after I’d watched the film three or four times.
Tarkovsky endured the misunderstanding of men like Alexander throughout his career. Still he got up out of bed every morning, turned on his imagination and made one world-changing work of art after the other. Whatever his censors perpetrated against him, in his final film he flushes all their efforts down the drain.
We’ve penetrated the center of this great director’s ouvre by gazing into his “Mirror” (1974). Might as well go wide now by contrasting his first feature, “Ivan’s Childhood,” (1962) with his final one, “The Sacrifice” (1986). From there, we’ll work our way back to the core.
