Books & Poetry

A recent addition to the reliable Pocket Essentials film list, Sean Martin’s digestible and illuminating ‘Andrei Tarkovsky’ also benefits from a welcome revamping of the format. Retaining the series’ hallmark clarity and concision, the newer Essentials are longer in length allowing for increased analysis and improved contextualisation.

It’s in the latter regard that Martin’s book excels, tackling the whole of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre, including the stage and radio works, books, photographs, paintings and poems that exist in addition to his remarkable features. Martin also provides an insightful overview of the period in which Tarkovsky emerged, placing him in relation to other Khrushchev Thaw directors Otar Iosseliani, Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky. Tarkovsky was finally forced into exile after completing ‘Nostalgia’, and his frequent clashes with the Soviet authorities are also well presented.

Aligning the autobiographical elements that informed Tarkovsky’s work to perceptive and diligently researched discussions of the director’s All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) student films, Martin offers an impressive consideration of the seven landmark features that established his reputation as the most celebrated Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein. Analysing Tarkovsky’s working methodology, including his notion that the script should be a blueprint only, Martin also unpicks the director’s radical aesthetic of long takes and tracking shots, dubbed ‘imprinted’ or ‘sculpted’ time.

Though giving due recommendation to the filmmaker’s own profoundly influential ‘Sculpting in Time’, Martin asserts that no Tarkovsky book can replace the experience of seeing the films themselves. But as a short overview for the unfamiliar, or as a stimulus to revisiting works by an artist Ingmar Bergman considered ‘the greatest’, this volume is an indispensable marking of the twentieth anniversary of the director’s passing.