Tarkovsky decided to become a filmmaker while prospecting for metals in Siberia
Andrei Tarkovsky was a poor student who quit Arabic studies to join a year-long geological expedition in the Siberian taiga. Somewhere out there he chose cinema. He made only seven features, yet three of them appear on Sight and Sound's 2012 list of the 100 greatest films ever made.
He was born in 1932 in a village near Yuryevets, about 500 kilometres east of Moscow, the son of the poet Arseny Tarkovsky. His father left the family when Andrei was small, and the boy grew up with his mother, grandmother and sister, a household without a man that he said marked his character. Evacuated to Yuryevets during the war, he once rescued his mother from drowning in a river. His father, who lost a leg at the front, never came home. Back in Moscow his mother worked as a proofreader, and he spent months in hospital with tuberculosis in 1947 and 1948; the evacuation, the absent father and the hospital all resurface in his film Mirror.
A family legend traced his paternal line to princes in Dagestan, but his sister Marina, after researching the genealogy, called it a myth with no documents behind it. After the Siberian expedition he entered the state film school, VGIK, in 1954, studying under Mikhail Romm, and married classmate Irma Raush in 1957. The Khrushchev thaw let young directors work and let foreign films in, so he could study the Italian neorealists, the French New Wave, Bergman, Bresson and Kurosawa; Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds left a special mark.
His debut, Ivan's Childhood, won the Golden Lion at Venice. Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror and Stalker followed, all made in the Soviet Union amid long clashes with state film officials. In 1979 he left the country and completed Nostalghia and The Sacrifice abroad, the latter winning a BAFTA. His films move slowly through long takes and dreamlike images, preoccupied with nature, memory and the spiritual.
In 1986 he published Sculpting in Time, his reflections on art and cinema, and died of cancer at the end of that year. Some believe the illness may have come from the toxic locations used to film Stalker. The Soviet state awarded him the Lenin Prize posthumously in 1990.
Source: Andrei Tarkovsky
