Aleksandr baluyev biography of william shakespeare
The Tarkovsky legacy
Introduction
In the course of just seven feature films – Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1974), Stalker (1979), Nostalgia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986) – Andrei Tarkovsky changed what cinema as an artform could achieve. Despite the lack of canonical consensus today as to which filmmakers should be counted as the true greats, one can make this claim about Tarkovsky because many active filmmakers today tell us as much.
The 12 films below, as well as all seven of Tarkovsky’s features and his early shorts, screened in the Sight & Sound Deep Focus programme Mirroring Tarkovsky: The Great Director and His Disciples at the BFI Southbank, London through October and November 2015.
But how did this one filmmaker’s influence come to be so culturally pervasive? Critics tend to use the word ‘Tarkovskian’ with alacrity. Whenever an elegiac film incorporates long single-camera takes, is happy not to distinguish between real time, action, dream and memory, and wants to drink in the landscape, that word is in the wind. You could say that when it comes to a certain kind of festival-friendly international art movie, Tarkovsky owns the weather. If there are grasslands swirling, white mist veiling a house in a dark green valley, cleansing torrential rains, a burning barn or house, or tracking shots across objects submerged in water, a Tarkovsky name-drop is never far away. That usage might seem glib, but these things indicate a wider aesthetic terrain that deals in transcendence and the spiritual, but one that has resonance outside of religious belief – a cinema of what we might call the agnostic sublime.
So how did this come to be? The obvious place to start is with those who have influenced the influencer. Andrei Tarkovsky was born into a family in which an atmosphere of artistic inheritance was intense and unavoidable. His father, Arseny, was a serious poet of some reputation. Although Arseny did not pub 50 years ago, the hippie movement borrowed many of their ecological ideas from Native Americans, who also participated in the Earth Day celebrations. But Indigenous peoples have struggled to protect their environment long before 1970. The history of U.S. colonization and the privatization of Native American lands, issues of sovereignty and treaty rights, the economic dynamics of capitalism, and tangible and intangible cultural heritage claims all create a complex movement that links social justice with environmental justice. Today, Indigenous peoples face environmental racism—policies and practices that intentionally or unintentionally disadvantages individuals or communities based on their ethnicity or race. Environmental racism is exemplified by numerous mining and pipeline projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline that cut through sacred tribal lands in violation of their sovereignty and at great cost of local Native American communities’ cultural, economic, and physical health. Richard I of England has been depicted many times in romantic fiction and popular culture. The Scotsphilosopher and chronicler John Mair was the first to associate Richard with the Robin Hood legends in his Historia majoris Britannae, tam Angliae quam Scotiae (1521). In the earliest Robin Hood ballads the only king mentioned is "Edward our comely king", most probably Edward II or Edward III. However, Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe popularised Mair's linking of the Hood legends to Richard's reign, and it was taken up by later novelists and by cinema. Typically Robin is depicted upholding justice in Richard's name against John and his officials during the king's imprisonment. Richard appears in the novella about Robin Hood, Maid Marian (1822), by Thomas Love Peacock. Richard has appeared frequently in fiction, as a result of the 'chivalric revival' of the Romantic era. .Native american activism arts
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England
Robin Hood
Other literature