“For me Tarkovsky is the greatest because he gave film a new language that enabled it to capture life as an illusion, as a dream… Discovery of his first film was like a miracle to me. Suddenly I found myself in front of a door whose key I had not held previously”

This is how the equally famous Ingmar Bergman described the great Russian cineaste. Namely you can either adore or hate Tarkovsky. You may be irritated by his listlessly sentimental humanism that emanates from the author’s film Solaris as a sort of a response to Kubrick’s  2001: A Space Odyssey, combining the poetics of Dovzhenko’s Ukanian school with the dialectics of the Marxist school. Afterwards the hero’s inner journey strays into the zone of “kindergarten psychology and inane melodrama” (Tony Rayns), as after two hours he has not moved away from his father’s lap, from which he had parted ten years before. Nevertheless, Tarkovskiy’s spiritual opus is far from inane. However, that does not mean that Tarkovsky is some sort of an author totem whose desecration means a blasphemous act.

Still Solaris remains the author’s most “pop” film in his opus. Even though Stanislaw Lem, the author of this metaphysical literary original, hated this film and called it “Crime and Punishment”, paradoxically that was a compliment for Tarkovsky as some film critics like to describe him as the “Dostoyevsky of film”. However, for Tarkovsky film was never a document but rather a dream. 'He is not here to explain things to us. He is an observer who stages his own visions”, said Bergman. Thus his films are utterly spiritual and poetic, reminiscent of a moral burden as well as a prayer. He is a true virtuoso who gives his films shape of a soul. It is a pure auto-reflexive search for the absolute, through constant movement of camera and slow motion.

This “prayer” effect is emanated in the author’s best film Andrei Rublov, which was banned by the bureaucrats from Goskin, only to be distributed five years later, almost a decade after Ivan’s Childhood. The film could be renamed with a title inspired by Passolini to “The Gospel According to St. Andrei”, since the author dissects the artist’s suffering, mystical rituals, excommunication and misery, while the lucid and highly estheticized shots with all their brutality and hallucinations sometimes evoke Brueghel (the artist’s surviving fresco paintings are shown in the climatic ending of the film). Nevertheless, blind admiration of the boy Andrei kindles the artist’s faith in himself and his people (the most impressive scenes are those of the young Rublov who tries to save his own life pretending to be able to make a huge church bell). Tarkovsky simultaneously envisions him as a Jesus-like metaphor of all the suffering of divided Russia during the Tatars’ invasion and the silent visionary who, after many years of silence, finally discovers the charm of speaking and painting.

However, the most beautiful examples of the author’s work are to be found early in his career. After graduating from films school, he directed Ivan’s Childhood, in which his small hero takes part in WW II as a soviet spy in dangerous missions behind enemy lines. Here the aura of holiness that leans over Ivan has nothing to do with the bombastic religion or philosophical abstractions from the author’s later films. In this film he treats child mysteries with utter respect.  The most beautiful memories are those from an idealized childhood, those that evoke “dance of birch trees”, truck full of apples, running after butterflies and horse wet from rain, since at the time Tarkovsky was close to Tschuchraij (code: The Cranes Are Flying) whose films boasted a fluid photography which leaned heavily on the cinematographer Sergey Urusevskiy’s style. Later, Coppola said that it was this cinematographer who inspired him in his film Apocalypse Now. But who is actually dreaming here? 'It is as if Tarkovsky tried to shift the burden of these dreams to the audience’, wrote Vida T. Johnston and Graham Petrie in their book 'The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. While the Italian communist print magazine accused the author of being too focused on the lyrical elements, Sartre defended him and sent a letter to the editors of the magazine 'L'Unita'. Nevertheless, disturbing episodes of Ivan’s visions owe a lot to the author’s later works in which poetry is not generated by dreams anymore but the heroes tend to dream while they are awake.

Protagonists of the film Stalker are similar. It is an ambitious film about faith and hope, as well as about quest for something that lets people to live, those most intimate and secret wishes that surface when they enter a mysterious post-industrial area of the Zone from which there is no return. But who is this ascetic “stalker” who hides in the title of the film? He is a prophet who believes that humanity is walking to its death because it has lost all the values in this world. In a world in which nobody believes in anything anymore, he is the one who tries to trace those who have not yet lost all faith, and leads them to the landscapes of the Zone to contaminate them with the germ of idealism ', explained Tarkovsky in one of his interviews. Nevertheless, Stalker remains a film full of contradiction, as are its characters. It is a quite talkative film in which stalker’s mute and paralyzed daughter experiences a disturbing miracle. Undoubtedly it is a visionary film that, in some respect, announced the tragedy in Chernobyl and the post-soviet collapse.

Probably the best recapitaulation of the author’s complete opus and his esthetics is sublimated in his elegy The Mirror, which accentuates how film is a medium that is primarily connected to time and subjectivity. His character Alexei becomes Tarkovsky’s alter ego, while the director himself appears towards the end of the film, lying in bed with a bird in one hand. Using pulsing footage, the director interchanges the personal and the political, fiction and documentary, and records three different periods of life – one with the author as a three year old boy, one in the author’s time pf puberty and one when the author is thirty years old. This film depicts Tarkovsky best as the “sculptor of time” who instead of clay uses blocks of time and shapes them in the editing process. However, Tarkovsky does not want to regard film in the autobiographical discourse and reduce it to a story of his own life, but rather about his “visual imagination”.

Later Tarkovsky continued his career in Paris with films about the existential crisis of Russian poets in Italy (Nostalgia) and meditations of retired actors/critics who are awaiting the nuclear cataclysm on the Swedish coast (Sacrifice), in which he completely removed the bond between reality and dream, imagination and the material. The only thing he has left is the pact with the Sovereign, by which he will sacrifice himself in order to save humanity.  Mighty (Dragan Rubeša)