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The Ritz, Lido and Classic Cinemas, supported by Cinema Reborn, are presenting a complete retrospective of the feature films of master filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (pictured above). These will be the first ever screenings in Australia to be devoted to a full career review of this master filmmaker. Tarkovsky’s work was previously at Cinema Reborn in 2022 when his masterpiece Mirror was presented in a superb 4K restoration.
The retrospective will begin at the Ritz Cinemas in Sydney on March 20 and Lido and Classic Cinemas in Melbourne on March 27, where Tarkovsky’s debut feature Ivan’s Childhood will be screened at 7pm on those dates. In Sydney there will be an introduction to the season at the Ivan’s Childhood screening by Sydney University film studies scholar Matilda Mroz and the main screening of The Sacrifice during the Cinema Reborn 2025 season will be preceded by an introduction by critic Janice Tong. In Melbourne, critics Grace Boschetti (Ivan’s Childhood) and David Heslin (The Sacrifice) will introduce those sessions at the Hawthorn Lido. The Sacrifice will be a part of the 2025 Cinema Reborn season at the Ritz on Thursday 1 May and at Lido on Thursday 8 May, and will also screen at Classic Cinemas, Elsternwick on Thursday 8 May.
Full details of the Tarkovsky retrospective, with links to bookings at each of the cinemas, may be found at these links.
The autobiographical note published below was written by Cinema Reborn Foundation Committee member Rod Bishop and was first published in the 2022 Cinema Reborn catalogue when the festival screened Tarkovsky’s 1975 film Mirror. (Click on the link to read Rod's excellent and most comprehensive notes on the film and its restoration)
“My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had until then, never been given to me…Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream”.
- Ingmar Bergman
Born in 1932 in Zavrazhye, 300 kms from Moscow, Andrei Tarkovsky’s father was the poet and translator Arseny Tarkovsky and his mother Maria Vishnyakova, a graduate of the Maxim GorkyLiterature Institute. He was only five-years-old when his father left the family, volunteering for the army during World War II and being awarded the Red Star. During the war, Andrei Tarkovsky moved to Moscow with his mother and sister where Maria worked as an editor and proofreader.
After high school, he studied Arabic at the Oriental Institute in Moscow, but dropped out to work as a prospector for the Academy of Science Institute for Non-Ferrous Metals and Gold, spending a year living in the Siberian taiga in the Krasnoyarsk Province.
He was accepted into the directing program at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), making several short films and at least one television docudrama. Collaborating on a script with fellow classmate Andrei Konchalovsky, The Steamroller and the Violin(1960) became his graduation film and won First Prize at the New York Student Film Festival in 1961.
His first feature, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), centred around an orphan who becomes a scout for theSoviet army during World War II, brought Tarkovsky to international attention, winning the Golden Lion at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. Problems with Soviet authorities and several different versions of his second featureAndrei Rublev (1966), a historical epic based around the Russian icon painter, meant the film did not appear at Cannes until 1969 where it won the FIPRESCI prize.Soviet authorities had insisted it be screened Out of Competition.
The near three-hour science fiction drama Solaris (1972), adapted from the novel by Stanislaw Lem and described as ‘a sci-fi masterpiece’ by Salman Rushdie won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury atthe 1972 Cannes Film Festival.
Mirror(1975) was not well liked by Soviet authorities and suffered severely limited distribution in the USSR in third-class cinemas and workers clubs. It was, however, heralded in the West and its reputation has continued to grow significantly over the past 45 years.
His last film in the Soviet Union was Stalker (1979), a philosophical and theological science fiction drama following three men journeying to a mysterious “Zone”. It won the Ecumenical Jury prize at Cannes.
Some sources report The First Day (1979),a script by Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky set during the reign of Peter the Great in 18th Century Russia, was stopped half way through production when it was learnt the film differed from the script submitted to Soviet censors. Tarkovsky was reported to have destroyed most of what was filmed.
In Italy, he made the documentary Voyage in Time (1983) with Tonino Guerra and again, with Guerra, started production on Nostalghia (1983), a film set in Italy about a Russian writer who is stricken with homesickness while researching an ex-pat Russian composer.At Cannes, it won the Ecumenical and FIPRESCI prizes and shared a specially created prize ‘Grand Prix du cinema de creation’ with Robert Bresson (for L’argent).
In 1985, he was processed as a Soviet Defector in an Italian refugee camp although declaring: “I am not a Soviet dissident. I have no conflict with the Soviet Government…I would be unemployed [in the USSR].”
His last film was the spiritually apocalyptic The Sacrifice (1986) made in Sweden and winner of the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and the Ecumenical and FIPRESCI prizes at Cannes. He could not attend the festival to accept the awards and died of cancer on 29 December 1986.
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