Soviet Film Maker Tarkovsky Dies at 54

Andrei Tarkovsky, a Soviet director of surrealistic films who defected in 1984, died today of cancer at Hartmann Clinic, hospital sources said. He was 54.

His wife, Larisa, was at his side when he died, the sources at the hospital in suburban Paris said.

Tarkovsky, who won several prizes at the Cannes Film Festival over the years, refused to return to the Soviet Union after he was denied permission to continue working abroad in 1983.

While working in West Europe, Tarkovsky had strongly criticized control of the arts in the Soviet Union. However, he also came to decry materialism in the West.

After his defection, Tarkovsky lived and worked in Italy, France and Sweden while campaigning to get his teen-aged son, Andrei, and his 85-year-old mother-in-law, Anna Egorkina, out of the Soviet Union. They were allowed to join him later.

Tarkovsky has been honored at the Cannes Film Festival since first winning wide recognition in the West for his 1966 film “Andrei Rublev,” a drama about a 15th-Century monk and icon painter.

Tarkovsky’s first film, “Ivan’s Childhood,” made when he was 30, won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in 1962.

This fall, “Andrei Rublev” and a 1979 surrealistic science fiction work, “Stalker,” were shown in Moscow theaters, a development departing from the usual practice of banning the works of defectors.

This spring, Tarkovsky won the Cannes Film Festival’s Special Grand Prize for the film “Sacrifice,” which was made in Sweden with several associates of Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. The film was his first made in exile.

In announcing his decision to defect, Tarkovsky said he felt he had the choice of returning home to almost certain oblivion or staying abroad to work. “To me, cinema is not just a job,” he said. “It’s my life.”

Soviet authorities, he said, “spat on my soul.”

But he later said: “The longer I stay in the West, the more I find that man has lost his inner freedom. In the West, everybody has their rights, but in an internal, spiritual sense, there is no doubt more freedom in the Soviet Union.”