Soviet Defector’s Films Stress Spiritual Man in Harsh World : Director Andrei Tarkovsky Dies at 54

Andrei Tarkovsky, the self-exiled director whose uncompromising films reflected a preoccupation with spiritual man caught up in an unforgiving world, died Monday near Paris.

The Soviet-born avant-gardist was 54 and was believed to have been suffering from lung cancer. He died at the Hartmann Clinic outside Paris, according to the Associated Press.

Although only a handful of his films had been seen in the West, each brought him international homage.

His first film as a Soviet exile, “Sacrifice,” won the Cannes Film Festival jury’s special Grand Prix Award this year but Tarkovsky’s illness prevented him from accepting the prize. He also won at Cannes in 1972 and 1983.

Praised by Critic

Kevin Thomas, a Times film critic, in a review just last week, called “Sacrifice” “Tarkovsky’s finest work, a culmination of all that has preoccupied him throughout his films. It is suffused with his characteristic longing for maternal love and for communion with God and nature.”

In 1984, Tarkovsky had opted to remain in Europe rather than return to the Soviet Union where he said the authorities “spat on my soul.” He complained that despite the sub rosa popularity of his films he often didn’t “have five kopeks to ride the bus.”

He had spent 24 years in the state-controlled Soviet film industry but was allowed to produce only six pictures and, although given large production budgets, much of his work was not released by censors. Those that were shown were confined to small theaters outside large population centers.

But defection proved no personal panacea, he later complained.

“Sacrifice” was made in Sweden with several associates of Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. In ethereal, dreamlike imagery it tells of a man who doubts the value of his own life but then vows to sacrifice himself and his family to prevent an impending global disaster.

In an interview while the film was being made, Tarkovsky complained that “our times have destroyed the ability to experience beauty. Mass culture has numbed the soul.

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

In the 2 1/2 years after he left Russia he lived and worked in Italy, France and Sweden.

Over the years he received many international honors, including the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1962 for “Ivan’s Childhood,” his first picture.

That film, about an orphan in World War II, opened the way to Soviet state support of his work, but his impressionistic ideas drew the disfavor of the censors, who withheld for five years his best-known Soviet production, “Andrei Roublev.”

International Praise

That 1966 drama about the 15th-Century monk and icon painter won Tarkovsky international acclaim. It and “Stalker,” a science fiction odyssey made in 1979, were re-released this fall in Soviet theaters--a departure from the general policy of ignoring the works of defectors.

Tarkovsky’s other pictures include “Nostalghia,” which he had been making in Italy when he defected and which reflects the theme of exile. A 1974 film, “The Mirror,” an alternately black and white and color film tells of a middle-aged man longing for the past, particularly his mother.

Other of the experimentalist’s work include “Solaris,” 1971, and “A White, White Day,” 1974.

Shortly after Tarkovsky’s defection he was brought to the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado where he was honored and where he told film critics, fans and students:

“Cinema is not an entertainment. It is the highest poetical discipline of art.”