ANDREI TARKOVSKY: FILM POET IN AN ALIEN WORLD

All real film artists are really poets. Directors can be divided into two kinds. There are those who attempt to present the world that surrounds them--the real actual world that you see with your eyes. And there are those who are concerned with presenting their internal selves. . . . These are the poets: Dovzhenko, of course; Bergman, Bunuel, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Vigo, Bresson. When they make films, they express themselves internally. No one else could make that particular film. . . . But you must understand that artists really never talk about themselves directly. No real artist does. Even when he talks about himself, he doesn’t talk about himself--or he wouldn’t be a great poet. A great poet, whether talking about himself, or talking about the community, is always addressing larger questions.

-- Director Andrei Tarkovsky

When Andrei Tarkovsky died of cancer Monday in Paris at age 54, it ended one of the strangest, saddest, most exalted careers in recent cinema. Tarkovsky was an emigre, a man without a country: a Russian usually at odds with his country’s currents, a Christian in a homeland that rejected his faith, a film maker at odds with the prevailing trends of the world’s movie industries.

He was, it seemed, the ultimate outsider--too rigorous, austere and uncompromising to survive. Tarkovsky made only seven feature films in his 24-year career, some rarely shown in the Soviet Union and scantily released outside. Americans barely know of him, except through the art houses. Many, seeing his films for the first time, find them maddeningly slow, philosophically murky, opaque. And, to be fair, it sometimes takes several viewings for a Tarkovsky film to fully reveal itself, for that shaft of radiance to suddenly break through and pierce you to the heart.

His admirers are passionate. Tarkovsky’s acknowledged masterpiece--the 1966 historical epic “Andrei Roublev”--was shelved for five years in the Soviet Union and has never really had a wide Western release. Even so, it placed in the top 15 in the last Sight and Sound International Critics-Directors Poll of the best films ever made (an astonishing placement for such a rarely seen picture). And Tarkovsky has had this kind of impact from the beginning. His first picture, the 1962 “Ivan’s Childhood,” made when he was 30, took the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival and two other major international awards. (Tarkovsky’s six succeeding films also accumulated many international awards and prizes--though never any in the U.S.S.R. itself.)

It was the most dazzling international debut that any Soviet film maker had made since the young Eisenstein in the ‘20s. It seemed to portend a brilliant future. Yet, when Tarkovsky died last week, he was estranged from his homeland and we had seen few of his films, including his last, “The Sacrifice,” produced in Sweden. (It’s now in the middle of a run at the Nuart, to be followed by a retrospective of all his other films.) To most filmgoers, Tarkovsky is still an enigma, an outsider who died far from home, who spoke in a language seemingly understood by only a few.

It is said the movies and the theater itself are international. I don’t really think so. Art, in its best form, is a national form. It’s something that belongs in the possession of a given culture.

The quotes here are from an interview he gave me in 1983 in New York, before the opening of his film, “Nostalghia,” about a Russian scholar visiting Italy, seized with strange dreams and a longing for his country. It was while filming it that Tarkovsky requested permission to remain longer in the West--something granted his old co-worker Andrei Konchalovsky, the screenwriter of both “Ivan’s Childhood” and “Andrei Roublev.” The Soviet government--which once refused to enter Tarkovsky’s “The Mirror” in the Cannes Film Festival, though informed in advance that it was a near-certain prize winner--refused him again. Tarkovsky never returned.

He was a small man, very simply dressed (blue jeans, as I remember), with an incredibly strong presence. And though he was known as a chain smoker--a habit that probably contributed to his death from lung cancer--he remained smokeless and rock still, eyes burningly intense. He could not speak English and talked through a translator. But he treated every question with such gravity, such a refusal to be sidetracked or trivial, that the talk was almost exhausting. Not unpleasantly so: The effect was like walking through a cathedral, where every footstep echoes and reverberates.

What I’m interested in is not symbols, but images. An image has an unlimited number of possible interpretations . . . precisely as in Zen culture.

Tarkovsky’s films are about innocent souls, artists, madmen or seekers, who are lost in a world of madness, danger and pain--and yet who somehow (if only in death) came out on the other side. “Ivan’s Childhood” shows us a small boy who has adjusted completely to war’s nightmare world, but will not survive it. “Andrei Roublev” shows a great medieval icon painter trapped in another war--just as furious, just as bloody--who retreats from a black, foul life and then emerges again in a moment of almost absurd triumph.

“Solaris” is about a sentient sea in an extraterrestrial world, which breeds visions of the past and drives its explorers mad. “The Mirror” was Tarkovsky’s vision of his own past: of the father who deserted them, the mother he worshiped. “Stalker” is about three searchers--the Scientist, the Writer and their guide, the Stalker--who enter a mysterious alien zone, hollowed out by a seeming meteorite explosion, which contains, at the center of its dangerous maze, a room which supposedly grants one’s deepest desire (and, for some of its invaders, death).

Of “The Sacrifice,” he said, “I wanted to show that a man can renew his ties to life by renewing his covenant with himself and the source of his soul.”

But the man we see here is an actor retired to the country who plants Japanese trees in an alien landscape. As we watch, he seems to have a horrifying nightmare of nuclear apocalypse and the destruction of his world, of witchcraft, love and death--and he awakens to another cataclysm, fire and madness. Finally, we see the tree again, flourishing by alien waters, and Tarkovsky’s last message: a dedication “with hope and confidence” to his son.

Would his fate have been any better in this country? He always seemed to reside somewhere else, in some region of the mind, of mysticism, memory and art. One of his dreams was to shoot a film of “Hamlet” in John Ford’s Monument Valley. Can you imagine how the studio executive of today would have greeted such a suggestion? A Russian director who can’t speak English wishes to film one of the great plays of the English language in a desert in Arizona?

So Tarkovsky died as he had lived: an outsider. The current Soviet cultural thaw came too late for him, if it would have helped him at all.

He was a stranger in a strange land through most of his career. His territory was private and remote, exalted by the few. Perhaps this was inevitable. Tarkovsky was a poet. The images he created reverberate and collide, spread out translucent waves in the currents of our minds. There’s a mystery behind them. But who says every mystery should be solved, every image transparent?

Poets of the screen are often doomed to relative obscurity. But for all the internal riddles of his films, Tarkovsky’s voice is somehow remarkably clear. We can hear it as if in some nocturnal reflection: We live, we suffer, we dream.