Compelling Films Explore Worlds of Tarkovsky

The Nuart’s “The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky” celebrates the work of the greatest Russian filmmaker since Sergei Eisenstein.

Tarkovsky was one of the most demanding and most uncompromising (aesthetically as well as politically) filmmakers of the modern cinema. His films run long and are virtually devoid of conventional exposition. Yet the worlds in which Tarkovsky plunges us become utterly compelling and we emerge feeling that we have experienced a revelation, no matter how shrouded in ambiguity.

The title of Tarkovsky’s enigmatic “The Mirror” (1974) (Friday and Saturday) could easily refer to art itself, in its ancient function of holding up a reflection to nature so that we may see ourselves in it.

With Tarkovsky, however, there’s always a desire to see beyond this world into others--in this instance, the past, evoked through memory, imagination and dreams. Tarkovsky shifts between black and white and color, between past and present, in so intensely a personal way it becomes beside the point--and also futile--to try to make distinctions; it’s best to go with the film’s gorgeous flow, connecting with it emotionally rather than rationally.

“The Mirror” is above all an expression of longing for the past, specifically for a mother’s love and a return to a Garden of Eden-like existence. But this is also a film with a double vision: While expressing that childhood desire for security that seems to remain with us always, it perceives its people from an adult perspective, and for all its luminosity, some of its memories are fear-laden and tragic.

At the beginning “The Stalker” (1980, Friday and Saturday) has the look of shadowy steel engravings and is set in a bleak industrial city in Estonia. Its title character (Alexander Kaidanovsky) is an intense man whose mission in life is to conduct, at great risk and small pay, people into the Zone, a heavily guarded, forbidden area that 20 years earlier had been struck by a meteorite or possibly a UFO. It is said that nature there has been mysteriously transformed; its flowers supposedly no longer smell. But the abandoned region attracts visitors because in it is a room in which one’s wishes may be granted.

Nothing is ever what it seems at first in a Tarkovsky film. At the beginning, the Zone would seem to symbolize the Free World, but it becomes increasingly clear that Tarkovsky has lots more in mind. The Stalker gradually evolves from a figure of seeming superstition--and even paranoia--to a figure of mysticism.

“Andre Rublev” (Sunday and Monday), made between 1964 and 1967, is a stunning one-of-a-kind masterpiece, an epic of stark, impassioned grandeur and astonishing, almost hallucinatory imagery that traces the spiritual odyssey of an artist-monk. Little is known of him except for what remains of his work, most notably his contributions to the frescoes in Moscow’s Cathedral of Annunciation. Screening with it is Tarkovsky’s seldom-seen debut feature, “Ivan’s Childhood,” (1962) in which World War II is experienced through a 12-year-old boy.

Made in Italy in 1983, “Nostalghia” (Tuesday-next Thursday), is another of Tarkovsky’s compelling visual tours de force. It’s about a Russian poet (Oleg Yankovsky) who has come to Tuscany to research the life of 18th century Russian composer Pavel Sinovsky. The composer had lived in Tuscany but eventually decided that he would rather live as a slave in Russia than remain free abroad, even though he became an alcoholic and eventually committed suicide after returning. Yankovsky is already in the throes of “nostalghia” himself, the sepia images of his country home and of his wife in Russia erasing from time to time our--and his--view of the gorgeous Tuscan countryside.

Near the beginning of “The Sacrificea” (Tuesday-next Thursday), Tarkovsky’s great meditation on the imperiled future of humanity, a middle-aged man (Josephson), an intellectual overcome by a sense of despair and futility, is planting a tree by the sea, telling his small, mute son that if he waters it every day at the same time, the world will change. The 1986 film ends with a shot of the boy carefully watering the fragile sapling.

These two sequences bracket Tarkovsky’s finest work. It is suffused with his characteristic longing for maternal love and for communion with God and nature while it evokes the specter of nuclear holocaust. No other filmmaker has so powerfully evoked a world of the spirit existing beyond surface appearances. In doing so, Tarkovsky created some of the most piercingly beautiful images ever captured on film. No director could wish for a more splendid valedictory than “The Sacrifice.” (310) 488-6379.