[Reader-list] Announcements digest, Vol 1 #29 - 1 msg

Thu Mar 28 11:24:51 IST 2002

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Today's Topics:

   1. Retrospective of Andrei Tarkovsky's Films (Sagnik  Chakravartty)

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Message: 1
Date: 27 Mar 2002 13:36:18 -0000
From: "Sagnik  Chakravartty" <sagnik8 at rediffmail.com>
Reply-To: "Sagnik  Chakravartty" <sagnik8 at rediffmail.com>
To: announcements at sarai.net
Subject: [Announcements] Retrospective of Andrei Tarkovsky's Films

FILM CLUB

India International Centre

Programmes for April 2002 at 6.30 p.m.

On the occasion of the 70th birth anniversary of Andrei 
Tarkovsky,
noted Russian film - maker, India International Centre Film Club 
in
collaboration with the Russian Centre of Science & Culture, New 
Delhi
is organising a festival of films. Entry for these screenings will 
be
open to IIC Film Club members and to invitees of the 
collaborating
organisation

ANDREI TARKOVSKY

Andrei Tarkovsky, the genius of modern Russian cinema, hailed by 
Ingmar
Bergman as "the most important director of our time. 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" died an exile in 
Paris
in December 1986. Born on April 4, 1932, the son of a prominent 
Russian
poet, Tarkovsky studied film making at the All Union State
Cinematography Institute from where he graduated in 1960. His 
diploma
work The Steamroller and the Violin (Katok I Skripka, 1960), won 
a
prize at the New York Film Festival, but it was with his first 
full-
length feature film Ivan's Childhood, which won the Golden Lion at 
the
1962 Venice Film Festival, that he achieved international 
recognition.
His next film Andrei Rublev (1965), loosely based on the life of 
a
famous medieval Russian icon painter was acclaimed as a 
masterpiece for
its vivid evocation of the Middle Ages. His subsequent films 
included
Solaris (1971); The Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975) and Stalker 
(1979).After
being allowed to film the Soviet-Italian co-production 
Nostaligia
(Nostalghia, 1983) in Italy, Tarkovsky announced his intention 
to
continue living abroad. His last film The Sacrifice (1986) was
completed in Sweden.

Tarkovsky's films are distinguished by an intense moral 
seriousness and
as his book Sculpting in Time makes clear, he wanted film to be an 
art,
not of entertainment, but of moral and spiritual examination, and 
was
prepared to make extreme demands, both of himself and his 
audience.
Despite the move from Russia to the west, his films display a
continuity and development of theme and style that transcend 
differing
political systems. They explore what he saw as eternal, themes 
of
faith, love responsibility, loyalty, and personal and artistic
integrity. In his last three films in particular this is combined 
with
an increasingly strident attack on the soulless materialism of
both 'east' and 'west', their reliance on technology as a solution 
to
human problems. Tarkovsky always insisted that audiences
should 'experience' his films before attempting to 'understand' 
them.
His increasing reliance on the long take, with several shots 
lasting
six minutes, is intended to fuse the experience of  both character 
and
spectator. The most characteristic element of Tarkovsky's films,
however, is the creation of a filmic world that has the power, 
mystery,
ambiguity, and essential reality of a dream

FESTIVAL OF FILMS BY ANDREI TARKOVSKY

On 3rd April at 6.30 pm
Inauguration
Dr. Ravi Vasudevan, Director, SARAI New Media Centre will give a 
brief
introduction

Followed by

ANDREI RUBLEV
(111 min; 1966; 111 min; b/w; English sub-titles)

Tarkovsky's monumental second feature film is considered by many 
to be
the finest Soviet film of the postwar era. Andrei Rublev presents 
eight
imaginary episodes in the life of its title character, a 15th 
century
Russian orthodox monk who won renown as an icon painter. Little 
is
known about the historical Rublev; Tarkovsky renders him as a 
man
clinging desperately to his faith in God and art in a world of
overwhelming cruelty and barbarism.

On 4th April at 6.30 pm

IVAN'S CHILDHOOD (Ivanovo Detstvo)
(90 min; 1962; 35 mm; b/w; English sub-titles)

Winner of the Golden Lion, Venice International Film Festival, 
1962

Enthusiastically praised by Jean - Paul Satre as a work of 
"Socialist
surrealism", Tarkovsky's lyrical debut feature film, suggested 
that the
most important Soviet filmmaker since Eisenstein may have emerged 
- a
judgement resoundingly confirmed by Tarkovsky's subsequent work. 
The
eponymous protagonist of Ivan's Childhood is a young orphan 
whose
zealous desire to avenge the death of his parents spurs him on 
to
increasingly dangerous espionage missions behind German lines. 
Most
critics agree that Ivan's Childhood is, for Tarkovsky, a 
relatively
simpler and more conventional work, but one in which the 
director's
celebrated aesthetics, although perhaps in germinal form, is still 
very
much in evidence.

On 8th April at 6.30 pm

SOLARIS
(167 min; 1972; 35 mm; English sub-titles)

Winner of the Special Jury Prize, Cannes 1972

Based on a novel by the noted Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, 
Tarkovsky's
Solaris is often described as the Soviet 2001 - "Star Trek as 
written
by Dostoevsky". The film concerns a troubled, guilt-ridden 
scientist
sent to investigate strange occurences on a space station 
orbiting
Solaris, a mysterious planet with an intelligent ocean capable 
of
penetrating the deepest recesses of the subconscious. Confronted 
on his
arrival by the incarnation of a long-dead lover, the protagonist 
is
forced to relive the greatest moral failures if his past. The film 
is
magnificently mounted in widescreen and colour and offers a
fascinating, felicitous marriage between Tarkovsky's 
characteristic
moral/metaphysical concerns and the popular format of science 
fiction,
a genre for which the director expressed  no particular affection, 
but
to which he would return again, more obliquely, just as cerebrally 
in
Stalker and The Sacrifice

On 10th APril at 6.30 pm

THE MIRROR (Zerkalo)
(106 min; 1974; 35 mm; English sub-titles)

Tarkovsky's visually sumptuous fourth feature offers an 
idiosyncratic
history of twentieth-century Russia, in the form of a poet's 
fragmented
reflections on three generations of his family. The poems used in 
the
film were written and read by Tarkovsky's own father; 
Tarkovsky's
mother appears in a small role as the protagonist's elderly 
mother. In
a dual role, the actress Margarita Terekhova is both the 
protagonist's
wife and his mother as a younger woman. "The Mirror is 
Tarkovsky's
central film, and his most personal one, although it might be 
better
described as a transpersonal autobiography. Dreams and memories of 
an
individual protagonist (who is never seen on screen) blend with 
the
dreams and memories of the culture. The Mirror achieves something 
which
is uniquely possible in cinema but which no other film has even
attempted: it expresses the continuity of consciousness across 
time, in
a flow of images of the most profound beauty" (Anton Buchbinder)

On 11th April at 6.30 pm

THE SACRIFICE (Offret)
(115 min; 1986; 35 mm; English sub-titles)

Tarkovsky's devastating final film ."a Faust for the nuclear 
age"
(David Parkinson). was made in Sweden with several regular members 
of
Ingmar Bergman's team. Described by Tarkovsky as a meditation on 
"the
absence in our culture of room for spiritual experience," the film 
is
set on an isolated island, where Alexander, a distinguished man 
of
letters, lives in seemingly idyllic semi-retirement. The apple of 
his
eye is his young son Little Man, who represents for him the great 
hope
of the future. The future is abruptly shattered by the outbreak of 
the
unthinkable: global nuclear war. In desperation, Alexander makes 
a
private vow to God: he will renounce everything . family, 
possessions,
even speech. if somehow the world can be put right again. The 
Sacrifice
is a masterful, elegant film of great formal rigour and 
intensity.
Tarkovsky supervised its editing from his hospital bed

Film Club  members are  requested to  please show  their 
membership
cards at the gates. Entry for these screenings is restricted to 
members
of the IIC Film Club

Please note:

Single Membership - Entry valid for 1 person
Double Membership - Entry valid for 2 persons
Associate Membership  - Entry valid for 2 persons

RENEWAL OF MEMBERSHIP
Circular to all IIC Film Club members

Film Club members are requested to renew their membership 
subscription
for the period 1st April 2002 to 31st March 2003. The membership 
fees
are as follows:

Double(applicable to IIC Members) = Rs.200/-
Single(applicable to IIC Members) = Rs.125/-
Associate (applicable to non-members)= Rs.350/-

Membership fees are payable by cash or cheque (drawn in favour of 
INDIA
INTERNATIONAL CENTRE). Membership cards maybe collected from the
Programme Office.

*IIC MEMBERS WHO HAVE ALREADY CLEARED THEIR FILM CLUB RENEWAL 
FEES
ALONG WITH THE MAIN IIC MEMBERSHIP RENEWALS ARE REQUESTED TO 
COLLECT
THEIR FILM CLUB MEMBERSHIP CARDS FROM THE PROGRAMME OFFICE

L.S.Tochhawng
Assistant Programme Officer
40, Max Mueller Marg, New Delhi 110003
Telephone: 461 9431
Fax: 462 7751

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