Andrei Tarkovsky
Production: © LSDF - Idéale Audience - Bereg - EDV 1333
Director(s): Alexander Sokurov
Available versions: ru
The fate of the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, crushed by History.
Filmmaker Alexander Sokourov portrays the fate of an artist crushed by History and consumed by the fire raging within him, Andrei Tarkovsky. Elégie de Moscou (Moscow Elegy) belongs to a series of Elegies produced by a documentary production company in Saint Petersburg with which Sokourov has often collaborated. This time, he dedicates his talent to his illustrious colleague Tarkovsky, overtaken by an untimely death at the age of 54 after he had only made eight films, including masterpieces such as Solaris, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice, his last opus.
Sokourov films the house where the filmmaker was born in 1932, his father, a great poet, his exile in 1982, his funeral in Paris in 1986 to the accompaniment of a Suite by Bach played in front of the orthodox church in Rue Daru by Rostropovich, but above all he focuses on revealing Andrei Tarkovsky to us: Tarkovsky talking about film directing, Tarkovsky directing The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky just before his death… All of this along with images from the filmmaker’s period but which now seems so far in the past: the huge processions at the time of Brezhnev’s death, the streets of Moscow or Leningrad, the Soviet countryside…
