---
name: "Andrei Tarkovsky"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/andrei-tarkovsky"
roles: ["Director","Production designer","Screenwriter"]
born: "4 April 1932"
died: "29 December 1986"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
updated: "2026-09-16T10:39:28.478873+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Andrei Tarkovsky

Director and production designer. Born 4 April 1932 in Zavrazhye, USSR. Died 29 December 1986.

## Details

- **Work:** Director, Production designer, Screenwriter
- **Born:** 4 April 1932, Zavrazhye, USSR
- **Died:** 29 December 1986
- **Also known as:** Andrei Tarkovskiy, Andrej Tarkovskij, Andrei Tarkovski, 安德烈·塔尔科夫斯基, أندري تاركوفسكي, アンドレイ・タルコフスキー, 안드레이 타르콥스키, Andrei Tarkovskij, Andrey Arsenyevich Tarkovsky, Andrey A. Tarkovsky, Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский, Andrey Tarkovsky

## Fi1m on Andrei Tarkovsky

> Andrei Tarkovsky lets landscapes and faces hold our attention long enough to become unsettling. We warmly recommend his cinema, especially *Stalker*, though the philosophical talk can grow heavy when the images have already given us enough to consider.

The green landscape in *Stalker* (1979) ought to be a relief after the ashen world outside the Zone. Instead, Tarkovsky gives us time to look for something that might explain why the place troubles us. A guide takes people into it, and their journey raises questions about faith and the difficulty of knowing what they want. We felt uneasy watching these men search for reassurance in surroundings that offered so little. The film's patience makes their need for answers affecting, even when the conversation becomes hard going.

From his first feature, *Ivan's Childhood* (1962), Tarkovsky built a body of work concerned with memory, childhood and time. Science fiction gave him a way to examine memory and desire in *Solaris* (1972), before *Mirror* (1975) brought personal memory into a non-linear account of family life. That movement between the imagined and the remembered matters more to his films than a tidy sequence of events. After *Stalker*, he made *Nostalghia* (1983) in Italy and *The Sacrifice* (1986) in Sweden. Homesickness comes to the foreground in *Nostalghia*, a subject well suited to a director so absorbed by memory.

In *Stalker*, the cinematography credited to Leonid Kalashnikov and Aleksandr Knyazhinsky uses the change in colour to make us inspect the landscape more closely. Tarkovsky's production design gives that landscape enough prominence for the searching to matter. His long takes ask us to stay with faces and places beyond the point at which another film might have supplied an explanation. The water, rain and reflections that recur across his work are worth watching in themselves; trying to decode everything can get in the way of looking.

The weakness is the talk, which sometimes grows heavier than the questions require. *Stalker* is strongest when the men's faces suggest how much their convictions matter to them, rather than when they try to explain those convictions. Tarkovsky keeps their need to believe close enough for us to care. That is why the slowness seldom feels like an empty demand on our attention. Start with *Stalker*, and allow it an evening without interruptions.

## Biography

Andrei Tarkovsky was a Soviet film director and screenwriter. He was born on 4 April 1932 in Zavrazhye and died on 29 December 1986 in Paris.

He trained at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow. His first feature, *Ivan's Childhood* (1962), won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. He directed *Andrei Rublev* (1966), *Solaris* (1972), *Mirror* (1975) and *Stalker* (1979), on which he also received a screenplay credit.

Later films include *Nostalgia* (1983), made in Italy, and *The Sacrifice* (1986), made in Sweden. He received awards at Cannes and was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize.

*Sources: imdb.com, en.wikipedia.org, sensesofcinema.com, encyclopedia.com, ru.wikipedia.org.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *Stalker* (1979), Fi1m 86, Director, Production design, Screenplay — [page](https://film.one/film/stalker.md)

## Also known for

- *Solaris* (1972), Screenplay, Director
- *Mirror* (1975), Writer, Director
- *Andrei Rublev* (1966), Director, Writer
- *Ivan's Childhood* (1962), Director, Screenplay
- *The Sacrifice* (1986), Director, Screenplay
- *Nostalgia* (1983), Director, Screenplay
- *The Steamroller and the Violin* (1961), Director, Writer
- *The Killers* (1956), Director, Scenario Writer

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/andrei-tarkovsky