Cinema & Movies: Russia

[Under development: 27 May 2005]

Although my father found Stalker to be the most boring movie he ever watched, it ranks as one of my all time greatest movies. Tarkovsky is intense and passionate about seeing the spiritual in the everyday.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return recently won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. I bought it on DVD. It was wonderful to watch a movie that lives and breathes outside the iron lung of the Hollywood formula. It is a brooding, dark and disturbing film. What does it mean? It both demands and evades interpretation. Feelings, emotions and atmosphere are elevated, not in the explicit, and often crass, way that Hollywood movies demands feelings or horror, terror, anger, lust, patriotism, as though feelings evoked by the flick of a switch are of the same quality as feelings that arise from unknown depths, but something less mechanical, more human; swirling and uncertain. That is what I love about some Russian cinema.

Title	Comment	Cinema	VHS
Stalker	Director: Andrei Tarkovsky	ü	ü
Mirror	Director: Andrei Tarkovsky	ü	ü
Andrei Rublev	Director: Andrei Tarkovsky	ü
Solaris	Director: Andrei Tarkovsky		ü
Nostalgia	Director: Andrei Tarkovsky	ü	ü
The Sacrifice	Director: Andrei Tarkovsky	ü
Idi i smotri (Come and See)	Director: Elem Klimov	ü
Proshchaniye s Matyoroj (Farewell)	Director: Elem Klimov	ü
Battleship Potemkin	Director: Eisenstein	ü

p.g.h@btinternet.com

Culture: sitemap

Peter Hughes: Introduction