JAN 6-7, 9, 11-16; FEB 3-5, 18-19

"Tarkovsky is for me 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." INGMAR BERGMAN

35mm PRINTS ► The seven features “sculpted in time” by Russian master and mystic Andrei Tarkovsky in a career cut short by lung cancer in 1986 (Tarkovsky was 54) are among the most influential, acclaimed, audacious, and awe-inspiring film works to emerge from postwar Europe. Meditative, metaphysical, uncommonly lyrical, remarkably textured, and incomparably visual, Tarkovsky’s is a cinema of moral and spiritual questing, of powerful apocalyptic poetry, of tour-de-force long takes and tracking shots, of expressive monochrome and muted colour, of unforgettable images and dreamlike landscapes. Steeped in Eastern Orthodox mysticism, abounding in elemental symbolism, sometimes venturing forth into hauntingly enigmatic science fiction, Tarkovsky’s films conjure up a hermetic, hallucinatory world that often speaks, forcefully, resonantly, mysteriously, more directly to the subconscious than to the rational mind. The result is cinema of the rarest order: transcendent, transfixing and transformative, rigorous and redemptive, utterly singular. Tarkovsky’s own reflections on art, the cinema, and his body of work were published in a 1986 book entitled, in English, Sculpting in Time.

This retrospective showcases six of the seven feature films made by this visionary artist. The seventh, 1979’s Stalker, was presented, in a 35mm print imported from Europe, at Pacific Cinémathèque in September. The retrospective also offers an opportunity to see Tarkovsky’s 1972 masterpiece Solaris paired with American director Steven Soderbergh's admirable 2002 remake.