Andrei Tarkovsky

The Pocket Essentials: Film

by Sean Martin

Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. This book looks at the most celebrated Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein, director of the legendary Solaris —the "Soviet 2001"—and Andrei Rublev, widely regarded as being one of the greatest films of all time. Sean Martin considers the whole of Tarkovsky's oeuvre, starting with the classic student film The Steamroller and The Violin and working across his full-length films to later stage works and writings, paintings, and photographs.

Genres: Film, Art, History, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

Author of bestsellers The Knights Templar: The History & Myths of the Legendary Military Order, The Gnostics: The First Christian Heretics and The Cathars: The Rise & Fall of the Great Heresy. My new book, A Short History of Disease, will be published in June 2015.

Reviews

[Braeden]

Read the chapter on Solaris for a research paper

[Pedram · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very concise review of Tarkovsky's life and career. The major part of the book includes plots of his 7 major movies plus a brief history for each project. The opening chapter concentrates on common themes and methods in Tarkovsky's cinema. Imminent armageddon and prophecies,the scared insane,mothers/wives,children and nature are among discussed issues. In summary it's a very insightful and readable book. Highly suggested to those who have an ardent interest in cinematography not cinema per se!

[Chant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasantly surprised by a small book! One often finds these survey books on such-n-such subjects to be rather lacking; however, with this book? It provides a fairly brief introduction to Tarkovsky's films with a brief summary of each film, which might be considered sacrilegious to Tarkovsky! But one tends to forget that most of us cannot block out 3-hour chunks of time to dedicate to a rewatching of whatever Tarkovsky film you're trying to "get".

Concise, to the point, and certainly provides just enough context on why Solaris and Stalker were adapted the way they were, among more illuminating information.

[Jonathon Dabell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Kamera series of film books are pretty good "cinema-lite" reads, although in this case the subject (Russian film-maker extraordinaire Andrei Tarkovsky) is hardly the kind of director you would describe as "lite". His films are at once poetic, beautiful-looking, deeply philosophical and extremely challenging to watch. No doubt about it, Tarkovsky is a genius, but you have to work hard to enjoy his films.
Sean Martin makes a creditable stab at analysing, explaining and interpreting Tarkovsky's films, as well as providing a wealth of other fascinating information. He admits himself that it's better to experience Tarkovsky for yourself, rather than reading about it or, worse still, looking up analyses of the director's work. Nevertheless, the book will make you seek out (or, perhaps, return to) the films and look at them from a different persepctive.
The weakest aspect of the book is Martin's plot synopses of each film, which are clunkily written. In all the other sections, he writes engrossingly about his subject and the book is eminently readable. A worthy look at one of the world's greatest (and most unheralded) movie-makers.