Film Forum

Russia/Italy, 1983
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring Oleg Yankovsky, Erland Josephson, Domiziana Giordano
Screenplay by Andrei Tarkovsky, Tonino Guerra
Cinematography by Giuseppe Lanci
In Italian and Russian with English subtitles
Approx. 125 mins. 4K DCP restoration

In Tarkovsky’s first film made outside the USSR, a Russian expatriate wanders wintry Italian landscapes while returning in memory to his homeland, as an inspired madman finds the fate of the world hanging on a candle’s flight across a dry pool (one of cinema’s most agonizingly suspenseful sequences). A wide range of themes and obsessions all come together in an overwhelming final shot that is upon you before you realize it. “Not much happens, and everything does, all in Tarkovsky’s stately, long-take style, where each shot gives the shadows time to spread and deepen… There are visions, memories, riddles, curious encounters, and a slow crescendo of spiritual longing. There’s much sublimity and shocking acts that rupture the stillness, and then one of cinema’s great endings.” – Alan Scherstuhl, The Village Voice

Restored in 4K in by CSC — Cineteca Nazionale, in collaboration with RAI Cinema at Augustus Color laboratory, from the original negatives and soundtrack preserved at RAI Cinema.

A KINO LORBER RELEASE

Reviews

“Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language.”
– Ingmar Bergman

“A hauntingly beautiful film.”
– David Parkinson, Empire Magazine

“Just as Tarkovsky used deep space to explore psychological space in SOLARIS, here, he's using an estranging, sepia-toned Tuscany to express the dimensions of the soul.”
– Scott Tobias, The Dissolve

"Pure meteorology, opening with a panoramic view of a granular mist rising from and rolling across a Tuscan landscape in a shot long enough for you to marvel at the artist’s seeming capacity to direct the weather."
– J. Hoberman