Article18th August, 2026 / film & tv
Tarkovsky
I visited Broadway Cinema twice this weekend to see restorations of The Sacrifice and Nostalghia, two films by my favourite director, Andrei Tarkovsky.
Somehow, despite going to art school, sitting through plenty of film discussion, having an indie cinema on my doorstep, and reading big newspapers, nobody ever told me about Andrei Tarkovsky. And this is a director whose Andrei Rublev (1966) was voted best arthouse film of all time.
Thankfully, lots of good things seem to be finding their way to me at this point in my life—things that connect, inform and influence what I’m making.
Still, I’m wary of recommending Tarkovsky’s films, because they’re probably the most challenging films I’ve seen outside an art gallery. They’re often extremely slow, with long takes that keep going well past the point where you crave a cut. There is narrative, but it’s usually half-hidden, layered, ambiguous, or only starts to make sense after repeated viewings. Solaris (1972) is the one people are most likely to have seen, but even that relatively approachable sci-fi film is doing several different things beneath the surface. David Nibloe, who writes brilliant deep-dives about David Sylvian’s influences and collaborations at Sylvian Vista, sums it up neatly:
We are so used to movies being served to us as fast-moving entertainment in twenty-first century culture; Tarkovsky’s work might as well be in a different medium altogether. His is cinema as art. He saw a parallel between the cinematographer and the poet, crafting many layers of significance for us to experience, appreciate and reflect upon. Events develop slowly, observed through long and subtly moving single camera shots. [The Sacrifice is] not an easy film to view, and yet at the same time it’s captivating.
I discovered Tarkovsky through Ryuichi Sakamoto: first via the documentary Coda, where Sakamoto talks about the films with such feeling, over stunning shots from Solaris; then because of how Tarkovsky seems to run through Async and his later work. Sakamoto described the films as poetic, musical constructions of image, sound, movement, life, death and memory. What pulled me in was the idea of Tarkovsky as a sound artist.
Earlier this year, a few hours with Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time in Tokyo’s Sakamoto Library—which I wrote about privately and shared with RSS subscribers, and which will also appear in a publication soon—made the connection feel less like an influence to note and more like a door opening. Since then, I’ve bought his seven films and rewatched them multiple times, appreciating and understanding more with each viewing. I also bought my own copy of Sculpting in Time and read it in full. And, because I can’t afford a rare copy of the Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids book, I grabbed a copy of the widely available Films, Stills, Polaroids & Writings. The Polaroids in particular are wonderful, each like a miniature movie, or a lost scene from one of the films.
The Sacrifice is Tarkovsky’s final film, and it starts in a recognisable domestic world: a family, a house, a birthday, a meal outside in the summer air. But even then, it feels eerie—the house standing alone in a strange marshy landscape. Soon, the possibility of nuclear catastrophe arrives, and the ordinary home slowly becomes the place where a private act of faith might save the world. Around that, the film builds a strange pressure from very familiar things: a model house, a map, an old story about a tree, doorways and escape routes, curious conversations, strange weather, and, eventually, fire. The film is basically asking one simple question: if you genuinely believed one act of surrender might save the people you love, what would you be willing to give up?
Nostalghia (often mistranscribed as “Nostalgia”) is Tarkovsky’s 1983 film about a particular kind of homesickness: a Russian ache for home, memory and belonging, but one that’s still easy to recognise, and a long way from the cosy, fuzzy Polaroid kind of nostalgia we usually talk about. It follows a Russian writer travelling through Italy who seems unable to fully live in the country around him, because Russia, memory, family, faith and loss are all weighing on him. Tarkovsky presses that feeling into damp rooms, fog, ruins, dogs, pools and a long, tense candle scene, where one small flame has to be carried across a drained pool without going out. It’s a simple, almost absurd act, but it holds the whole film. It’s about trying to keep something fragile and meaningful alive in a world that doesn’t care.
Nostalghia is the film of his that sits inside me the most. I think about it all the time. Tarkovsky’s own exile is soaked into the pacing, the shots, the mist, the steam, the water, the between-worlds feeling, the eeriness of it all. His favourite visual devices like weather, doorways and dogs feel at their most instructive here, and it’s the film that best uses landscape not as scenery, but as something internal, remembered and half-buried. The scene where the camera zooms slowly into mounds of wet sludge inside Domenico’s house, revealing the serene valley held inside it, takes my breath away.
Still, every Tarkovsky film matters to me now: I adore Mirror (1975), the abstract collage that loosely traces his life, and Stalker (1979), the quietly sci-fi exploration of the eerie Zone, a pressurised hinterland where devotion, cynicism and rationalism are tested. And then there’s Andrei Rublev, mentioned earlier, a black-and-white journey through medieval Russia with its incredible payoff in glorious colour.
I can’t think of another director who lets us spend so much time just looking—at landscapes, faces, still lifes, paintings—or who draws us so completely into weather, water, mud and fire.
Falling in love with Tarkovsky’s films has made me push open a few previously closed doors: from periods of art that had never really spoken to me, to a greater sensitivity to the spiritual and the importance of faith—I’m no closer to joining an organised religion, but maybe I’m developing a wider sense of the spiritual. It’s also helped me return to Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa with a better understanding, and to try incredible (and sometimes very challenging) films that use similar devices, such as Dreyer’s Ordet, Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, and Angelopoulos’ outstanding Landscape in the Mist.
Above all, Tarkovsky is helping me find what my own work most needs, particularly the album, encouraging me to sharpen my motifs and giving me the confidence to hold some things back. I’ll come back to the quote I used in the Sakamoto Library article, because it says everything:
All creative work strives for simplicity, perfectly simple expression. The most painful part of creative work is finding the shortest path between what you want to say or express and its ultimate reproduction in the finished image. The struggle for simplicity is the painful search for a form adequate to the truth you have grasped.
And so, not for the first time, I’m grateful to Sakamoto for showing me the way.
