Andrei Tarkovsky would have turned 80 years old on Wednesday and the Tumblr and Twitterverses were buzzing with tributes to the Russian grand master. My favorite was the concise observation by one Raúl Pedraz [Update: actually a quote from Chris Marker’s One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich] that Tarkovsky was the only filmmaker whose entire work lies between two children and two trees.
It’s a couple of days late but I wanted to offer my own tribute to one of my very favorite filmmakers (Mirror being the film that I always hold up as my favorite film of all time). It is very hard to find Tarkovsky posters that have not been seen before so I was happy to stumble upon this rare East German poster for Tarkovsky’s first feature, Ivan’s Childhood, featuring, happily, a boy and a tree.
[Update: Thanks to Criterion I just discovered that, by happy coincidence, Ivan’s Childhood had its world premiere in Moscow exactly 50 years ago today!]
Tarkovsky is one filmmaker for whom I’d gladly have posters that simply feature gorgeous images from his film (of which there are an unlimited supply) but there are so many terrific illustrated posters that I thought I’d just feature my favorite for each film here, in chronological order.
I was surprised to even find a poster for Tarkovsky’s 1961 45-minute diploma film The Steamroller and the Violin. This rather crude but likeable Polish poster (its title translates as “Little Dreamer”) is by Jerzy Haas.
The stunning Czech poster for Andrei Rublev (1966) is by Karel Teissig (1925-2000):
Of all of Tarkovsky’s films, Solaris (1972) has inspired the best poster design. I really could not choose between (clockwise from top left) the Polish (by Andrzej Bertrandt), Italian (by Renato Casaro), Czech and French designs. So I present them all.
The Polish poster for Mirror (1974) is the one I’m least sure of. It certainly doesn’t do my favorite film of all time justice and I doubt I’d even recognize it as a poster for Mirror at first glance, but sadly there isn’t much competition, most of the other posters being rather slapdash photo montages. And it’s a striking illustration, by Marek Ploza-Dolinski , in its own right.
One of the best known of all Tarkovsky posters is the French illustration for Stalker (1979) by the great Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon (1934-2005). I’m also partial to the much starker Russian poster, and the Folon design almost makes Stalker look a little cute, but it has the requisite magic and mystery.
The dramatic French grande for Nostalghia (1983) gives Tarkovsky a very 80s flair with its script title treatment.
And finally, though I probably should have ended this piece with one of the many posters for The Sacrifice (1986) that simply feature Tarkovsky’s final image of the tree and the boy, I have to go with the superb Russian illustration (almost an ideogram of the film) by Igor Maistrovsky.
Thanks to Posteritati for the Sacrifice poster (which they have for sale along with a number of these and other Tarkovsky posters). And if you have favorite Tarkovsky posters that I didn’t include here, please tell me about them in the comments below. The indispensable Tarkovsky website Nostalghia.com has a very comprehensive collection of posters, though unfortunately not in very high quality scans.