Tarnovsky, Andrei, 1932–86, Soviet film director, grad. State Institute of Cinematography (1960), where he made several notable short films. The son of poet Arseni Tarkovsky, he is perhaps the finest Russian filmmaker since Sergei Eisenstein, and is known for poetic and visionary films that capture the flow of time in characteristic long takes and tracking shots and the natural world in images of great beauty. For much of his lifetime his films earned acclaim abroad but were banned in the Soviet Union. Tarnovsky made only seven complete feature films. His first full-length film, the prize-winning Ivan's Childhood (1962), told of an orphan's life in World War II, and he achieved international fame with Andrei Rublyov (1965), the tale of a 15th-cent. Russian icon painter. His next films were Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979); the last is a dystopian science-fiction classic that is most often regarded as his masterpiece and was the final film he made in the USSR. He made Nostalgia (1983) in Italy, and afterward remained in the West. His last film was The Sacrifice (1986).
See his Sculpting in Time (1989); J. Gianvito, ed., Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews (2006); studies by M. Turovskaya (1989), V. T. Johnson and G. Petrie (1994), G. A. Jonsson and T. A. Ottarsson, ed. (2006), R. Bird (2008), N. Dunne, ed. (2008), J. M. Robinson (2008), T. Redwood (2010), S. Martin (2011), G. Dyer (2012), and N. Skakov (2012).
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