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Tarkovsky's films online for free

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735 pointsbookofjoe176 comments

IMHO, if you’ll be watching your first Tarkovsky film start with Stalker, which is how my girlfriend (now wife of 27 years), introduced me to him many years ago. I was very much a Fellini person, and the Bergman-Tarkovsky school seemed cryptic (at best) at the time. When finished, ask yourself (1) if you would have gone into the room and (2) what the dreamlike sequences with Stalker’s son meant.

Second one should be Solaris, if you’re into SciFi or The Mirror if you’re not of if you’d like a challenge. I think The Mirror is the better movie, the woman (stand in for T’s mom) looking at the wheat field (T had these specifically planted for the film!) haunts me to this day.

I personally couldn’t relate to The Sacrifice, perhaps his most personal film. His earlier films (Ivan and Rublev) I could not watch at all.

To be a genius artist like him in the Soviet Union meant privileges unheard for art film directors in Europe (let alone US), eg see the wheat field thing above. It also meant you’re at the mercy of the “masses”. I had read an article once that included a comment for The Mirror from a regular filmgoer, saying after 30mins it caused such a headache! The funding was based on such feedback and the movie was labeled as elitist (it is) which greatly impacted his career. It’s infuriating to think T lost time due to such petty interference (OTOH, I could only finish the film on my third try, falling asleep in first two attempts! So she had a point)

>> Stalker’s son

Um, daughter.

You’re absolutely right, called Martyshka (little monkey) same as in the book. As I was searching for material on her on Google I came across this interesting article: https://przekroj.pl/en/society/the-stalkers-daughter-renata-...

Stalker is a beautiful movie but perhaps not the easiest one to watch, especially if you are not used to 10 min long shots of nature (e.g., water in a stream). Possibly Solaris, which you recommend too, would be an easier movie to watch first.

I've tried twice now to watch Solaris and fell asleep both times - someone let me know if it's worth it! I've seen every other Tarkovsky film and love his work, this one just felt particularly difficult for me.

It's worth it.

You have to approach the movie like sitting down with a good book. Make a day around it! Brew some tea/coffee ahead of time, watch it when you are refreshed and can soak it in. And not just the plot.. but the art of what’s on the screen; how it’s shot. You’ll be rewarded in the end.

I liked Solaris well enough, but in the end it was far less interesting than say the better Star Trek episodes.

When I rewatch Solaris I always skip the first 30 minutes or so (the part on Earth). Makes it a much easier and less slow watch!

The first time I watched it, I fell asleep part way through and woke up at the end. But then I decided I really wanted to watch it, so I immediately restarted it and and stayed awake and LOVED it. I think it's worth it.

Same. Definitely worth watching.

You have to allow yourself to be immersed in it. It's a slower pace than commercial film makers adopt, but the atmosphere builds.

The Mirror is one of my favourite films but I always fall asleep 2-3 times while watching it!

I find it so relaxing that I’ve just learnt to enjoy the whole experience and enjoy the dozing as part of the experience of watching the film.

Perhaps the dreamy effect is inducing a magic like experience as if we as a viewer are seeing through a dream

Great to hear that, I'll plan to watch it on those nights that I need to sleep but my brain keep having the best idea ever

The book is excellent, but I also find that both adaptations drag a bit and can be a boring watch.

You could — at the risk of being burned at the stake by purists — try the other one [0] which is faster paced but touches on the same ideas. Then if you’re really intrigued by that, go back to the original.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(2002_film)

I found the 2002 Solaris very moving and would recommend it to others. (And, in case there has been some burning at the stake, I am up-voting your comment.)

I had to split it up into three viewing sessions, but I thought it was worth it.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

Or mimoids.

Instead of 10 minute long nature shots, Solaris has a 10 minute long car ride on Tokyo freeways

It's Moskow, not Tokyo!

It was filmed in Tokyo, but is possibly supposed to depict a futuristic Moscow.

That is one of my favorite scenes ever, and I think of it whenever I’m in a big freeway system or tunnel.

But yeah probably not easy if you’re not already fairly deep into art-house films.

It’s only five minutes.

Stalker is what happens when Russians remake The Wizard of Oz.

>His earlier films (Ivan and Rublev) I could not watch at all.

Those also require a familiarity and understanding of the relevant culture of those places.

> ...eg see the wheat field thing above

Not the same but it made me think of Akira Kurosawa spends 12 hours on a single shot...only to cut it[0]

[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/criterion/comments/pamqsd/akira_kur...

As a modern American, I confess I start to go to sleep after the first 6 or 8 hours of shots like that

FWIW Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala is also available for download: https://youtu.be/sFaL03SKEzE

Andrei Rublev is by far his best film in my opinion.

The version on youtube is 20.48GiB(!) so I hope it's the best possible quality.

  Input #0, matroska,webm:
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    Duration: 03:02:38.36, start: -0.007000, bitrate: 11990 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: vp9 (Profile 0), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 3840x2160, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 24 fps, 24 tbr, 1k tbn (default)
      Metadata:
        DURATION        : 03:02:38.333000000
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      Metadata:
        DURATION        : 03:02:38.361000000

The wind in the field scene is mesmerizing, one of my favourites as well.

Same here. That was the gateway film for me. It reminds me of the Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance).

Annihilation is pretty clearly "heavily influenced" by Stalker.

I consider myself a person who really loves and appreciates film, but I could not parse Stalker. It’s clearly dense with meaning and subtext, but I think I had too much going on in my head when I was watching it to appreciate what was going on.

My personal recommendation for a Tarkovsky's first is his diploma film The Steamroller and the Violin (1960, 46 min, co-written with Andrei Konchalovsky). It was surprisingly watchable [for me] and I wish I had watched it first myself before I was exposed to the Mirror when I was 16.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steamroller_and_the_Violin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7jiwaPYslA

> (1) if you would have gone into the room and (2) what the dreamlike sequences with Stalker’s son meant

(3) did the stalker / Tarkovski just bring you to the room

>To be a genius artist like him in the Soviet Union meant privileges unheard for art film directors in Europe (let alone US), eg see the wheat field thing above. It also meant you’re at the mercy of the “masses”.

It also meant being at the mercy and whims of the Communist party. Like Polish genius director Andrzej Żuławski, who filmed almost his entire magnum opus "On the Silver Globe," only to have the Communist government cancel the project and order the destruction of what was filmed.

The greatest science fiction movie never made. I get goosebumps every single time I watch these trailers:

https://youtu.be/zBFRiSlcBAg

https://youtu.be/HFf5BGNpnJ0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Silver_Globe_(film)

Żuławski is amazing! He manages to strike the right balance between abstraction and action; between soulful Slavic opaqueness and, well, viewers wanting to understand what's happening on the screen without having to read the characters' minds through an inverted Christology or some such implied cultural context.

Żuławski's movies contain enough mystery to thrill the imagination, yet it is crystal clear that they are telling a particular story, with an intended authorial meaning, the further implications of which we are free to ponder - not simply painting a vast, inhospitable landscape for us to project our own meaning onto, like Tarkovsky does, or many West European filmmakers like Bunuel or the aforementioned Bergman.

Now I want to get me a projector and organize a pirate Żuławski marathon in a warehouse, culminating with a screening of On the Silver Globe, once someone's brought a decent pusher to the party and the shit has started to kick in... Eh, if only my city's avant-garde art scene and I hadn't recognized each other for the pretentious good-for-nothing wankers that we are. More effectual personalities can be found among the wannabe gangsters, for fuck's sake - but those lives are little movies in their own right, and avant-garde cinema's got nothing on them.

Unfortunately, without an overt repressive apparatus for people to struggle against, it seems their finest qualities end up going down the drain a little bit. Creative people end up inventing novel schemes for making money out of ever more primitive illusions, instead of dedicating their brain cells to creating those increasingly elaborate visions that kept our forefathers struggling onward with dignity against inhuman conditions. Which leads us to the big question: if the Communist authoritarian project was a necessary condition to get all these fascinating, singular (anti-/post-)Communist works of art... was it worth the millions of lives sacrificed or devastated?

It's coming out on Blu-ray this year: https://eurekavideo.co.uk/movie/andrzej-zulawski-three-films...

A Japanese release already exists (JP subs only): https://www.amazon.co.jp/On-the-Silver-Globe-Blu-ray/dp/B077...

It's also on torrents and English subtitles should exist (if they are needed at all)

There is an older DVD release (2007?) from before the remaster, which I’ve heard has bad English subtitles. Not sure what you’ll get via torrents.

It is obvious that you may get the Awesome Edition via torrents.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/

> what the dreamlike sequences with Stalker’s son meant

I though he had a daughter, am I misremembering?

Interesting tidbit, after a year of filming scenes the prints were damaged in processing and were unusable. [1] He had to completely (almost) reshoot the film a second time. I always wondered about the difference between the original shoot and the reshoot, what no one got to see.

[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/trivia

stalker is based on the beautiful book ‘roadside picnic’ iirc. just a lovely, lovely read.

It might help new viewers to understand that Tarkovsky viewed film as art, not entertainment. As such, he purposely avoided strong narratives or plots, instead focusing on poetry, mood, and time.

From the book "Sculpting in Time" by Tarkovsky himself: "I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful and poetic of art forms. Certainly I am more at home with them than with traditional theatrical writing which links images through the linear, rigidly logical development of the plot. That sort of fussily correct way of linking events usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience to some abstract notion of order. And even when this is not so, even when the plot is governed by the characters, one finds that the links which hold it together rest on a facile interpretation of life's complexities."

>He purposely avoided strong narratives or plots, instead focusing on poetry, mood, and time.

Somewhat similar to Terrence Malick in that way (but I'd say Malick is much more approachable).

I think we have to agree to disagree; I found The Tree of Life (the only Malick movie I've managed to finish) to be a boring, incomprehensible mess of a movie, while Solaris and Stalker have been, in my opinion, somewhat interesting things.

I need to watch Solaris and Stalker.

Tree of Life was one of my favorite film experiences ever, but I wouldn’t care to watch it again.

I’m curious - why did you feel like Tree of Life was incomprehensible?

If I'm being 100% honest, I haven't seen the movie in more than a decade and I barely remember it, outside of the general "not liking it" feeling.

If it shows up on Netflix or something I might give it another go; it's not rare for me to like a movie more on a second viewing.

Realistically, that movie is not going to be on Netflix any time in the next decade

The Thin Red Line is one of my top films, and I walked out of The Tree of Life. Only afterwards did I realize they were directed by the same guy. And then this spring I saw A Hidden Life. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. I plan to rewatch The Tree of Life to see if I like it better than first time. Perhaps I was not in the mood for that type of movie that particular evening.

Totally in agreement. The Thin Red Line is possibly my favorite film of all time, while I hated The Tree of Life; except for that awesome creation segment. And I also loved A Hidden Life.

You know, I might have had a similar reaction to Tree of life. But I thought the extended versions of The New World and Days of Heaven shared the same relationship between aesthetic and mood vs. narrative that I see in Stalker. You do not, however, get any Tarkovskysque monologues on metaphysics from Richard Gere or Colin Ferrell.

Solaris in particular seems more relevant than ever with the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI services that do not understand what their outputs mean to us, and often produce eery simulacra of life.

The final scenes of Solaris show this situation brilliantly in that their content matches the way it is shown: The scenes themselves mirror the depicted content with perplexing compositions, zooms and transitions, almost as if they were themselves created by an entity that does not understand the content or medium:

https://youtu.be/Z8ZhQPaw4rE?t=9489

Quoting from the book:

"QUESTION: Do you mean, for example, that the hands didn’t move as human hands would move, because the joints were not sufficiently supple?

BERTON: No, not at all. But . . . these movements had no meaning. Each of our movements means something, more or less, serves some purpose . . . "

Solaris is by far his best movie, even better than STALKER (which is itself excellent). It seems many have not seen it. They are missing out.

(His worst and most overrated)

edit re: slowness, it's a lot less slow than his final few works which I also adore. they're all great I just think the rest of his catalog gets less good word simply for drastically less popular exposure.

It's definitely a lot slower paced than our current ADD society is used to. An esteemed director like Kubrick's movies would seem unbearably slow to many.

I think Kubrick's movies are fantastic, deep, atmospheric, thought provoking. True art.

I have never made it all the way through one without falling asleep. 2001, Blade Runner, Dr. Strangelove.... Even movies loosely associated with Kubrick like A.I. cause me to nod off. I have to stop when I'm nodding off and come back later fresh in order to finish.

Maybe it would be different if I had seen them in theaters.

> 2001, Blade Runner, Dr. Strangelove....

Gladiator was also amazing!

Love that film. "No, I'm Spartacus!" Classic.

spartacus, spartacus the merciful \o/

Gladiator was shot by Ridley Scott, just like Blade Runner. Kubrick (who i love) is so legendary, he really should just get credit for every great movie in existence ))

Blade Runner is not a Kubrick film.

You're right. My mistake for lumping that in there.

I've never fallen asleep while watching 2001. It's definitely slow, but riveting for me, because (like Tarkovsky's film) there's a lot of meaning in the scenes, and they give me a lot to think about.

> "Maybe it would be different if I had seen them in theaters."

There's still chances to see 2001 in cinemas! It gets re-released somewhat regularly for anniversaries and Kubrick retrospectives, etc. I was born long after 2001 came out, but I've seen it on cinema screens many times. It was so far ahead of it's time and looks so incredibly good in 70mm that it's mind boggling to consider that it was actually made in the 1960s!

STALKER created an entire franshise on it's own. Which to date has a very dedicated community.

It is one of the best psy-films of all time.

It also inspired a related post-disaster urban-exploration-style culture around the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/09/the-stalkers-ins...

I really didn't enjoy the ending of Solaris and, for that matter, The Little Prince. You don't need to have a punchy ending for me not to feel like I wasted my time with your movie. It's okay to let the journey stand on its own rather than throwing in a climax that feels haphazard and spontaneous.

The original Solaris novel had a different ending, a disillusioned reflection by Kelvin, which I found much better. It was probably not dramatic enough for a movie, too analytical.

Aside from this, perhaps another reason why the first part of the movie looks and feels more promising than the second one is more trivial. As far as I know they experienced a budget shortage at some point of production.

Personally, I always found that the novel ends on a comparatively hopeful note, especially given the circumstances, the final word being cudów ("of miracles").

It's one of his most accessible movie, and usually resonates with tech people for obvious reasons. His best movies imo are Mirror, Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Stalker and then Solaris, Nostalgia and Sacrifice.

Now Solaris book by Lem is far superior to Tarkovsky's rendition.

I love Stalker, and I'm a huge Tarkovsky fan, but hated Solaris. It doesn't hold a candle to Stalker.

I also like Tarkovsky's Mirror and The Sacrifice.

You might like the original book Solaris better. It has a unique atmosphere, isolation and mystery of the alien planet, and explores a different idea of alien life than we usually get in movies. This is hard to communicate in a movie, Tarkovsky did well, but it does not hold up as well as the book.

Wait, you hated Solaris? It was the first Tarkovsky movie that I watched and I really connected with its themes of the "real" vs "memories". It's hard for me to imagine anyone hating Solaris...

I still have not seen Mirror, though a few of my film friends have told me to check it out for years.

I started watching it tonight, because of this thread. It was my second attempt. I quit about 40 minutes in and started to browse IMDB user reviews in hope to understand it. The 1 star reviews resonated a lot with me. Hate is a strong word but definitely not my cup of tea.

Fair enough! You've definitely given it the college try and I won't criticize that!

Out of curiosity, is there anything in particular about it you didn't like or was it a "just not my thing" kind of thing?

I did not feel engaged to the plot. The dialogue felt abstract and kind of went over my head. Someone mentioned that the film is "very Russian" and perhaps that is part of it. I have extremely limited exposure to Russian culture but it feels quite introspective to me. I noticed the dialogue sounding a little like Putin, just sound-wise. Lots of "mmm" sounds which in my language people make when they are considering their next words. Somehow I see a connection there (that probably don't exist, if I am being rational)

You might try the Solaris novel instead. The movie was based on it, but as you know books can be very different.

I found the first part with all the meetings and philosophical debates on earth to be boring and hard to follow too, but if you stop there you’re missing out on the payoff of all that exposition. It really picks up once he gets to the space station.

But I found the opening shot of the plants in the stream to be revelatory, a tiny bit of film making that changed the way I viewed life.

Tarkovsky's "Stalker" is loosely based on the "Roadside Picnic"[1] a sci-fi novel of Strugatsky brothers.

A. and B. Strugatsky are not that much recognized in the western countries as Andrey Tarkovsky, but they made significant contribution to the Russian literature of XX century, and their books are still popular in the post-soviet countries. In particular, the Roadside Picnic influenced many modern sci-fi works too, including, for example, the "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." and the "Metro" video game series.

Tarkovsky's "Stalker" is quite distinctive from Strugatsky's novel both in style and plot, but the screenplay of the movie was written by Strugatsy brothers too. Basically, they made completely different work in the same setting, but following completely different narrative. Also, they included a lot of pieces from their other (lesser famous) work "The Ugly Swans" into the screenplay, which is closer to Tarkovsky's film style. For example, the Writer's monologue[2] is just a direct translation of the same monologue from The Ugly Swans.

"Solaris", another Tarkovsky's famous sci-fi movie, based on Stanislav Lem's novel of the same title, was a more controversial work. Stanislav Lem made quite critical reception of this adaptation that simplifies and distorted his novel's original ideas. However, I think that Tarkovsky's "Solaris" is still the best adaptation of this book we currently have.

Aside from this, I would recommend "Ivan's Childhood" a war movie about orphaned child, and the "Andrei Rublev" a historical movie about the famous Russian Orthdox icon painter set place in the late middle ages, and about survival of artistic people in hard times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwIoSI1Eqak

(Some of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/stalker happen to be on sale on Steam atm.)

The reason Stalker is so different from Roadside Picnic is very simply that Tarkovsky made the film twice, the second time without the original script.

He spent an entire summer filming the Strugatskys' original screenplay. But he was using American Kodak 5247 film stock that was found to be out of date. He tried several times to confirm the problem with the Soviet processing lab, but they were unfamiliar with the stock, and only by the time he was done shooting did they realize that the filmed footage was in fact unusable. Tarkovsky himself suspected it may have been sabotage. Apparently (I've never been able to confirm this) the sepia footage at the beginning of the film is from this footage.

Tarkovsky was at this point despondent, not just unhappy with the destruction of his footage, but also with the direction the film was taking, and with his cinematographer (Rerberg, who was critical of the film and the script), whom he fired shortly thereafter. While negotiating with the Soviet film board to get more money and time to reshoot the film, he had several workshops with the Strugatskys to try to develop a better screenplay. Eventually Boris gave up and flew back home, but Arkady persisted, and finally wrote Tarkovsky a short treatment that suggested reducing the entire film to a bare-bones, more philosophical story with nameless characters and very few overt scifi elements. He then encouraged Tarkovsky to go do his own thing.

This appears to have been the breakthrough that helped Tarkovsky find the direction and inspiration he needed, and he used the treatment as the basis for a new screenplay that ended up having very little to do with the book. He wrote enthuastically to Arkady that for the first time as a director he had a screenplay he could call his own. (His previous films had all been written by others, or collaborations, and mostly adaptations.)

Eventually, Tarkovsky was able to negotiate with the film board to shoot a two-part film instead. They would pretend his first shoot, which had already been financed, was the "first part", and he received the necessary funding to shoot the second half. The Strutgatskys, who were still credited, weren't very happy with the final film.

The whole story of Stalker is complicated. I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, for more information.

Related. others?

How 'Stalker' claimed the life of Andrei Tarkovsky and his wife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32588569 - Aug 2022 (1 comment)

The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782009 - Jan 2022 (79 comments)

The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26132544 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)

The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126004 - Feb 2021 (44 comments)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Message to the Young: “Learn to Be Alone” (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22196779 - Jan 2020 (91 comments)

Andrei Tarkovsky – Poetic Harmony [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11601651 - April 2016 (18 comments)

Tarkovsky Films Free Online (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7107215 - Jan 2014 (52 comments)

The best way to watch these movies would be by pirating them from the RuTracker, as that way you will be sure that you are not contributing any views or advertisement money to the Mosfilm, with a bonus of much higher bitrates.

Here are the links:

Solaris — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6191155

Stalker — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6182463

Ivan's Childhood — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6194960

The Mirror — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6194964

Andrei Rublev — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6194948

The Passion According to Andrei — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5820633

Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein is in public domain, and so you can legally watch any other upload on YouTube instead of Mosfilm's, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsQcljysO-8

Nice

Plus if you are not in an a t m o s p h e r i c mood, you can watch Moscow - Cassiopeia (kids space film) and Kuryer (coming of age comedic drama in EOL CCCP) instead.

And then The War of the Worlds: Next Century with Iron Idem for dark comedy that's even less a fan of Soviet stuff

As you're interested in identity and profiles, do you have any comments on how Ivan and Katya had (realistically or mistakenly) thought the other would have affected their own identities? (and where does Kolya see himself in 5-10 years? "most likely to become a New Russian"?)

Interesting q. It's been a while since I last saw the film.

But I saw Katya as a distant, hidden ideal for Ivan. In terms of her reflection on him being hidden from his consciousness.

She's far more idealistic in terms of silent goodness / valuing mindset. This is like the Stanislav Kurilov mindset. Calm, but knowing deeply that things like repression and conscription for short-sighted power goals are not ultimately acceptable.

Refined in character, nearly angelic, but how? And what does it mean? This is Ivan's unconscious puzzle.

To her, he seems to ground her. She understands him almost as a pet, so this perhaps explains a bit. But in this situation she can't yet express to him fully what the above implies for him. Her deeper consciousness is not available to him.

IMO this is where we got a lot of the emergent criminality in the 90s chaos (beyond what existed already), this disconnect. Those who can make values conscious but who will not force the message, formed the moralistic vitality of change. And those who will take action but who do not naturally tend to values form the vitality of force seeking direction. This contributes to broad chaos toward a structural vacuum. Something must be done in the idea space in order to propagate the values further. A very difficult problem for most of humanity at this point in time.

Just some thoughts though. Hope I understood some of what you were getting at. Please share your own thoughts if you would like.

I'm afraid I don't have the same analytic toolbox that you do, so I had no thoughts on them to this depth, thanks.

Something that did strike me is that, as a teenager on the other side of the iron curtain, I had been chasing girls at the local residential private school, who introduced me to anime — so the scene where Katya's friends are watching live-action japanese media seemed like a nice parallel (at least post-Glasnost) in our lives.

That's awesome :-) It's a wonderful film for that kind of retrospective cultural tourism.

Kuryer was a movie that impressed me much when I saw it first, back in ~ 1988. I searched for it for 30 years and I found it on Internet a few years ago, I saw it again and I got the same hit in the head as in '88. It is not a light movie to see, a bottle of vodka aside might help if you were of that age in Eastern Europe in the 80-es.

Why? What's wrong with Mosfilm?

Probably cooties, according to current regime orthodoxy.

There are things more important in life than ad revenue, and MosFilm can't directly get it from YouTube at the moment anyway.

RuTracker should always be one of the first options to consider, but I wouldn't be that zealous. Official subtitles might be the biggest problem, as they don't seem to have a definite source. Some are expressive (up to metrical translation of the songs) but too liberal, some were certainly made by cheapest freelancers they could find. The user has to know beforehand that better translations can sometimes be found, and that it is possible to use extensions to load subtitles from local files. Re-uploading the videos as distinct native and translated versions, and changing softsubs to hardsubs and vice versa is another problem resulting in link rot. Video itself usually seems to be fine, though one of the SD masters of “Stalker” was known for relying on digital film stabilization which resulted in artifacts on faster panning shots, but in that case it was the same on DVDs.

For comparison, LenFilm also uploaded movies to YouTube, and they had masterpieces of Alexei German in 1080p, but either recorded with botched brightness correction through some kind of screen capture software at superfast settings, or watermarked with landline phone number (in a second decade of a 21st century) of some subcontracting studio. The whole thing probably relied on some clueless intern uploading files from their office PC. However, LenFilm has been banned as vile and daaangerous “state-controlled media”, and neither German, nor popular Soviet adventure movies for kids, nor dull and boring soc-realistic factory life dramas are officially there.

Personally, I am a bit skeptical about the image of a regular multi-tasking user seeing the scene of a interrogation, a remark about the suicide of Mayakovsky, and a dinner, and getting it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFZa9CVBeJY&t=2669

Three decades of talking about multimedia, and we still don't have a convenient commentary system to hold all the explanations and notes.

Having these movies, and many others, on YouTube is a net positive. I already saw most of Tarkovsky's movies, but I found on Mosfilm's account on YT a few more good movies, it will be a good way to spend the nights during this summer.

I would like to have a simple way to get these movies offline without paying YT premium for 720p, so your links are welcome.

If anyone is wondering if there's any relation with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, like me:

  > While not a direct adaptation, the video game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is heavily influenced by Roadside Picnic. The first game in the series, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, references many important plot points from the book, such as the wish granter and the unknown force blocking the path to the center of the zone. It also contains elements such as anomalies and artifacts that are similar to those described in the book, but that are created by a supernatural ecological disaster, not by alien visitors.

from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic#Adaptations_an..., unfortunately no concrete reference to actual interview or statement from the developers is provided in the page.

Also, about Metro 2033 (game):

  > The book is referenced in the post-apocalyptic video game Metro 2033. A character shuffles through a shelf of books in a ruined library and finds Roadside Picnic, he states that it is "something familiar". Metro 2033 was created by individuals who had worked on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. before founding their own video game development company. The game was based on a novel of the same name which also took influence from Roadside Picnic.

The game is more like the Stalker movie than the book.

In the book there were research missions and active urban life as well as smuggling, whereas the movie is spearheaded on going through the Zone while uninvited. The movie also has the post-apoc vibe whereas the book does not. The whole point of book is co-existence of the unknown with normal(ish) human society.

I don't think S.T.A.L.K.E.R. bears much relation to Roadside Picnic. There are no monsters in the novel (the zombies are "returned people" and are harmless), and the deadly traps are unknowable and nonsentient things more like forces of nature rather than beasts hunting people. Plus there's no radioactivity nor connection to Chernobyl. The plot happens in an unnamed American city, even!

The novel is not a horror novel. It may be considered existential horror, though.

Dang. Now this makes me wonder if Annihilation is based on Stalker.

It's based on the first of 3 novels by Jeff VanderMeer, although it's definitely influenced by "Stalker" and/or "Roadside Picnic".

I read the book and played all the STALKER games, the games are based on the aproximate universe but that is all.

It’s actually five films because “The Passion According to Andrei” is simply the original longer cut of “Andrei Rublev”.

I believe Tarkovsky himself preferred the final cut which is 20 minutes shorter (but still over three hours, so not exactly a cinematic snack).

Link to the Mosfilm YouTube

https://m.youtube.com/@Mosfilm_eng/videos

I liked Solaris while watching it, but it's one of those movies that's kind of "stuck" with me. I find myself thinking about it at random moments, just kind of pondering its themes. I've always been interested in the fine line of "real" and "creation" (my favorite movie is Ghost in the Shell (1995)), and I think Solaris does a good job exploring the interesting themes about how our memories of a person an the actual person are different and the same.

It being free on YouTube is as good of an excuse as any to re-watch it.

More generally, heaps of old Soviet movies are available in HD (and often subtitled) on Mosfilm YT channel, putting you a yt-dlp away from a movies night.

https://www.youtube.com/@Mosfilm_eng

Was re-watching The Limits of Control by Jim Jarmusch recently, and realised it had a reference to Tarkovsky's Stalker in the scene with the "cinema lady".

"The best films are like dreams you're never sure you've really had. I have this image in my head of a room full of sand. And a bird flies towards me, and dips its wing into the sand. And I honestly have no idea whether this image came from a dream, or a film"

Jarmusch’s “Ghost Dog” takes quite a few ideas from Tarkovsky’s work.

And 'Le Samourai' for that matter. Great flick!

And while we are here: There used to be a huge Tarkowsky copycat movement at the film festivals, which flamed out just 10 years ago.

But just now another one appeared, the Quinzaine premiere "Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell" by Thien An Pham which I attended. The guy is also seriously depressed (as Tarkowsky) and would need professional help, but the critics are still flocking to it. And I didn't fall asleep as with other similar films.

https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/inside-the-yellow-coco... https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/inside-the-yellow-cocoon...

If you are on mosfilm do watch this gem of a sci-fi dystopian dark comedy film Kin Dza Dza

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUtZOl_QxvY

and White Tiger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soRIjIJAUfA

Weird fact about Stalker, they were shooting in disused USSR factories that had just been left as-is -- a lot of people on set got cancer not much longer after shooting, likely from being around so much industrial waste.

It's also way better than the book it was based on IMO (Roadside Picnic).

That's interesting to me: I found the book far more compelling than the film.

"Roadside Picnic" pdf: https://soviethistory.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/pic...

Hard to compare. They’re completely different in terms of plot, mood, style… everything, really. Roadside Picnic has the signature Strugatsky Bros dark comedy running through it, while Stalker really has no comedic elements whatsoever. I prefer the book, for what it’s worth. OTOH, I prefer the film Solaris to the Lem novel.

I need to reread Solaris. I read it when I was like 14 so it was a bit beyond me at the time.

https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-236

Coincidentally, the German translation of Roadside Picnic has an afterword by Lem.

IMO the Stalker game is like the darkest and most raw take of the general theme, the movie is the most philosophical and artsy take and the book is somewhere in the middle. And they’re all worth it.

I think the Stalker game bears little to no relation to the novel. The novel is not about shooting things up and there are neither monsters nor radioactivity.

The Stalker shooting locations are actually close to Tallinn in Estonia, a former Soviet republic that’s an EU and NATO member today. So if watching the film turns you into a super fan, it’s not too hard to go visit the sites!

that is so crazy i was in one of the shooting locations yesterady by accident (it is now a kultural venue location) and wondered why an area there had the name "stalker", of course i thought about my favorite movie but i never considered it being filmed where i live. thanks for this mind blow

I took my wife to be on a week long tarkovsky crawl of Tuscany. The locations used in nostalgia are something else.

The film was also lost in a lab and completely reshot

edit: by lost I mean the usability was lost. it was destroyed in chemical process. thx for pointing out it was just half. but his textural differences are explained also by technique, he did it in his other works even through his late career (mixing sepia segments, different processing even in his final film)

It wasn’t lost but something went wrong with the film development on about half of it. I believe that’s why it has two such distinct film styles (which also happens to work quite well for the film).

> a lot of people on set got cancer not much longer after shooting, likely from being around so much industrial waste

Is there a credible source for this statement?

the main source seems to be the sound technician and two members of the set dying of the same form of cancer. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/stalker-killed-andrei-tarkovsky

Interesting...

... because I was just reading about Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease (because of his recent movie "Still") and apparently he and two other people who worked in his earliest TV show (where he was a secondary character) got early onset Parkinson's, and he claims this is a mere coincidence, not enough to consider this a relevant "cluster" of Parkinson's.

In both cases it's three people who worked closely together catching a relatively rare disease. I wonder if it's relevant for Tarkovsky, given that Michael J. Fox thinks it wasn't relevant for him...

well the main difference seems to be that some crew in stalker stated they had the sense of being poisoned in that dust and fume cloud and also developed accute allergic reactions. Its still all just based on the statements of the sound technician, i did not find interviews with other crew that said the same, but i'm sure there are some interview transcriptions in russian print somewhere. In the end the best source would probably be the estonian death statistics for cancer increases closer to those areas or further downstream the same river.

Well also Tarkovsky died from cancer not a whole lot of time after.

It was initially supposed to be filmed at factories, but there was a change of plans and circumstances (the first of many others which resulted in constant rewriting of the script, succession of three cameramen, and summer of 1978 spent on remaking shots from summer of 1977).

Outdoor shooting happened at Rotermanni Quarter, an old factory area next to the port of Tallinn, at various factories and train stations around the city, and at the old unused dam nearby. Scene of family leaving the bar takes place at the ash pond of Moscow Combined Power Plant #20 (in background) with its drainage chutes:

https://pastvu.com/p/451104

Don't miss the source link, because it's a memoir of second assistant camera technician with lots of photos:

https://immos.livejournal.com/67613.html

As for foamy wastewater, it came from the pulp mill. Its contents and potential toxicity could be anything, depending on part of the cycle that dumped the byproducts. Turpentine was a good candidate, and it could be combined with sawdust particles. However, if spending a couple of months by the river could give people cancer, local people would also have it.

Note that the mill opened in 1938, so, depending on who you ask, either the river had already been dead before Soviet era, or it was constantly being polluted in each year of it. To my unprofessional eye, the flow of Jägala river is way too small to effectively dilute the waste (nor all the little dams help it), but it was an important project economically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehra#Pulp_Mill

Tarkovski's movies have what you could call a Russian sentiment. Hard to put in words what exactly that means but perhaps some fatalism and melancholy, how things are what they are and do not easily change except in our dreams. Looking back at Soviet Union and now Putin's Russia, and even the autocratic Czarist Russia before revolution, it is easy to understand where that sentiment comes from. But it makes for great, thoughtful art.

Another great Russian movie from a contemporary director of Tarkovski is "A Few Days from the Life of I.I. Oblomov":

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079619/

And that sentiment is replicated by the director Andrey Zvyagintsev, in e.g. The Return (2003) or Leviathan. Both great movies with beautiful cinematography and very Russian feeling.

Well put. Fatalism and melancholy are great descriptions of it.

One such interesting culture clash happened when the Soviets went to Cuba to shoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Cuba. A beautiful movie, fantastic cinematography by Kalatozov, but the Cubans just never liked it. The portrayal of Cubans is very much what Russians thought Cubans might be like, as opposed to how Cubans see themselves.

Funny that he actually already blogged about this back when they became available in 2010 (Mosfilm since introduced a new channel guess that’s where the newness come from)

https://kottke.org/10/07/tarkovsky-films-online-for-free-vie...

I remember watching Adrei Rublev for the first time, getting more and more pissed the whole time. It wasn't the technique. I had already seen Solaris. It was the hapless passiveness of the main character. However, the bell making sequence really drew me in. I had this immense tension waiting to see how it would turn out. The ending broke me and suddenly the whole movie clicked for me.

I don't wish to spoil it or taint someone else's experience so I'll just say, many films have a plot twist at the end but I can't really think of another movie that manages that kind of an emotional turn. Not without something pretty hammy like a surprise betrayal or death. Andrei Rublev will always stick with me.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Tarkovsky's clear influence on Terrence Malick's style. If you like anything by Malick, say, The Tree of Life or the most recent A Hidden Life, you should at least watch Mirror or Stalker.

He is not just one of the two or three greatest directors ever but also wildly influential. Genius.

Exhibit A: https://vimeo.com/153979733

I saw A Hidden Life within the last month and it is one of the best movies I have seen. I have also seen Stalker and after an interesting start it eventually bored me. I can see why you make the comparison, but I found them very different.

If you liked A Hidden Life, you should definitely give Mirror a watch. I think you'd enjoy it!

I am willing to give it a try, thanks!

Interesting— I like both but I wouldn’t think of Tarkovsky as having an influence on Malick. What would you say are the similarities, for you? Tarkovsky is intensely formal, seems blocked to the point of almost being choreographed, while Malick is quite the opposite in both regards.

The colour grading on Stalker on YouTube seems quite different to other versions floating around. The YT version seems to have lost the heavy yellow cast of the other versions.

Does anyone know which is "correct"? It makes quite a difference to the feel of the film.

being on youtube is great, but if you have a chance to see stalker in a cinema or a better digitized higher resolution version, i highly recommend it. this movie has among the most beautiful film grain and colors i have seen and this dimension is mostly absent on the linked digitization. this is also probably the worst movie for this to happen as the pace and composition require a nearly meditative immersion into the scenes, like looking at a great oil painting without enough resolution to see the brush strokes.

English hardsub is a savage move.

Looks like all movies are hardsubbed

Mosfilm actually has 2 channels and the original older one has normal YT subs, but the movies are more geolocation restricted, they are not available in the US, UK, Canada.

Solaris for example

https://youtu.be/6-4KydP92ss

https://polsy.org.uk/stuff/ytrestrict.cgi?ytid=https%3A%2F%2...

What's the other channel's URL?

https://youtube.com/@MosfilmRuOfficial

Better than harddubbed?

I watched a random segment from Stalker, the embedded movie, and at 15:10 the woman gets in the car and the subtitles say "Come with me", while the character clearly says "Go!". Very confusing. The auto-generated subtitles got this one word right but have other gaps. So warning if you're gonna watch these that the subtitles might not be perfect.

I've found subtitles in general to be really off the mark after learning a few more languages, but at least it's actually possible to tell that they got it wrong if it's a subtitle and not a dub I guess?

It's still insanely jarring and really messes with the experience if you speak the subtitled language and notice that over and over.

His book(Sculpting in Time) is a great read btw!

The cinema of directors like Tarkovsky and Bergman can only nominally be termed "movies".

A combination of deep introspection, reflection on the human condition and achingly beautiful photography makes them all-time masterpieces, up there with the most important achievements of human culture.

I often add Ozu to this list, too, although his works tend to be a bit closer to "movies" than Tarkovsky or Bergman.

I just bookmarked three of these. I have watched Tarkovsky's version of Solaris at least 3 times (and the American version with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone 5 or 6 times) - I love that story and both movies are so very good!

Sounds like you would also like the novel. The Kindle version is a new translation by Bill Johnston. The previous one was a flawed retranslation (from Polish to French to English).

Thanks, I just got that translation. I had read the previous translation.

Natascha McElhone - a timeless beauty. Became a fan of her since The Truman Show.

Time for some rewatch! He was my favorite filmmaker, and he's a really good one. I considered his films a form of arts. I still consider them arts, but now I think that arts should not be boring.

I love Tarkovsky, but this is equally valuable as a sleep aid for some.

Unlike most other cinema I’ve experienced, I find Tarkovsky’s films tedious to watch, but tremendously meaningful in retrospect. One of the greatest directors of all time, to be sure.

If you really want to watch this, do it after the war, after Russia withdraws from Ukraine. Not now.

I wonder, why? I certainly won't be monetarily supporting Russia directly.

always have been

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