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Free Download Kdrama Www.30tk.ir a documentary cine-novel by Igor Maiboroda

REHRBERG

The process of crafting an image

is informed by the artist's worldview.

The worldview is shaped by the artist's time,

country of residence, his culture...

his daily interactions,

his unique intellectual and physical attributes.

a final film

Rehrberg and Tarkovsky: The other side of Stalker

Prologue

What is your favorite film?

The Mirror.

The Mirror is the greatest achievement

in the legacies of G. Rehrberg and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Rehrberg saved Tarkovsky when he agreed to work on the film

after other DPs refused.

Rehrberg joined Tarkovsky on his next film, Stalker.

After Chernobyl some said that Tarkovsky

predicted the catastrophe.

But few people know about the other side of Stalker:

the catastrophe that took place on the set.

Like a nuclear reaction spiraling out of control,

Tarkovsky lost his grip on reality

on the set of Stalker.

This led to a breakdown of essential human bonds.

We could say that it foreshadowed another great catastrophe:

the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The humanist Tarkovsky used Stalinist methods,

removing Rehrberg's name from the film's final credits

and depriving him of an artistic future,

even though it was Rehrberg

who helped Tarkovsky bounce back after the breakdown.

Excuse me, is this the way to Tomshino?

You should have stuck to the road.

- And what is this? - What?

Why are you sitting here?

I live here.

Here on the fence?

Are you looking for Tomshino or my place of residence?

Ah, there's a house...

Imagine, I brought all the instruments and left the key.

Maybe you have a nail or a screwdriver?

No. I don't have a nail.

Why are you so nervous? Give me your hand.

Go on, I'm a doctor.

Don't distract me, I'm counting.

Do I need to call my husband?

You don't have a husband. No ring. Where's the ring?

I was always interested in human emotions.

Emotion and close-up are worth more

than any landscape or antique column...

I am interested in the portrait.

You can look at it endlessly.

You should film it, by the way.

I've been looking at that Rafael for 58 years.

That's something.

There was a kind of film renaissance in the 60's.

About three years after we did The Mirror, I said:

Boys, we're heading into a decline.

Nobody believed me.

Here we are. I didn't think it would last this long.

It's been 17 years.

Rehrberg predicted the decline of Soviet film

the same year he shot his second film with Tarkovsky.

A lot of bad rumors came out of that collaboration,

but Rehrberg kept silent.

He made fewer and fewer films.

I was able to help Rehrberg

during an especially bad stretch.

And he told me the real story behind the making of Stalker.

I saw that he was still haunted by it.

He complained to me

that he couldn't find anything worth filming.

I said: "You told me all about your childhood."

"Wouldn't it be great if people could see that?"

Rehrberg said: "Let's do it together."

I know that Rehrberg had no intention of dying.

Two weeks before he died he told me that he was reading

Hegel's dialectics and Losev's writings on aesthetics.

He said he had to make three more films -

the autobiography was the most important of them.

That film will never happen.

We can only make a documentary

as a tribute to a great cinematographer,

whose style was often imitated.

They called it "shooting a la Rehrberg."

But a copy could never rival the original:

the last of the Rehrbergs.

The line of Russian Rehrbergs begins with Jan Rehrberg,

who emigrated from western Europe on the invitation of Peter I.

Rehrbergs fought for Russia, built its ships, railroads, factories,

St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

Fedor Ivanovich, Rehrberg's grandfather,

was the first artist of that dynasty

It was important for me, the maker of REHRBERG,

to recreate the events on the set of Stalker.

I collected witness accounts and materials,

which will be shown here for the first time.

You will learn the bitter truth as you hear this tragic tale.

I found moral justification for this project

in Losev's writings on Renaissance aesthetics -

the same work that Rehrberg was studying at his death.

The Renaissance is famous for its archetypes

of falsehood and treachery, foul murder and vengeance,

cruelty and opportunism, and all manner of passions:

this is what we call "the other side of the Renaissance,"

i.e. the underside of titanism.

A titan wants to rule over all of creation.

But he always encounters other titans,

who also want to rule over all.

The piles of corpses at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies

are symbols of the inevitable demise

of the titanic aesthetics of the Renaissance.

I have no interest in making bad fiction at the moment.

I've been shooting ads for three years.

When we came to the agency someone said to us:

Do you want Rehrberg?

I said: you're crazy, he's way out of our league.

Not a problem, they said.

Things were so bad that he would call me to ask

what he should charge for a commercial.

That's where the country was at that time.

And not much has changed.

Is there a specific location that could tell us:

it is 1995 and this is what's happened to us.

The Manege...

Moscow, 1995. Manege Square

The square is in the city center.

The Arena is at the center of the square.

The square is the brainchild of the architect Osip Bove.

The wooden structure spanning 45 meters

is a daring feat of engineering.

Moscow. March 14, 2004. Manege Square.

participating in the film:

Mstislav Rostropovich Natalia Gutman

Victor Astafiev Marina Tarkovskaia

Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovskii

Nikita Mikhalkov Ia Savvina

Pavel Lebeshev Irina Antonova

Mikhail Romadin Aleksandr Boym

Shavkat Abdusalamov Vadim Yusov

Sergei Kozlov Oleg Gedrovich

Evgenii Tsymbal Viktor Kosakovskii

Yurii Ilienko (Ukraine) Vadim Alisov

Jerzy Wojcik (Poland) Evgenii Guslinskii

Olga Surkova Mariana Chugunova

Igor Korshich (Slovenia)

appearing in archival materials:

Aleksei Losev Evgenii Mravinskii

Sven Nyqvist Andrei Tarkovskii

Larisa Tarkovskaia Gleb Panfilov

The Author of the Image

Moscow, 2002. Vvedesnkoe cemetery

I met Rehrberg in Ljubliana.

I kept watching him, because to me

he is a model of a refined human being,

and a great artist of cinema.

Rehrberg came up to me and shook my hand.

He said: thank you for your films.

I said: thank you for your work,

for The Mirror.

I regret that he did not make many films,

we would have been far richer and wiser for it.

He suffered because he had to make commercials.

I know he did not love that work.

He dreamt of making fiction.

Solitude was a great burden for him.

Rerberg is an astonishing creature.

I feared him.

The name Rehrberg is well-known in Moscow.

It was not one man, it was an entire lineage.

First, he was a genius. Second, he was my spiritual kin.

The fact that he was a musician is clear from his films.

I called and asked him to write something about Andrei -

He refused. He said: I will not do it.

It was his nature: he burnt himself up.

He once said: I'll go to Switzerland

and wander around Geneva with a walking stick.

A dreamer. A shy romantic. One drink and he's off to Switzerland.

His wife would say: Cemetery! not Switzerland.

Why is it that everyone in Russia has to suffer?

Everyone with a drop of talent must end this life too soon.

The DP is a key job. They call it "the wife."

There were few directors of Tarkovsky's caliber

that Rehrberg could work with.

When he worked with my brother on his first film

he got to a place that made it very hard to go down.

You could only go up, or stay at the same level.

Dear Pavel Mikhailovich,

I would like to inform you of our progress.

The situation leaves much to be desired.

The biggest problem is the lack of camera crew.

Rehrberg has to do everything himself,

which reflects on the quality.

It is very hot and dusty.

Every day something happens to the camera,

we have to re-shoot constantly because of technical problems.

And this is Rehrberg's first film.

I am worried for both of us. Yours, Konchalovskii.

Now it seems exciting and exotic.

At the time I hated it. I refused to go.

Andron was known as a kind of playboy...

I didn't understand that we didn't need a "view" out the window.

He said: just put up some white.

I said: how could you do that? We need to paint something.

He said: it's all going to be overexposed anyway.

I couldn't get it. I only understood when we saw the rushes:

when you expose for the interior, the exterior will be overexposed.

- And he explained it? - Yes, I didn't know about it.

He was the first to shoot contre-jour.

They recalled him and told us to get a new DP.

Andron appealed to Yusov:

they tell me it's all garbage, and it's my first film...

Despite differences between Rehrberg and Yusov,

the latter said: I insist on Rehrberg.

He was a risk-taker. A kamikaze.

A DP that's really a stuntman.

That's exactly how he was. I second that.

It's one thing to be a stuntman and know what's up and what's down.

And he knew it.

He would raise contrast with highly concentrated developer

and the image really popped out.

We had bad film stock, bad cameras,

but since Communism = Socialism + Electrification...

I had as many lights as I can dream of...

I see Nykvist doesn't have enough lights on Sacrifice.

I would have put up 5, and he only has 3.

Only his experience and his taste saves him.

He brought to cinema an ability to sculpt phenomenal portraits,

and to use lighting realistically, even hyper-realistically.

Natalia Arenbasarova, the star of The First Teacher,

received the "best actress" award at the Venice festival.

And a memo appeared in Rehrberg's personal file:

The film, which has won a prize in Venice,

and international acclaim,

owes its success to the cinematographer.

Rehrberg was the driving force on that picture,

probably even more so than Andron.

I think it was simply a remarkable brain

that could only think in terms of screen images.

Were there similarities in the working process

of Tarkovsky and Konchalovsky?

Or are they different?

They were both very good at taking other people's ideas.

They are different, but they were similar in their youth.

They collaborated on the screenplay of Rublev.

But as different people they went different ways.

I find Konchalovsky to be the smartest of our directors.

Unlike Tarkovsky, he knew his flaws

and always tried to make up for them.

His education and worldview were far broader

than is typical for a cinematographer.

One of the Italian directors tells me:

I never see DPs getting involved with the script.

How can you not, if everything stems from the source?

We also have a couple of good DPs that say: that's not by business.

How can you get to the heart of the matter if you don't understand it?

Or if all of us missed it somehow?

We have to work at it, all together.

This has always been important for you?

Yes, and sometimes I got into trouble for it.

For Rehrberg crafting the image is not a job,

it is a quest for truth.

His life was that quest.

Andrei Tarkovsky said these words.

The quests for truth of these two image-philosophers

crossed paths on the set of The Mirror.

Rehrberg hung up the Anthenian School

on the same wall, where long before

his father had hung the portrait of Rafael:

one of the greatest humanist painters,

who saw painting as a way toward an understanding

of man, nature and society.

They believed that reason and beauty will triumph

only when we learn to respect each other's opinions.

This is the only existing footage of Losev.

Until then Losev refused to grant interviews.

His wife and I convinced him to let himself be filmed.

I knew this was for all eternity,

and so I called Rehrberg.

I just had to say one word: Losev.

He agreed right away.

And he said, I am not doing this for money.

Rehrberg and I helped Losev get up and move to an armchair.

And Rerberg said to me: this is not about film.

I was surprised to hear it from a man

whose whole life is about the image.

He said: this is not about film, we have to capture him.

We had very little film.

I had to make a sign for Rehrberg to run the camera.

We shot one roll.

Rehrberg changed magazines.

I'm rubbing my ear until it's all red -

and he's just looking on - he doesn't even see me.

He was only paying attention to Losev.

Real freedom is God. Why?

God does what he wills.

Nobody else can do this.

There is nothing and nobody that can limit his freedom.

Religion is a doctrine of freedom.

That's the main thing.

And it is reflected everywhere, politics, contemporary life...

In 1929 the philosopher Losev publishes Dialectic of the Myth.

He talks about fetishization and deification of the social myth

of Communist ideology.

Controversial passages are excised by censorship,

but Losev reinserts them at publication.

The book and its author are arrested.

Life is more complicated than logic, he said to his interrogators.

He explained his action in a letter from the camps:

I was suffocating because I could not speak.

This is why I had to reinsert those passages.

I knew it was dangerous but the need to speak,

to express one's individuality,

exceeds all thought of danger for a philosopher.

Losev and other seekers of truth

were labeled "enemies of the people"

and put in concentration camps for reeducation.

Glory and freedom await the glorious prisoner-fighters.

The White Sea Canal was built in two years.

Approximately 100,000 prisoners died during construction.

The first ship to sail the canal was named Chekist.

Losev survived, but lost his eyesight.

He did not betray his convictions.

He did not publish again until after Stalin's death.

The canal conquers human nature.

Terrible nightmares haunted Losev in prison.

He cannot climb up to the train car and the train leaves without him.

Or he cannot enter into his own house.

There are things Andrei never talked about.

This film was addressed directly to members of his family,

but it was received by millions of viewers.

The effect of a work of genius, a director of genius,

forgive me for saying it, and a genius DP.

Rehrberg was one of the first DPs in Russia

who could film things in their history.

He showed us objects in their dialectic,

even in a dialectic of their disintegration, their decline...

The Mirror was highly acclaimed in the USSR.

The government ignored the film and suppressed its release.

I don't see any metaphors there, and I don't like metaphors.

For me the situation is not metaphorical, but realistic.

Metaphor is very dangerous.

If it is highly multi-layered, then it can work.

But I don't like reading and writing "between the lines,"

as they like to do in Russia.

The point is not using objects that you can't fully understand.

Andrei made films about himself and I - about myself...

Andrei and I shared a worldview and a love of Leonardo.

Beauty in the struggle of light with darkness, said Leonardo.

That is both my view and my job.

I called him and asked him to write something about Andrei

He refused. He said I won't do it.

Regrettably I only made one film with Andrei.

Fate parted us.

When Rehrberg came to Ljubliana for the third time

I showed him what Tarkovsky wrote about him in his journals.

Everything shot in Tallin with Rehrberg

should be thrown into the trash twice over.

Rehrberg is fully responsible.

He trampled on the principles of creation and talent.

He thought himself a great talent.

He debased and destroyed talent, as he destroyed himself.

A drunkard, a shameless, a godless libertine -

he's finished, as far as I'm concerned.

After reading this Rehrberg looked up at the sky and said:

Andrei, why did you do it?

Yes, it's not a good story, as far as our friendship goes.

Is friendship compatible with cinema?

I don't know, but I think Fellini, for example, needed friendship.

Ioselliani needs friendship.

Andron doesn't. Tarkovsky doesn't.

As long as you can use this person, you keep him around.

Then you don't need him anymore.

These are complexes of filmmakers:

Look at me, look how important I am, etc.

This is the ugly side of cinema.

It is not good for an artist, and so I left.

This painting, called Familiar Faces,

is dedicated to the memory of friendship and sincerity.

Romadin painted his contemporaries,

the free intellectual elite,

whom he had known and worked with.

They came of age during the Thaw.

It was a brief renaissance

after the long winter of Stalin's rule.

This painting was shown many times in the Manege -

which itself had become a symbol of the Thaw.

Exercizhaus, as it was first called,

was used for over a century as army training grounds

No one thought to maintain the wooden structure,

the roof-beam gradually gave way and columns had to be put in.

It was no longer possible to march and ride horses inside.

At the height of the Thaw

the Manege was turned into an exhibition hall,

the locus of a new era of Soviet art.

But the spirit of the Exercishaus demanded

that artists march in formation.

Party leaders visited the anniversary exhibition.

They saw such paintings as this:

this work could only cause indignation.

The sculptor Neizvestny tried to defend his ugly creations.

It started out back in VGIK, I was shooting some class assignment,

and I wanted to shoot the back of a steamship.

Makarova was my supervisor.

She said: how can it be from the back?

We want to see the face.

The back expressed more than the front.

I graduated in 1960 from a Russian film school,

but my true teachers were Sven Nykvist and Gianni di Venanzo.

I come from an intellectual family. My father trained as an architect.

He worked in book design and illustration.

My mother is a musician, from a family of musicians.

Her cousin, my uncle is the cellist Rostropovich.

As a professor at the Moscow Conservatory

his mother was, to some extent, my mentor,

when I was a young student.

When I first came to the house of Professor Kazalupova,

I was about 10 or 11 at the time,

it was a total shock.

The place was full of art, like a palace: vases, paintings.

Ivan Rehrberg was a highly cultured man, very refined.

My aunt used to make fun of Rehrberg:

he's so cultured, she'd say, so...

Ivan Rehrberg became well-known in the '20s

for his drawings and watercolors.

He was a man of some importance.

He was also a master of woodcarving and xylography,

and famous as a designer of book covers.

The book cover is special type of graphic art.

Ivan Rehrberg brought a certain expressiveness to his designs.

He used silhouette figures in his canonical illustrations

of Pushkin's Little Tragedies, published in 1937.

This was the year of Pushkin's centenary.

It revived the cult of Pushkin,

who had been declared a maniac

by Soviet psychiatrists after the 1917 Revolution.

Ironically, the 100th anniversary of Pushkin's murder

was the year of the bloodiest repressions.

The state rehabilitated a dead poet,

and destroyed the living poets of its Revolution.

Meyerhold, the great theater director and reformer,

lived in this house until 1937.

His apartment was just above Rehrberg's,

where Gosha Rehrberg was born in 1937 -

Georgi Ivanovich Rehrberg.

Twenty five years later, as a young assistant DP,

Rehrberg was assigned to film a landscape

for an adaptation of Pushkin's story "The Blizzard."

This encounter with Pushkin was a good omen in his life:

on his next film he would be promoted to full-fledged DP.

What has influenced you in your film work?

My father, I suppose.

He was an illustrator and painted in his free time -

he was my first influence.

I studied with Rehrberg in the same studio at VGIK -

it was a very strong studio -

and we formed a small group within the studio:

Knizhinskij, Rehrberg, myself, Beliankin...

We spent a lot of time at Rehrberg's house:

his father had a phenomenal library -

more than a library, really -

he had been collecting a visual arts library for many years,

made up from old editions, which were then suppressed.

We had access to people,

who were completely effaced at the time:

Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Bosch...

Judging by the illustrations kept in the home archive

Ivan Rehrberg focused on internal states and minute psychology:

these were not typical at the time and could be misunderstood.

The situation at home was difficult

because Ivan Rehrberg was paralyzed for many years.

Whenever I saw him he was in his chair,

and it must have been hard on the boy -

and on his mother, who had to take care of everything.

She was an interesting person:

she was a stern woman, naturally.

Her father was a Cossack, Semen Kazalupov,

a strong and difficult man.

She was a remarkably well-organized woman,

demanding much of others...

I think I was very lucky:

that family tradition of high expectations -

Rehrberg brought it into our little group:

we weren't just drinking vodka in his room;

we were trying to access a culture that was closed to us.

Rehrberg's house was full of color,

and he was always on to something new:

cars, painting, or he was going after women.

I can understand him... Nothing wrong with that.

But despite his great ambitions, and Renaissance-like aspirations

he was left with nothing, except a collection of people

who either envied him or simply disliked him.

But he did attain the reputation of a true artist.

In Russia I am counted among the so-called painterly school.

I love painting, especially the Italian and Dutch Renaissance.

And of course the renaissance of the 20th century:

abstract painting and the Russian avant-garde.

The only thing I don't like is Expressionism.

I have been learning from painting all of my life.

I would count myself among the poetic naturalists,

if there is such a term.

Once I came to his house and I thought:

well, we're gonna have some fun or something,

and I see an easel and he's painting a copy of Poliakov.

That copy of a Poliakov back there, I did it in '72.

That was not too easy, but not too hard either.

Next to it is an original composition,

I tortured it for a whole month, until I understood

that I can put together three colors, and no more.

So this is a quarter of the original canvas,

I couldn't bring it all together, so it hangs there as a lesson.

Rehrberg is lucky because he comes from a line of artists.

The brothers Ivan and Fedor were known

in the artistic circles of Moscow in the mid-19th c.

Fedor was famous, a good painter.

He was well-known as a teacher and had many students.

Fedor Rehrberg founded Russia's first private art school

that prepared students for the Imperial Art Academy,

and the Moscow school of painting, sculpture and architecture.

In 1906 Malevich, the founder of Constructivism,

enrolled as a student at the school.

Rehrberg belonged to the realist school,

but he was tolerant of his students' experiments.

He introduced Malevich into the artistic circles of Moscow

and helped him get his artworks into prestigious exhibitions.

Fedor Rehrberg knew all the great masters of his time:

Serov, Repin, Korovin, Vrubel...

He was one of the founders of the Moscow Artists' League.

The Tretiakov Gallery has his painting "Boats,"

which Rehrberg thought one of his best.

Financial troubles forced Fedor Rehrberg to sell his works.

It would be impossible to gather his paintings,

scattered across museums and private collections.

We had to make do with what remained with his heirs.

This is a portrait of his brother Ivan.

Ivan Rehrberg was a military engineer and architect,

intimately linked to this building where I am standing today.

He was an assistant to Roman Klein,

chief architect of the Fine Arts Museum,

and was involved with several important buildings in Moscow,

like the Kiev Station...

as well as the Central telegraph building,

and the Italian Renaissance building inside the Kremlin compound.

Today it is occupied by the office of the president of Russia.

The Rehrbergs have contributed significantly to our culture.

Rehrberg has some serious roots, as far as art is concerned.

The family overestimated German Romanticism, I think.

Since my father and grandfather grew up in that milieu

they were overly partial to it.

German Romanticism is very narrow in its aims and its worldview.

Basically it is not altogether far from a decline.

This is why I quickly shifted to the Renaissance and stayed there.

One will always have one's youthful formal exercises -

I started out with that, more or less off-course.

But then realism came out ten times stronger for me...

The breadth of his cultural heritage is evident

in all his films that we know.

I think he drew liberally on various sources

to create his cinema, his vision of cinema.

My dream was to record Bach's suites, accompanied by images.

Who could do it better than anybody else?

Of course, Rehrberg.

First, he was a genius. Second he was family -

spiritual family. A lot closer to me than, say, his mother -

and then he was exposed to those Bach suites

since they were played at his house...

The six suites of Bach last 2hrs and 40min.

It was the hardest job of my life.

In terms of responsibility and intensity.

The church is 300m long, 12 degrees C.

It was cold... The poor man.

Freezing cold, I'm telling you.

Rehrberg was freezing and I was freezing.

A phenomenal man with a great work ethic,

a fantastic talent.

Those five weeks we spent together working

stayed with me like an island of happiness, of friendship -

that time we spent together working on Bach.

Rehrberg came from the Kazalupov family,

all of them were professors at the Conservatory.

For them cinema was not a serious art.

They were self- sufficient people,

whereas a cinematographer is a dependent -

especially if he is an artist.

And Rehrberg had a difficult time.

Even if you are the 1st violin, the conductor is your master.

The conductor is like the director.

His working with Mravinsky - that was a great story.

I was there too. He invited me to the rehearsal.

The sense of piety that he experienced at this time -

his relationship with Mravinsky -

In my life I encountered two people that had great influence on me

with their human dignity and the power of their art:

the first is the famous Russian conductor Mravinsky.

I filmed him conducting nine symphonies,

and I still remember and love him forever.

The second was of course Andrei Tarkovsky,

with whom I had shot, regrettably, only one film.

Fate parted us.

The Stalker Chronicle, Part I

The filming of Stalker was a journey into the Inferno,

similar to the one undertaken by the film's characters.

The film was made three times:

some episodes were filmed 6,7,8 times, maybe more.

I know Boym who worked with them, and Shavkat.

I know Rehrberg who worked on Stalker -

none of these people is ever mentioned in the credits.

The only artist there is Tarkovsky - it is unfair.

There was a large crew working on the film.

Everyone loved and supported him.

By accident I happened to be in the audience -

there were lots of people, including the studio heads -

watching the rushes of Stalker.

It was astonishing footage.

"Andrei, that's out of focus, you have to reshoot."

Sizov said that out loud.

For me it was a shock - the collapse of that partnership.

Why? How?

"Rehrberg won't get away with it, she said.

You'll see they'll never work together."

Rehrberg was very upset.

I know that he wanted to make that film.

When I feel sad I can always find him on TV or on the radio.

I turn it on and he's right there.

I won't say anything interesting.

Mravinsky would be very succinct

after a performance of the 4th of Brahms

or Shostakovich or Tchaikovsky.

It was short, succinct - he was already very old then.

He held conversations with himself, and with God.

And he was prepared to speak for 7 minutes.

Let's get back to Stalker.

Do we have to?

As long as we're here, I'd like to get something out of you...

Talking about Stalker

Moscow, 1997, Rehrberg's apartment.

participating: Georgiy Rehrberg,

Marianna Chugunova, Evgenij Tsymbal.

As long as we're here, I'd like to get something out of you...

Strugatskii writes that I ran out...

I think that is not fair.

I did not run out, I was removed.

I never doubted that. Right, Masha?

- Of course. - Andrei's first mistake was...

he picked a text that did not fit his goals.

It seems he outlived it; he did not want to make a second Solaris.

From the diaries of Tarkovsky, published in Paris,

translated from the French:

"1973. I read the novel by the Bros. Strugatsky

titled 'A picnic by the roadside.'

It could be turned into a marvelous screenplay.

Must think about making money at Central Asian studios

if I'm going to repay debts."

He told me he's been to a number of locations

and that he's still looking for the Zone.

A place that resulted from an atomic explosion.

I told him that there is a place in Tajikistan -

old Chinese mines - a kind of lunar landscape.

He said, that's exactly what I'm after.

Something dead. I said: it's pretty dead.

There's a railway there and a small steam engine...

Proposal for a fiction film to be titled "Wishing Machine."

The action is set in our times, in an unnamed capitalist country.

Several years before the start of the action

an alien spaceship lands near a small town.

The aliens have gone, but they left behind a Zone

full of otherworldly mysteries.

Militarized corporations attempt to seize alien treasures,

particularly the Machine that grants the wishes

of anyone who comes near it.

The Wishing Machine is protected by deadly traps.

A certain "Vulture" - a man without honor or principles -

a space "poacher" as it were -

is promised a "pile of greenbacks"

by the agents of a militarized corporation.

He penetrates into the Zone to retrieve the Machine.

The film combines elements of a thriller

with progressive philosophical ideas

and a critique of bourgeois ideology.

The authors: Arkadii and Boris Strugatsky.

He arrived with the art director Boym

and we set off for Isfara.

I showed him the location and he approved it right away.

Tarkovsky was impressed by what he saw in Isfara,

and believed that the Wishing Machine created here

would grant his greatest wish, as his diaries suggest:

to make his next film in Italy.

He had spent several years

petitioning the Film Committee

to let him adapt Dostoevsky's The Idiot

and one of Hoffmann's tales.

After a string of refusals he sent a letter

to the upcoming Congress of the Communist Party.

The Film Committee received a directive:

Let Tarkovsky film.

He had the freedom to film anything he wanted,

but he passed over Dostoevsky and Hoffmann

for a duo of science- fiction writers

trying to break into cinema: the Strugatskys.

Here is what the curator of Mosfilm had to say about the script:

"The hero betrays a child for the temptation of a 'golden fleece.'

This may be a powerful trope, but we are baffled

by his psychologically unmotivated actions."

The script committee warned Tarkovsky

about serious flaws in the script, by then renamed Stalker.

They asked him to rework the dialogues and monologues.

But Tarkovsky saw these warnings as a conspiracy against him.

"You must make good out of evil,

because that is all you've got."

The authors chose this flashy line

from R.P. Warren's novel "All The King's Men"

for the epigraph of their sci-fi comic-novel.

Similarly, in his adaptation,

Tarkovsky decided to bank on "eastern" flavor and exoticism.

We spent hours wandering the streets,

he was very pleased with everything.

I remember he was ill when he came and he said to me:

I'd love to get to a sauna.

I said, there's a Turkish- style bath nearby.

We went over to the old town -

that bath isn't there anymore -

it was underground with arches...

The owner was a friend of mine - and he kneaded him good.

Massaged him, worked him over thoroughly,

went through several runs, hot and cold, soap, etc.

We had green tea and he felt wonderful.

He would talk about it many times afterwards.

We chose a location in Isfara and sent all our equipment there.

The AD was meeting the caravan on location

when suddenly there was an earthquake.

The AD called and said - the hotel is nothing but rubble.

There are corpses in the courtyard.

How can we go?

How did Tarkovsky make his decision?

Tarkovsky... was a complicated man.

He never liked making decisions.

In this particular case he made me the scapegoat,

because I said that morally we had no right to go.

Both of us had small children -

how can we go to a place of disaster?

Andrei claimed that "the crew refused to go."

He was very upset that he couldn't do it in Isfara.

Nature kept him form making it in a Zone

that really looked like a site of a nuclear disaster.

That was the first crack in the film.

Nature was the first stone that fell out of this wall.

Nature and literature are always inextricably linked.

I try to read something and understand it as though for the first time.

And the success of this insight depends on the atmosphere of the piece.

The text is not as important as this atmosphere

that had given birth to it in the first place,

and that is meant to be communicated to the audience.

And the matters of timbre, technique, everything else -

all of these depend on the right sense of atmosphere.

When you lose this sense - you're lost.

We went to western Ukraine and found another location.

It was the outskirts of a smelting factory.

- Similar in nature... - Right.

Andrei said: it's toxic here.

First earthquake, now toxic.

It was pretty toxic, but you could still film.

But the real issue was something else -

he wanted to go to the midlands. Unconsciously.

We couldn't find anything,

but the combination of this so-called midlands climate:

i.e. brush, hazel-wood, etc. - with the abandoned power plant -

that we discovered completely by chance -

this combination finally pleased him - more or less.

I'm telling you all this

because the film started breaking down right then and there.

- You mean Kaidanovsky? - Kaidanovsky also.

According to the script Kaidanovsky is an evil man

who goes to the Zone in order to destroy these people

and to win back his daughter's health.

In the final version he became a kind of... guide,

or a Christ... basically it was turned upside down.

Why did you hit me? He wants to destroy it!

He wants to destroy your hopes! Give it to me!

When I saw the final version it was turned upside down.

I think Andrei was completely unprepared for this film.

He was busy staging Hamlet - at the Lenkom.

I would say that Shakespearian tragedy, Hamlet in particular,

is not about the physical death of the hero

brought about by his obsession with vengeance or justice.

The point is that he basically condemns himself to death

when he sets out to right his "crooked age."

A man that devotes himself to the service of mankind,

to the task of repairing the ruptured thread of time -

by surrendering himself to the historical process,

by becoming a kind of catalyst -

he invariably dissolves in this process.

This danger of perishing in the name of progress -

of disappearing completely -

that is the tragedy of Hamlet because he is dissolved in it

and serves merely as a catalyst of this historical movement.

Remember, he used to run from the set to the theater for the applause -

I think he could not do two things at once.

Naturally, like any serious creative person... This, that, and the play...

A play, a bit in the circus - this is no way for an honest artist.

He was always taking up a script that he'd already...

...already outlived, overcame...

...and he had rehearsals every day - he was all about Hamlet.

The worst of it is that the entire preparatory process -

the creative process that takes place at one's desk -

it's not just a matter of learning the score -

you have to keep in mind that you will be dealing with living beings.

How do you communicate it?

For the record we should say that the fact that I had removed

Larisa, Tarkovsky's wife, from the lead role

earned me a blood enemy.

I remember that.

Larisa Tarkovskaia wanted to play the part of the Stalker's wife.

She had her debut in The Mirror

as the woman who trades a rooster for earrings -

a grim scene, where they kill the rooster.

Larisa wanted to play Tarkovsky's mother -

she thought herself both wife and mother - and probably daughter.

She wanted to play all the women parts.

When the struggle for the lead in The Mirror took place

she was not yet confident of her place,

and Tarkovsky chose Terekhova, who played it marvelously.

Larisa was very offended, and hated Terekhova.

The two had a very difficult relationship,

and some scenes she had to be... taken off the set...

You have to know Terekhova, who's completely crazy too -

It was not pretty.

It was pretty tense.

When Tarkovsky decided to do theater,

and they were thinking about casting Hamlet,

Larisa wanted to play Gertrude.

And again Terekhova got the part over her.

Larisa was very sure of her acting talents

and she really wanted to play the wife in Stalker.

Rehrberg was fiercely opposed to it.

The entire crew was against it.

There were screen tests: Larisa did one.

I think it was not a convincing performance.

Then they shot a test with Alisa Freundlich.

Alisa was seated in a static pose before a static camera

and you could do with her anything you wanted.

And she did two takes - absolutely killer.

The main thing you felt a life story with Freundlich.

You felt those years lived with this Stalker,

that suffering that her life has been.

On the one hand there was Freindlich, who just astonished us.

Andrei even wanted us to put that test in to the final cut of the film.

Then he said, let's put the audio track - she'll never do it like that again.

How could a director get such an idea?

You can't film somebody and use a different audio track.

Freundlich even got mad: does he really think I can't do it again?

He was not an actor's director.

There are actors' directors, that wasn't him.

If an actor wasn't up to par he did not care that much.

He could do with a fake tear and Pergolesi on the soundtrack

to cover the bad actor.

Because he was always using every other means of expression.

There was a pretty harsh conversation...

When Andrei came to look at the set -

and he was pretty drunk -

we still did not know who we were filming the next day.

I said: you still haven't picked an actress. We shoot tomorrow.

They spoke in the next room, near where I was working.

Rehrberg came right out: Who do we shoot?

The actress? Or the wife?

Tarkovsky was vague. He said: what do you think?

Rehrberg said exactly what he thought.

He was right, but he was pretty blunt.

Tarkovsky said, I'm not my wife's paramour.

Of course we'll film Alisa.

But Rehrberg found himself with a very powerful enemy.

Larisa never forgave him for it.

Larisa believed that Rehrberg deliberately lit her badly

at her screen test.

That he did it to keep her out of the film.

She said: he won't get away with it!

You'll see that Rehrberg will never work with him again.

She was very supportive of Rehrberg during the filming of The Mirror.

But his lifestyle was not to her liking -

she was afraid Andrei would take after him.

There were always some kind of conflicts between them,

but there was nothing serious.

And they did begin work on the Stalker together.

"It really is like a marriage, the director and the DP..."

"ITALIAN DIALOGS" Rome, 1982 archival recording.

Panfilov: "It really is like a marriage, the director and the DP..."

Tarkovsky: "Sure! A DP is crucial!"

Panfilov: "A divorce is final here!"

Tarkovsky: "No going back!"

- You have to look after them. - And their nature shows...

Larisa: Andrei looked after him too much...

- You looked after Rehrberg too much... - I had no choice.

Panfilov: I think that if you take it seriously...

...that's the only way. - No other way!

You'd be, "Gosha, what'dya think? This ok? That ok?"

Tarkovsky: Because I know him, and he's a swine!

And if you don't pamper him, he won't lift a finger.

And what happened?

Halfway through, I had to tell him to get the hell off my set!

Larisa: He behaved obnoxiously on the set.

Tsymbal: When you started work on the film,

did you discuss the shoot, the lighting, for example?

Rehrberg: A bit here and there, I don't remember now.

You said something interesting about scale earlier...

A lot was decided directly on the set...

We had a lot of experience with that on The Mirror.

Half the film was invented on the set.

The script kept changing.

Back to The Mirror.

He invited me to work on a film titled "A Very White Day."

We worked for half a year, just talking about it.

He was nervous, kept scratching himself.

I was scratching myself too by the end of it.

Then the film was shelved and I went on to a different film.

Tarkovsky wouldn't talk to me after that for some time,

because I refused to go back to him.

But I think Rehrberg was a great choice:

I couldn't do what he did.

I like directors who work with improvisation,

because a director must always be "new" -

I like learning from him.

Andrei had a great working style -

if you suggest something to him, he snatched it up.

Rehrberg basically saved Tarkovsky on that film,

because Yusov wouldn't do it...

Andrei and I did a few films together and

we were perhaps weary of each other.

Yusov was not happy about this kind of confessional style.

Mother had to answer a whole lot of questions

and her interview had to be filmed in secret.

We had a script that went through a lot of changes,

because it did not please anyone, for various reasons.

And so we started work on the weakest, most obscure section:

the dreams and visions of the boy...

The studio curator Skubina would run after him on the set

begging for some bits of script to submit to the studio heads.

There was virtually no script. That's how they worked.

Well we made up a bunch as we went along.

For example: nature is always preventing the boy

from returning to the house:

either the wind, or the rain, or what have you.

Then we wrote the text: "I keep dreaming of my childhood home..."

"where I can never return..." The text came later.

"The same dream comes with astonishing regularity.

It seems to command me to go back to that place,

so painfully familiar, where my grandfather's house stood,

where I was born over forty years ago.

Right on the kitchen table, covered with a crisp white cloth.

Every time I mean to enter, something keeps me back.

I keep seeing that dream. I am used to it."

That was already inside us -

Andrei was telling the story of his childhood, and I - of mine.

The scriptwriter wrote about his. Everything mixed together.

This was evident in the final product: it was an improvised film.

And that is where its special charm comes from.

We made up half the film and improvised the other half.

The trouble was the film had 17 different final cuts...

Of course you could do that in the Soviet Union.

They understood each other very well.

It was just the right combination.

Andrei needed that kind of understanding from his DP.

You can invent a set, invent a situation, invent a mise-en-scene,

imagine the details of the set, plan the lighting,

work out the blocking,

and finally put it all into practice.

Basically this was true of nearly every scene inside the house:

Tarkovsky's childhood home.

This was all worked out in the art director's studio,

the three of us sat down and sketched it out,

planned camera angles,

even such details as the mirror on the wall,

which reflects children standing in the doorway,

through which we see the fire outside.

But this kind of advanced planning was very rare for this film.

We could talk about the counterpoint of color:

the green vs. the red of the fire.

We could talk about fire and water -

that combination has always interested artists.

If you want to know about my favorite shot: this is it.

For me it sets the tone of the aesthetic of the film

and this is just how I imagine this woman:

she was so lofty and so lovely - that's how she was.

And you can see the changes in the composition here:

at first she is low and cast down, then...

the view seems to be irrational...

I can't really say why it was done this way.

It seems to be some kind of an inner, psychological turn.

Were you operating the camera, or did you have an assistant?

That's good.

The best things I did came to me intuitively,

in a dream, unconsciously...

A multilayered image cannot come from a rational consciousness.

Andrei loved his childhood. I less so, perhaps.

But that communion with nature I learned in childhood

had its influence on my interaction with people and nature.

The child is a significant part of our lives.

A time when you are perfectly open, still untainted...

Unless of course you have some bad genes.

The strange thing is that that childhood

stays with you for the rest of your life.

You see, The Mirror may be my best film because...

Because it was Andrei's top work, as far as I'm concerned.

He gestated it. It wasn't written...

It came out of him. And all autobiographical films

are typically the director's best films.

That's when their very nature comes out.

It is always the truth, which is crucial.

Konchalovsky never had that autobiographical film -

perhaps it's still to come.

It think it will come.

The Stalker Chronicle. Part II

Let's talk about the making of that establishing shot:

The main thing was the script and the text.

We shot a scene in the room with these three people

and with that text.

I think we used a medium length lens.

When we developed it there was nothing there.

Andrei said: How come Bergman can do wide and we can't?

Let's use the widest lens we have (I never like doing that) -

and hope it comes out.

We shot it again with the wide lens, same interior.

Developed it - nothing there.

He says: I got it. We have to get a "longer" lens,

and use a different camera angle.

So the grips had to put a hole in a concrete wall

- That was me! - You too?

We put the camera outside

and shoot the same thing all over again.

Develop it - nothing there.

It wasn't a matter of...

And what about busting up the road to the station...

Basically blood was spilled, and nothing gained by it.

In the end he built a studio set for that scene.

In the end... that's another story.

This was the beginning of the end for Rehrberg:

whatever he shot, however he shot it -

we reshot scenes many times with different lenses -

many different angles -

certain things were beginning to drive us crazy.

Even the grips were becoming frustrated,

and they usually don't care as long as they're working.

They were ready to work 24 hours a day

as long as there is a final product.

Imagine what the DP was going through.

The relationship was becoming strained:

There were always jokes and jibes on set,

but here the situation was very tense.

I remember when Rehrberg finally said to Andrei:

Andrei, let's take it easy.

Two geniuses on the same set can be too much.

There was a deathly silence.

Tarkovsky pretended not to hear that remark.

From the book by Konchalovsky: Low Truths.

I remember the summer of '63.

We were at the summer house. There was an argument.

Andrei was standing by the window.

It was raining. Andrei turned around and asked:

You think YOU're the genius?

I did not answer.

There was a silence. We heard the sound of rain hitting leaves.

I looked at him and knew exactly what he was thinking:

he thought he was the genius, not I.

As a major artist, he was acutely aware

of being underestimated, slighted.

It was a real tragedy for him.

He was constantly railing against Cannes,

and yet he dreamed of getting the Grand Prix.

Why did he need it?

Alas, he was all too human, as far as I saw it.

First they replaced the art director, then the second AC.

- They replaced Boym? - Not because he did something wrong.

He had to go to Tashkent to do sets for a ballet.

From the Diaries of Tarkovsky, translated from the French:

May 28, 1977. Shooting difficult, nearly collapsed.

Boyd is drinking. If I don't get rid of him now

I'll never work with him again.

The same goes for Rehrberg.

They are not serious. They have no ambition.

They are mediocre, infantile creatures. Bastards. Halfwits.

Well, he may have thought so, but the bottom line is:

no matter how much Rehrberg or I drank -

he is the one in charge.

Then comes that terrible moment when you mount the "scaffold"

and you must raise your arms.

And the first moments - it either goes right, or it doesn't.

There are 106 people in the orchestra.

Each did or did not sleep well or eat well that day.

He may have had a fight that day.

And that creates such pressure, such resistance -

it happens without any intention from the players.

The first 10-15 min goes to creating some kind of diffusion

between my state and their state.

Two states fusing and becoming a creative process.

The rest is easy.

The music takes over: piano, forte...

You don't think about it, because it's going on already.

What can I say? My conscience is clean.

If we drank, we drank all together.

But we sure did drink.

Sure there were moments when Rehrberg outdrank him,

and he outdrank Rehrberg too plenty.

I don't believe it happened, and Andrei said then:

The only thing we have so far is Boym's set.

That set was built at Mosfilm.

I think he was happy with the first shots in the studio.

The set that was built later was very similar to Boym's set.

They were identical.

This is confirmed when we look at the shots from Stalker

and compare them to cuttings from the original version.

We spent several years looking for this evidence,

and found them by chance in the archive of Rehrberg's assistant,

who worked with him at the beginning of the film.

From the recollections of Feigina, Tarkovsky editor.

I have the materials from the original Stalker,

shot by the marvelous DP Rehrberg.

It is brilliant in both direction and cinematography.

That film is a tragic story

the entire footage turned out to be unusable.

These lines were written in 1988,

for a collections of memoirs dedicated to Tarkovsky,

edited by his sister, Marina.

Two years later Feigina was killed in a fire

and the materials burned with her.

The deal with the film stock was that it was crap.

Plus, the stuido lab was missing a processing step.

It wasn't just our film that got ruined:

there was no black on two other films.

Sure, there were "thin spots," I admit it.

I shouldn't have held them in as long as I did.

Finally the results were unsatisfactory,

I did not thinks so then, I don't think so now.

You could print it in the west - maybe.

But you couldn't print it here.

When we had these dismal failures I asked Rehrberg,

Why didn't you test the film stock that you brought with you?

The problem was the film stock?

That was part of it.

There is such a thing as technical inspection.

The main culprit, that... chief engineer Konoplev, who died...

He says, "What's this? I don't test film stock!"

"Let them worry about it. The studio can do tests!"

I say, You're the DP, working for a Soviet studio.

You think they're gonna do anything for you?

"That's not my problem. It was the lab's fault."

- So did you do tests? - I never do tests!

So you think that's not your job? Then what's your job?

That's it! He was drunk then. That's it! he says.

He came with some whore too...

Andrei, I'm not working with any of you again.

I'm going abroad!

Just before that you shot a film for Soloviev on the same stock.

Right. White Night Melodies.

Everyone was very happy.

They processed it in Japan.

They tested the film prior to shooting -

but that was the lab's job, right?

Right, we got back a print on Kodak stock,

it was so good the head technician at the lab showed it to everyone.

- That's why you chose Kodak. - That's why.

But what third party sold us the stock - nobody knows.

I don't know what the problem was.

Misfortunes always come in droves:

it wasn't just the stock;

they did not have a proper setup at the lab.

When they started beating me up over it

Nakhabtsev came by with a box of film stock

and showed on the label the extra processing step.

Kniazhinsky and Nakhabtsev had the same problems.

I happened to be in the third auditorium, by accident.

There were lots of people, studio heads with Sizov in command.

They were viewing rushes from Stalker.

It was incredibly beautiful.

I remember one shot that made it to the final cut:

A shot of a mossy bog overlooking a void.

A fantastic scale trick. Incredibly beautiful.

Everyone's quiet, just watching.

Waiting for the committee to say something.

I don't remember if Rehrberg was there.

Nakhabtsev was there. And he defended Rehrberg

as the head of the cinematography department.

Or at least he defended the cinematographer's craft.

Suddenly Sizov says: Andrei, it's out of focus.

You'll have to reshoot.

He said it out loud.

Rehrberg was blamed for the complete failure of the shoot.

They started blaming him for everything.

800,000 rubles was a big deal back then.

They had spent about 500,000 of the budget by then.

They had to excuse themselves somehow

and they decided to blame it all on Rehrberg.

But they couldn't do it.

He was perfectly innocent, as far as technical things go.

Me and Adnrei had patched things up by then -

he was a little mad at me for backing out of The Mirror.

I say: what's the matter?

He says, Rehrberg did a bad job. Most of it is unusable.

I say, impossible.

Let me show you the footage, he says.

I can't watch 6,000 feet of footage -

I just don't believe it's true.

I understand the cinematography of Stalker,

and I understand what's experimental there.

I know that he had pushed his film stock to the limit.

Can we make a deal - play it like that for all eternity.

One more time please.

Rehrberg spoke his mind, maybe a little too bluntly,

in front of the writers.

He said something about the script, about some scene.

And it may have been the last straw.

And this is how Andrei reacted to it.

That the was probably the pretext.

I learned one thing from this whole Stalker disaster:

Andrei needs a lot of time to gestate something.

He wasn't allowed to work for a long time,

and when he was finally allowed to make a film

he didn't have enough time to get his head around the script.

And Rehrberg, with his typical frankness, told him straight out.

That was not a nice thing to swallow.

That was the beginning of the tensions.

Then there was all this bad stock,

and it was the end.

He just said it to him in his usual manner:

told him just what he thought about it all.

Not right away, it was all building up.

But before the final parting he even managed

to say something to the writers,

when they came up to rework some part of the script.

It was directed at Strugatsky more than at Andrei...

Basically I told Andrei that he should stop shooting,

rewrite the script, and check into a hospital,

both him and me.

When was this?

That was in Tallin.

Andrei was afraid that they won't let him work again.

He had to keep going.

When the row became pretty intense

one of the Strugatskys came down to my room

and told me to stay out of the script.

In response I told him what I thought of the dialogs.

I said: I can't stay out.

Next day we are shooting in a hotel in Tallin,

he calls me: "Andrei, everything will be fine!"

I said, do you remember what I told you last night?

He doesn't answer. Maybe he did not remember.

I said, I told you I never want to see you again!

You can go back to Moscow, or you can keep boozing here,

we'll never see each other again.

I'll never shake your hand again!

And I've never said hello to him since.

because he betrayed me!

Always with his girls... so shameless...

Oh, he knew how to party! That genius!

Who's this Tarkovsky? Never heard of him!

Listen, I didn't want to do it...

But I had to throw him out, halfway through the shooting.

Finally Andrei reworked the script the way Rehrberg wanted it,

but he never admitted it.

What is typical of Rehrberg's work as cinematographer

is what I consider to the be the highest understanding of film art today.

He does not merely put together a scene,

he puts together the context of several scenes.

Only when taken together can they attain this highest value

and determine the composition of the whole,

the value of the entire production, the whole film.

The first step is to understand what the artist had in mind.

And for me any work of art that is intended for interpretation

is first of all a human document.

And my relationship to it when I perform it.

The Stalker Chronicle. Part III

Andrei was able to shoot the film again

using the momentum of the initial filming.

He shot it seemingly under optimal conditions.

And when he made it

he realized that it was not the film he should have made.

But how could you excuse yourself:

you can't just come back to the studio and say:

I was a little rash... I could do better...

And so he had to use these strange, perhaps cruel means -

I mean he had to sacrifice Rehrberg.

Tarkovsky never showed any footage to his crew.

Once I was able to sneak into the projection booth,

where they were watching the rushes

and I saw some of the material, and it astonished me.

The image was pretty monochromatic

and reminiscent of what we saw in the final version of Stalker.

But the skies were the color of lemon, acidic.

The first Stalker was largely based on special effects,

on strange and mysterious events, taking place in the outside world.

From the Diaries of Tarkovsky, published in Paris.

Aug 26, 1977 Everyone will be new: the DP, the designer.

I want to try to get Abdusalamov.

And the script.

The Strugatskys are trying to rewrite the script

for the new Stalker who must not be a junkie poacher.

He must be a believer, a devotee of the Zone.

We must start everything from zero.

Do we have the strength for it?

I must send an article about MosFilm to the Pravda -

about the primacy of matter

and the secondary nature of our consciousness.

Must tell the studio chief Sizov about this concept.

As far as I know Sizov loved Tarkovsky

and permitted him many things he would not permit others.

I was on set when they launched Stalker.

The set was a burnt out hut.

Rehrberg and Tarkovsky came and said: this is garbage.

And the hut was really burnt - it took a lot of work.

The entire studio staff came in to see this set,

but Tarkovsky just said: we can't use it.

We have to rebuild it.

And he was alowed to rebuild it from scratch.

It was a whole new set.

From the Diaries of Tarkovsky, published in Paris.

Aug 26, 1977 I arranged with Kalashnikov:

he is a professional that can do a great deal more than Rehrberg.

When he takes on a problem he has to find a solution,

and when he has no problems to solve

he feels himself creatively impotent.

He yearns for problems that he can solve.

And he shall have them.

When I was removed from the film and replaced by Kalashnikov,

who was brought in many times to "save" films,

I presented him with a pen and said:

Take this pen. What for? he says.

I say: you'll have to write a script.

He says: I don't write scripts.

And he went off. Shot 1,500 meters.

And when he realized that he isn't going to get paid he ran off.

Because it did not interest him, and there was no money.

- So then this other genius showed up... - Another genius...

Our friend Kalashnikov, who is just unbearable. He and his wife.

- Just unbearable. - I didn't get it. He got scared...

Scared he couldn't get the job done.

And he refused to film.

They couldn't work it out with Kalashnikov.

I don't know why. They were different people.

- I thought you liked him... - What he shot was not bad...

Even better than Rehrberg's.

But it was just NOT BAD.

Because Kalashnikov... he just can't get above a certain level.

He is a professional, and no more than that.

It was not enough for me.

I saw some things... And he didn't like my working style.

From the memoirs of the art director Abdusalamov.

Kalashnikov and I took off. Poor man.

He couldn't calm down the whole trip back.

What was I thinking? Trying to work with a genius...

I came to Tallin - it was script version #9 by then.

He acted in my film Triptich in '70 and designed the set.

Andrei heard that he was a brilliant artist,

and decided to invite him.

I left Tarkovsky to avoid a conversation about his wife.

Andrei went back to Moscow, I stayed behind -

his wife started gathering some signatures...

as a kind of protest.

I said, don't do that, it's not Andrei's style.

If you want, I'll rewrite it.

If Andrei says so, I'll sign it...

- Sign what?

That the crew has such and such complaints...

She was the one running the show.

So I left.

When he came back and found me gone she told him all kinds of stories.

God know it wasn't true.

The set was full of intrigue.

Very peculiar personal relations evolved around the "Empress,"

as she was known on the set.

A very peculiar system of worship.

Tarkovsky never got wind of it,

kind of like rulers never get accurate reports of their subjects.

I am innocent before Andrei and I never offended her.

But you just couldn't work in that setting.

You can say I anticipated the events. I left just like Rehrberg.

Some story. But... I think we did all we could -

me, Rehrberg, Boym, and Voronkov, the old colorist at Mosfilm,

who was a teacher to all of us.

It is collective work. Stalker is a group work.

That Andrei put his name there instead of mine - so be it.

We all did our jobs earnestly.

And I think Rehrberg also did his job well.

It's all Larisa's doing. That spinner of intrigue.

Their relationship, I would say, is pretty demonic.

First of all, she poised herself as a kind of savior of Andrei:

a modest Russian woman, taking on the weight of the world,

asking for nothing in return,

a Russian angel, guarding a brilliant artist.

But as she established herself more and more

especially after she gave birth,

she kept claiming more and more for herself.

To the point where she claimed to be that pure source

from which Tarkovsky drinks his inspiration and energy.

She ruined all his relationships with all former friends,

all former associates,

You told me that after the film was suspended Larisa called

and invited you to spend the New Year's with them.

Right. I imagined they wanted to patch things up.

The artists turned out to be a lot more corporate:

they just refused to work.

Ramazin, Begubsky... Abusallamov did a little work.

But he wasn't really on the level...

And he would not work with anyone else.

I knew Larisa.

I remember her back when she was just his assistant.

She would place a flower on his desk every day.

This was all during my time,

at the height of our friendship -

when he got married, and disappeared -

he hid it from us.

I don't think he was the kind of person who had friends -

meaning friends with whom you discuss personal questions.

I think that he hid all his personal issues very deeply.

His relationship with Larisa, the reasoning behind it.

Why it had to be her.

Why he was embarrassed by her, afraid of her.

Why he couldn't leave her.

Why she was a witch, why she was an angel -

this is all in his films.

But none of us would even think of saying anything to him

about Larisa or any other thing like that -

maybe somebody like his mother could.

I'm sure she did say something at the beginning.

Maybe Marina or his father talked to him about it.

But that was all behind closed doors,

and I don't know what his responses were.

I think probably it hurt him...

By that time Andrei had already walked

a long and difficult road in cinema -

as everyone knows.

His personality had changed a great deal in those years.

I can't even compare the young Andrei -

working on Ivan's Childhood -

and the Andrei who made Stalker.

These are two different people.

The process of crafting an image

is informed by the artist's worldview.

The worldview is shaped by the artist's time,

country of residence, culture...

his daily interactions,

his unique intellectual and physical attributes.

This painting was done during the filming of Stalker,

the artist is Dmitri Shushkalov.

Andrei valued him highly as a painter.

Andrei liked it very much.

Dima tried to recreate his inner world in painting.

Here we have Tarkovsky himself -

Larisa, of course -

her daughter, their son Andrei -

In the background you have the Stalker

and even farther back you can make out

the various frequent visitors to their house.

A certain Araik, and Zhenia,

the manager of an antique furniture shop.

Andrei was uncompromising in terms of aesthetics.

Otherwise he was a soft, spineless person.

He could be talked into anything.

Especially if Larisa was the one talking.

She understood that in him right away.

It could never happen to Andron -

that his wife would be bossing him around -

deciding who gets to be his friend and who doesn't.

On the last film I first understood

what it means to take pleasure in making films.

- I never imagined...

... that you could work like that with a DP.

It's like a woman you love and you live with her.

- After all the films, after Yusov... - Right, right!

It's like as if my wife ran away,

and I was suffering, going out of my mind -

then by chance I met anther woman -

..no, no - and then we would get married -

and suddenly - I saw the light!

My god! why in the world did I ever waste my time on her?

What a strange life it is...

Don't be afraid of anything. Change everything!

It was all coming from Larisa, even though I...

I couldn't say it was all her fault -

I mean she's really a nobody.

Tarkovsky made the decisions - it's his fault.

So Andrei was a harsh man, a cruel man?

I suppose it comes with the territory.

I mean the territory in this country.

In Russia, it's always... where there's a dictatorship -

someone has to be a dictator.

The director had the State Committee over his head

and he became the dictator of his crew.

I thought to change them - and they changed me!

In their image, after their likeness.

Future used to be simply the continuation of the past.

All changes were somewhere far beyond the horizon.

Now the future has fused with the present.

Are they ready for it?

They want to know nothing. They only know to eat.

Let's get back to Stalker.

Right. Andrei stopped filming for the winter,

rewrote the script,

and in the spring started all over again.

And he shot it all fresh.

This was only possible in the USSR,

and it was only possible for Andrei.

Shoot 1,500 meters three times over -

and they're basically the same.

Minor changes - I don't remember.

- The hero was different - Right, the hero's different.

As far as the image goes it was more or less the same.

For Tarkovsky man is part of the environment.

Right. Sometimes he gets blamed for it. Unjustly.

Man is part of nature...

And not always the most important part - in the frame...

No - I wouldn't go there...

all that stuff - light more important that actors...

- Kniazhinsky's cynicism. - It's cynical and it's wrong.

It's all in close-ups there. I always loved filming faces...

...from the lifetime of ants, we used to call it...

Nonsense.

But my work with Kniazhinsky -

those were the best days of my life.

In terms of cinematography, personal relations...

What a delicate, intelligent man...

So loyal, so trusting, an ideal DP.

I doubt Kniazhinsky added anything to the film.

Kniazhinsky could never equal Rehrberg.

I think Rehrberg became a scapegoat,

and was replaced with Kniazhinsky -

who was a fairly skilled professional,

but in terms of \tenderness -

which is the key to this film, its highest pitch -

in terms of subtlety, refinement

he was far inferior to Rehrberg.

- That one, that shit! - Who?

Rehrberg - who'll never make a film again -

he doesn't know how anymore, he ate himself up.

- Who is he working with now? - He was with Talankin...

Yes that awful "Shooting Stars" -

In 1984 the jury at the Venice Film Festival

was so impressed with "Shooting Stars" -

an adaptation of an Astafiev novella,

so "dreadfully" photographed by Rehrberg -

that it established a new prize: a golden lion for cinematography.

But as a DP Rehrberg was not sent to Venice

and he never received his prize.

We used photographs that we found in a war museum -

that's how it was in real life:

corpses, people getting scrubbed, that bottle there...

At that time war films mostly used the old "newsreel" look -

we decided to do it differently, to make a color film,

and at the same time stay true to the spirit -

kind of harsh colors too.

It seemed to me pretty modern back then.

Some of the sequences are very strong,

especially the hospital scene,

that blood transfusion - right after the dance.

A great contrast.

I worried that they will want to change the text -

add their various safety devices -

but it was a good film.

Of all the films that were made from my stories

this is the best one.

He had his share of insults,

but you can't really insult this man.

He had real dignity -

insulting him was like insulting yourself.

They wanted to tear us apart.

Because any partnerships or individuals that rise above the norm...

Basically the film got done - but there was a pile of corpses

and it was shot three times.

It's too bad they managed to break us up,

because I would have had a different life.

I would have probably gone abroad with him,

but I would have come back.

I can't live anywhere THERE. I have to live HERE.

Some of the material shot by Rehrberg

did make it into the final cut of Stalker.

If you remember that storm that sweep across the foam -

that was shot by Rehrberg.

There were no purifiers, and god knows what we were breathing -

the stench was unbearable.

It may be that all those who have since died

may have gotten their various illnesses right here.

Both Tarkovsky and his wife died from lung cancer.

Solonitsyn died from lung cancer.

And many who worked on the film are gone.

HAPPINESS FOR ALL, FREE OF CHARGE

AND LET NO ONE DEPART CHEATED!

Tarkovsky's dream came true:

he left the SU and was hailed a genius.

But he paid a high price.

Judging by the way Andrei dealt with his other DPs -

I saw the film about the making of Sacrifice -

it is clear that he trusted Rehrberg most of all.

It wasn't the same with Kniazhinsky.

I was annoyed that for the first fourteen days

Tarkovsky was looking through the camera.

I believe you had something to say about that?

I imagine that for the first week or so

Andrei was just checking to make sure.

It was probably hard for him without the language.

He wouldn't stay with the camera

unless he was working with a bad DP, and that was rare.

Only on Stalker he did everything by himself.

He must have thought himself a better DP.

During the filming he spoke a great deal about you.

He said that you and I are very similar

and I took it as a compliment.

Tarkovky's diaries were published by Larisa.

When Tarkovsky was still alive

Larisa would sometimes show me these diaries.

This was in Rome.

She'd say "Look at what he's writing, the bastard!"

I had always wanted to build a home, a family -

but how can I do it with a woman like Larisa!

"Can you believe that son of a bitch!"

Seriously, that's how it was, I'm telling the truth.

Larisa was enraged by what he wrote -

whether he meant it or not.

I hear that the published diaries are heavily edited by her.

If you could, what would you say to Rehrberg today?

I'm afraid that I couldn't...

The fact that he took part in some events

organized in memory of Tarkovsky - that means a lot to me.

Even through he was still very hurt by what happened.

It is very dear to me. But - I doubt I could say anything to him.

I regret that I did not know him better.

Now I understand that an entire world has vanished with him,

a deep and meaningful world, which I never knew.

Shostakovich wrote, I was at first quite frightened

by Mravinsky's methods. I thought he was nitpicking -

he would interrogate me about every note,

demanding I resolve all his difficulties.

But by the fifth day I understood

that this was the correct method.

And I took my own work more seriously

when I saw how seriously Mravinsky took his.

Andrei Konchalovsky studied at the Conservatory

but he did not become a musician.

Tarkovsky dreamed of becoming a conductor.

But it was Rehrberg who got Mravinsky's baton as a present.

EPILOGUE

Tarkovsky's last film was shot in Sweden.

The Royal Theater in Stockholm put on a play by Erland Josephson -

the actor who played in his last film -

about the loneliness of a director, who had defected from the SU.

Tarkovsky left behind friends and colleagues,

who loved him and helped him realize his boldest visions.

In the early '80s Ingmar Bergman wrote:

I love and admire Tarkovsky. I think he is one of the greats.

But I think Tarkovsky is beginning to imitate himself.

The scene of the death of the hero in The Mirror

had a strange significance.

He played that part himself, though you couldn't see much of him.

He shot it on the eve of his birthday.

Everyone was a little moved and uneasy about it,

even if everyone laughed it off.

When he wanted to see how he would look in that bed,

he would trade places with Rehrberg,

and Rehrberg would lie down

and both tried out that death bed on the eve of his birthday.

In the end, all I wanted was to be happy.

And what will happen to your mother -

if you don't get up off this bed?

Nothing... All will be well.

All will be...

I think that the '90s were tragic for Rehrberg,

and perhaps they sped up his demise.

There was no cinema.

The kind of cinema that he could do.

And there was no money for it.

Astafiev is not getting anything,

and we've known each other since "Shooting Stars."

No one will give money -

Novels are hard these day...

Well, I have a novella, for god's sake...

Yes, he would be the one to do it.

Because there is so much subtext there -

very little action...

He knows how to do that.

"Do you have a director?"

I think we can find somebody if we look hard enough.

Outside that clique.

Because nothing good comes from there.

The tragedy was that he had amassed an incredible amount of experience -

and he had to make commercials,

and I think he raised the bar there -

because today you can't stand looking at badly shot ads.

Rehrberg brought dignity to the commercial.

I was talking to some of my former colleagues in the ad world,

and I wondered, why don't they use Rehrberg?

They said, he takes too long.

I couldn't understand it. We worked very quickly.

And we never had any fights.

No, because when he told us it's shit, we agreed.

Then I understood that he works slowly

when the director doesn't know what he's doing.

He couldn't just make trash,

even when the director and the client

were perfectly willing to make trash.

So of course he got on their nerves.

I feel bad that he will never make anything like The Mirror,

or even something like the ads we made together.

That's not so important, I guess,

what is important is that one of my closest friends is gone.

I can't call him up anymore and say, I'm coming over for breakfast.

Without asking permission.

I think it is a very human loss.

For me, for a few others.

It's a great deal more than all his contribution to art.

He was a very strange, unique man.

I don't know anybody else like him.

He was a man born in the wrong time, in the wrong country.

A man with a complicated and contradictory life,

which I think very few have really understood.

In my studies of the history of philosophy

I have come to understand

that you cannot get rid of the concept of fate.

All eras had their own understanding of fate, sure.

Antiquity had its fate, the middle ages had its own fate.

There are many shades of meaning.

But if we had to choose one principle,

I would say freedom is very important.

But fate is also important.

It plays an important role.

Freedom and Fate.

No, no, there is no censorship now.

There is freedom of choice, but there is no choice.

"...fantastic beams that span

the entire width of the Manege.

One of the listeners said: it could be rebuilt,

but you couldn't repaint the Mona Lisa.

The original is dead.

We have to understand: this is the original!

If Mona Lisa burns down, you couldn't repaint it.

We have to understand: the original is on fire!"

I had a great emotional shock yesterday,

because even these walls are now gone.

A new age is dawning,

and we have to say goodbye to our illusions.

Will you come back when this is rebuilt?

I won't come, and I won't give them a single photo.

I don't want this museum.

Andrey's films - that's his museum.

What happened here is my personal tragedy.

Moscow will take little notice.

Everything will be fine. A business will be here.

They manufacture faucets or toilets.

Everything is nice and smooth.

Clean, as they say. Renovation, clean.

This is a funeral, as far as I am concerned.

The process of crafting an image

is informed by the artist's worldview.

The worldview is shaped by the artist's time,

country of residence, culture...

his daily interactions,

his unique intellectual and physical attributes.

Written and directed

by Igor Maiboroda