Stalker

 It is classified as a science fiction film, but it is anything but that "Stalker" (1979) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and starring Alexander Kadanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko among others.

Its the slowest science fiction movie that i have ever seen. The camera moves ever so slowly and with a purpose. The Stalker (Alexander Kadanosky) takes people to a distant place where ordinary laws of physics do not apply and it was probably a site where a meteorite once fell. That is called the Zone and it is a difficult path to traverse.

One can't go in a straight line and each step has to be carefully taken. The stalker takes two men - the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko) to the Zone. Inside the Zone there is a room where all your desires and wishes will be fulfilled. Its an allegorical film in the sense that to achieve such a state of consciousness that to achieve one's desires, a person has to pass through many obstacles and difficulties and hardship.

The script is intellectually challenging because a whole host of philosophical questions are thrown at the viewer. The camera work is absolutely astounding, the art design showing the ruins and remnants of an industrial building including dirty water is breathtaking and stark. Cinematography as usual is quite good. Andrei Tarkovsky's movies are difficult to follow yet there is something in it for the viewers, something deep and thoughtful that a viewer can relate to in his own life. IMDB 6/10 

Battleship Potemkin

 

Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 silent era film directed by Sergei Eisenstein. It is supposedly one of the greatest films of all time. Its a story of a mutiny on board a battleship Potemkin when the sailors are given poor quality meat and rebel against that. The officers round them up and order the officers to shoot them, but the officers refuse, marking the beginning of the workers' rebellion. One of the sailors Vakulinchuk dies in the melee and when his body is taken to the port of Odessa, the town erupts in anger against the then Tsarist regime. The Cossacks then come down and start randomly shooting many people, including women, children and old people. The battleship Potemkin fires cannons against the Odessa opera house and thereby signals its attention to protect the people of Odessa. Production values for the movie made way back in 1925 is stupendous. Some of the shots especially in the Odessa steps are quite brilliant.  Some of his shots have been copied by other movie directors, such as the baby pram slowly falling down the stairs in "Untouchables", With the orchestral music playing throughout the movie, it must have been a blockbuster movie way back in 1926 when it was released.    

Andrei Rublev

Andrei Tarkovsky's iconic cult film Andrei Rublev on the life of Russia'a greatest painter of Christian icons and frescoes in the 14th to early 15th century. The painter Andrei Rublev lived sometime between 1360 and 1430. In the film Andrei Rublev (played by Anatoly Solonitsyn to a great performance) is not shown actually painting anything and none of his art is shown until the actual Rublev paintings at the very end of the movie. Tarkovsky tells the story in parts moving from one episode to another. Christainity and Christain paintings were apparently not liked by the Russian princes of that era who frequently came and ransacked the churches, destroyed the paintings and the town and killed people and raped women. Then there were the Tartars who had Mongoloid features different from the Russians and they were also enemies of Christianity or did not understand them much. Pretty much there is lot of violence in the movie but not of the Tarantino kind. Tarkovsky has a different canvas. His shots of horses moving across the plateaus were magnificent. When the Russian princes ransack a church in which Andrei Rublev is hiding along with many others and many are then killed, Rublev manages to kill one Russian who is attempting to take a women upstairs apparently to rape her. Then Rublev goes silent to atone for his sin of having killed somebody. 

This movie is something of a cult classic among movie connoisseurs and Andrei Tarkovsky is also a kind of a cult movie director. This movie was made in 1966 at the height of the cold war when Russia was USSR and Leonid Brezhnev was the President. As with all iconoclastic movies, this also faced the wrath of the Russian censors for many years.