The great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made only seven feature films in his short life. (Find most of them online here.) But before making those, he directed and co-directed three films as a student at the All-Union State Cinema Institute, or VGIK. Those three films, when viewed as a progression, offer insights into Tarkovsky’s early development as an artist and his struggle to overcome the constraints of collectivism and assert his own personal vision.
The Killers, 1956:
Tarkovsky was fortunate to enter the VGIK when he did. As he arrived at the school in 1954 (after first spending a year at the Institute of Eastern Studies and another year on a geological expedition in Siberia) the Soviet Union was entering a period of liberalization known as the “Krushchev Thaw.” Joseph Stalin had died in 1953, and the new Communist Party First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced the dead dictator and instituted a series of reforms. As a result the Soviet film industry was entering a boom period, and there was a huge influx of previously banned foreign movies, books and other cultural works to draw inspiration from. One of those newly accessible works was the 1927 Ernest Hemingway short story, “The Killers.”
Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Hemingway’s story (see above) was a project for Mikhail Romm’s directing class. Romm was a famous figure in Soviet cinema. There were some 500 applicants for his directing program at the VGIK in 1954, but only 15 were admitted, including Tarkovsky. In The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie describe the environment in Romm’s class:
Romm’s most important lesson was that
it is, in fact, impossible to teach someone to become a director.
Tarkovsky’s fellow students–his first wife [Irma Rausch] and
his friend, Alexander Gordon–remember that Romm, unlike most other VGIK
master teachers, encouraged his students to think for themselves, to
develop their individual talents, and even to criticize his work.
Tarkovsky flourished in this unconstrained environment, so unusual for
the normally stodgy and conservative VGIK.
Tarkovsky worked with a pair of co-directors on The Killers,
but by all accounts he was the dominant creative force. There are three
scenes in the movie. Scenes one and three, which take place in a diner,
were directed by Tarkovsky. Scene two, set in a boarding house, was
directed by Gordon. Ostensibly there was another co-director, Marika
Beiku, working with Tarkovsky on the diner scenes, but according to
Gordon “Andrei was definitely in charge.” In a 1990 essay, Gordon writes:
The story of how we shot Hemingway’s The Killers
is a simple one. In the spring Romm told us what we would have to
do–shoot only indoors, use just a small group of actors and base the
story on some dramatic event. It was Tarkovsky’s idea to produce The Killers.
The parts were to be played by fellow students–Nick Adams by Yuli Fait,
Ole Andreson the former boxer, of course, by Vasily Shukshin. The
murderers were Valentin Vinogradov, a directing student, and Boris
Novikov, an acting student. I played the cafe owner.
The filmmakers scavenged various props from the homes of friends and
family, collecting bottles with foreign labels for the cafe scenes. The
script follows Hemingway’s story very closely. While two short
transitional passages are omitted, the film otherwise matches the text
almost word-for-word. In the story, two wise-cracking gangsters, Al and
Max, show up in a small-town eating house and briefly take several
people (including Hemingway’s recurring protagonist Nick Adams) hostage
as they set up a trap to ambush a regular customer named Ole Andreson.
One notable departure from the source material occurs in a scene were
the owner George, played by Gordon, nervously goes to the kitchen to
make sandwiches for a customer while the gangsters keep their fingers on
the triggers. In the story, Hemingway’s description is matter-of-fact:
Inside the kitchen he saw Al, his
derby cap tipped back, sitting on a stool beside the wicket with the
muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun resting on the ledge. Nick and the cook
were back to back in the corner, a towel tied in each of their mouths.
George had cooked the sandwich, wrapped it up in oiled paper, put it in a
bag, brought it in, and the man had paid for it and gone out.
In Tarkovsky’s hands the scene becomes a cinematic set piece of
heightened suspense, as the customer waiting at the counter (played by
Tarkovsky himself) whistles a popular American tune, “Lullaby of
Birdland,” while the nervous cafe owner makes his sandwiches. Our point
of view shifts from that of George, who glances around the kitchen to
see what is going on, to that of Nick, who lies on the floor unable to
see much of anything. “Tarkovsky was serious about his work,” writes
Gordon, “but jolly at the same time. He gave the camera students,
Alvarez and Rybin, plenty of time to do the lighting well. He created
long pauses, generated lots of tension in those pauses, and demanded
that the actors be natural.”...MORE
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