Striking French, Russian & Polish Posters for the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky

Near­ly thir­ty years after his death, Andrei Tarkovsky (many of whose films you can watch free online) con­tin­ues to win devot­ed fans by what some describe as his still-unpar­al­leled mas­tery of aes­thet­ics. Not only do all his pic­tures — and espe­cial­ly his lat­er works like Solaris, Mir­ror, and Stalk­er — present images of the deep­est rich­ness in a man­ner of the high­est refine­ment, but in so doing they come out look­ing and feel­ing like no oth­er films cre­at­ed before or since. So many cinephiles claim that one can iden­ti­fy their favorite direc­tor’s work by only a sin­gle shot, but for Tarkovsky this boast actu­al­ly seems to hold true (espe­cial­ly in the case of the nine-minute can­dle-car­ry­ing shot from Nos­tal­ghia). When we talk about Tarkovsky, we talk about aes­thet­ics, whether we talk about his films, his Polaroid pho­tos, or his posters.

Not that Tarkovsky’s per­fec­tion­ism had him exer­cis­ing total con­trol over the one-sheets that adver­tise his films, nor did he actu­al­ly com­mand every visu­al detail of every frame of the films them­selves. I would sub­mit, how­ev­er, that all who worked in the orbit of a Tarkovsky pro­duc­tion, from cin­e­matog­ra­phers to set builders, right down to the graph­ic design­ers, entered his thor­ough­ly real­ized and affect­ing aes­thet­ic real­i­ty. “Tarkovsky is one film­mak­er for whom I’d glad­ly have posters that sim­ply fea­ture gor­geous images from his films (of which there are an unlim­it­ed sup­ply)” writes Adri­an Cur­ry at MUBI, “but there are so many ter­rif­ic illus­trat­ed posters that I thought I’d just fea­ture my favorite for each film.” His selec­tions include the French one for Stalk­er, the Pol­ish one for Mir­ror (because you can nev­er ignore Pol­ish movie poster design), and the Russ­ian one for The Sac­ri­fice. It pays Tarkovsky one of the high­est pos­si­ble com­pli­ments: he cre­at­ed not only beau­ty, but works that inspire oth­ers to cre­ate beau­ty.

A col­lec­tion of the inter­na­tion­al movie posters for each of Tarkovsky’s major films can be found at Nostalghia.com.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online

Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

Tarkovsky’s Solaris Revis­it­ed

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Stu­dent Films, 1956–1960

The Mas­ter­ful Polaroid Pic­tures Tak­en by Film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.