The Russia born Andrei Tarkovsky, 1932, made only seven full length films - Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker, Nostalgia, and The Sacrifice - yet the slender body of work has established him as the most important and well known Russian director since Eisenstein. His genius was recognized within his own lifetime by Jean-Paul Sartre, who championed Tarkovsky’s first feature, Ivan’s Childhood, and Ingmar Bergman, who regarded Tarkovsky as ‘the greatest of them all’.

    Regarding his first full length feature, Ivan’s Childhood, he says ‘it was his qualifying examination to see whether or not he had in him to be a director’. While one watches Ivan’s Childhood, a war film largely concerned with what happens in between two missions, away from the Front Line; the film starts at the end of one and ends at the start of the second, of what will be Ivan’s last mission. In....