Ivan's Childhood

Ivan's Childhood was the first feature film Tarkovsky directed after graduating from film school. He was still deciding whether or not to become a director and was trying to prove he had the talent and skills to be a director, so Tarkovsky "went for broke" in terms of techniques for shooting the film. Tarkovsky admits the film has its faults, but he still finds several scenes valuable.

Literature

While cinema owes much to literature, including dialogue and many of its stories, Tarkovsky insists cinema must break with literature in order to forge its own identity. The director as artist must be free to completely reshape stories which originated in literature (including the screenplay), in order to make that story uniquely cinematic.

Mirror

Mirror was a film Tarkovsky made in 1975. It was largely autobiographical, drawing heavily from Tarkovsky's childhood memories. Tarkovsky was criticized for being self-indulgent by...