#1 NOSTALGHIA - The Greatest Films-a list by Carlos de Mello

NOSTALGHIA by Andrei Tarkovsky - 1983 with Oleg Yankovsky, Erland Josephson, Domiziana Giordano - Andrei Tarkovsky is almost certainly the most famous Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein. His visionary approach to cinematic time and space, as well as his commitment to cinema as poetry, mark his oeuvre as one of the defining moments in the development of the modern art film. Tarkovsky was born in 1932 in Zavrzhe in what is now Belorus. He was the son of noted poet Arseni Tarkovski and actress Maria Ivanovna. Tarkovsky studied Arabic at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Languages between 1951 and 1954 and geology in Siberia, before enrolling in the famous VGIK Moscow film school in 1959. In the early 1980s, Tarkovsky left Russia permanently. The few remaining years of his life were plagued by a constant struggle with the Soviet authorities to allow his family, particularly his young son, to join him. His filmmaking career started again in Italy where he followed the television documentary Tempo di viaggio (1983) with his most accomplished film since Mirror, Nostalgia, written in collaboration with the distinguished screenwriter Tonino Guerra. A gracefully sustained mood piece, Nostalgia is as concentrated as Mirror was expansive. A Russian poet played by Oleg Yankovsky arrives at an Italian spa accompanied by his interpreter (Domiziana Giordano). He is in Italy to research a book, but in spite of the extraordinary visual beauty of the spa, he is afflicted with homesickness. He befriends a local eccentric played by Erland Josephson who locked his family up for years to await the end of the world. The almost plotless simplicity of the narrative allows the viewer full access to the atmospheric richness Tarkovsky and his new cameraman, Giuseppe Lanci, create. The most richly textured, almost tactile film by a director without equal in bringing objects and surfaces to life, it is no exaggeration to say that the ever-present moisture of the spa at times seems to seep through the screen. The film's conclusion, an extremely long take of a dying Yankovsky trying to cross a pool carrying a lighted candle in response to a request by Josephson, could be the most wrenchingly moving scene Tarkovsky ever shot. Tarkovsky died in 1986 and is buried in Paris. His influence is visible in the work of several major contemporary directors. ---- The New York Times Review By VINCENT CANBY Published October 5, 1983 = ''Nostalghia'' (Nostaglia), which will be shown at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center today at 9:30 P.M. and tomorrow at 6:15 P.M., is the first film to be made outside of Russia by this relentlessly poetic, Soviet director. The setting is Italy, where the hero, Gortchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), has come to research the life of a 17th- century Russian composer who spent a long time in Italy, was terribly homesick, finally went home, became an alcoholic and committed suicide. In the course of the film, Gortchakov does very little research and a lot of musing, which often takes the form of lovely flashbacks and fantasies, most of which are seen in monochrome as compared to the living color of the other lovely images. Loveliness, I'm afraid, is really what this movie is all about. The Italian landscapes, frequently heavily misted, the ancient churches, the old towns, the occasional peasant, and the leading lady (Domiziana Giordano) are so lovely one feels that Mr. Tarkovsky's private world was created for camera-carrying tourists. Gortchakov is homesick, but his homesickness is a kind of madness (I think). He is rude to his Italian guide, Eugenia (Miss Giordano), who would like to have an affair with him. He spends a lot of the time in very dark rooms. The only person who touches him is a genuinely mad fellow (Erland Josephson) who, when last seen, is setting fire to himself in Rome after exhorting citizens to seek the answers to their problems in nature. Mr. Tarkovsky, whose earlier films include ''Andrei Rublev,'' ''Solaris'' and ''Stalker,'' may well be a film poet but he's a film poet with a tiny vocabulary. The same, eventually- boring images keep recurring in film after film - shots of damp landscapes, marshes, hills in fog, and abandoned buildings with roofs that leak. The meaning of water in his films isn't as interesting to me as the question of how his actors keep their feet reasonably dry. In ''Nostalghia'' Mr. Tarkovsky also shows a new if unproductive fondness for the image with a dark door or a passageway in the middle of the screen. Sometimes actors walk in or out of those passageways and doors, but mostly we just wait and hope. Nothing happens