Andrei Tarkovsky classics Solaris, Stalker, The Mirror and more besides are now available in full (and legally) on YouTube.
Celebrating its centenary in January 2024, Russian production company Mosfilm has spent the past few months quietly uploading many of its classic films to YouTube.
Among the additions are several works by Andrei Tarkovsky, including perhaps his most famous films, Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979). Solaris, adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel, is a simmering masterpiece – the story of psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatis Banionis), who’s sent to a distant space station to investigate some strange behaviour among its crew. Once there, he’s told that the planet the station orbits, the titular Solaris, may be sentient – and capable of somehow turning memories into physical reality…
Stalker’s a sci-fi piece of a very different sort. It’s loosely adapted from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic, and sees a group of scavenger, led by Alexander Kaidanovsky’s Stalker, head into a barren wasteland known as the Zone. Their aim is to find a room which, they believe, is capable of granting wishes – though the journey to that room is a hazardous one, with the Zone surrounding it filled with anomalies that defy the laws of physics.
(Roadside Picnic also provided the basis for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series of survival shooter videogames.)
Mosfilms’ selection of Tarkovsky joints – which are nicely transferred from the original prints – are all handily kept in one playlist. The two major omissions are Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986), his last two films – though they were made outside the Soviet Union and are probably subject to the decadent west’s copyright laws.
Zooming further out, Mosfilm’s YouTube channel offers a trove of other classics, including Andrei Rubliev, Ivan The Terrible and the singularly distressing war drama, Come And See. Do have a stiff drink handy if you choose the latter as your Friday night film.
Oh, and if you’re after more genre films from the USSR, do check out Soviet Movies Online – there’s a startling number of titles on there, including the 1968 TV adaptation of Solaris. It’s not as good as Tarkovsky’s, but it makes for an interesting point of comparison. You’ll also find on there the earthy Hard To Be A God and the bleak yet captivating post-apocalyptic mood piece, Dead Man’s Letters.
Thanks to BlueSky’s Elicia Donze for bringing this corking selection of films to our attention.
