Alicia
I love this movie so much
Lovesusti
The Worst Film Ever
Onlinewsma
Absolutely Brilliant!
Aneesa Wardle
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
omer_faruk_aktas
Facing any of Tarkovsk's films in the eyes of the faithful promises awe-inspiring aesthetic journey that can tremble the angels far beyond the reach of the soul. According to those who can not speak very positively, the same films may be accompanied by intense confusion, distress and downright antipathy. (Sealed Time / Tarkovsky)Tarkovski became a student of Mikhail Romm when he entered the Moscow Cinematography Institute. When he received his diploma in 1961, he was praised for his name in the film Cylinder and Violin.For Tarkovsky's Cylinder and Violin, he says, "I did not try eclecticism before Ivan's Child was ruled before I started working at Mosfilm."In an interview with Ivan about his childhood, Tarkovski said, "I wanted to convey all the hatred I felt about the war. I chose childhood because childhood is the most contradictory state of war. It is not built on a plan in the film, it is based on the opposition between war and the child's feelings. This whole kid's family was murdered. When the movie starts, the boy is in the middle of the war. " Tarkovski tells the relationship between a cylinder and a Kemanda worker and a child. This film also reveals the unusual camera angles and complexity that Tarkovski will have at the peak of Ivan's Childhood. In terms of character and event cycle, Cylinder and Violin will form the basis of Tarkovski's poetic cinema understanding. The film and the metaphor of the dreams and dreams we encounter, Apple and indispensable Tarkovski cinema.For Tarkovsky, reasoning and even ethics requires that the formal logic be transformed into a "logic of the dream"; because according to Tarkovsky, the poems of dreams represent "one of the ways of being in the world's consciousness" and support our efforts to "face reality". (Sculp-ting in Time, p.21) Does the rhythm of life hinder your imagination?"What shall I do with you? Too much imagination. "The violin teacher tells Sasha in front of the metronome device, "What will I do with you too much imagination" presents an impressive metaphor for Sasha's dream world and our rythmic sense of real life.In the film, Sergei is a role model father who protects Sasha and her from bullies. The story of the roller driver and the violinist.Cylinder and Violin is a short story of Tarkovsky's visual composition filled with the mirror-reflection notions, the metaphorical atmospheric structure, the time of music and the painful yet sweet accompaniment of the main.Tarkovski writes in 1960 with Andrey Mikhalkov Koncalovski, a screenplay. Completed in 1961, the film is awarded first prize at the New York Student Films Festival. After Mosfilm Studios decided that director Eduard Abalov would not continue Ivan's Childhood, Tarkovski was hired to complete the project.
lefaikone
Tarkovsky has said that Ivan's childhood was his first "real movie" - meaning, a movie which he put his heart and soul into, and a movie which defined to him if he got what it took to be a director or not (needless to say the answer). So I think it's justified to say that this movie actually is more of a dress rehearsal to his later works.In "Sculpting In Time" Tarkovsky presents very strong, even extravagant opinions on the use of colours-, on the structure-, on the use of music etc.- in cinema, which shows best in this picture in it's strange visual look. The strong and flashy colours make it look almost like a colouring book - it's not the most visually brilliant Tarkovsky, but you can clearly see the experimentalism, and how he was trying those theories in practise while making this, which to me, as a Tarkovsky fan, was very interesting to see.Overall, not a masterpiece - good human description (as expected), good actors, nice cinematography, but nothing too mind blowing. I think you get most out of this if you have a bit wider understanding about Tarkovsky's works, which allows you to see this as a gateway to understanding how Tarkovsky became Tarkovsky.
MisterWhiplash
The Steamroller and the Violin is a nice little film that gains its underlying traction from being about two people who connect on a human level among others in this small Russian village who are mean (i.e. bullies) or just impersonal (a music teacher) or images of destruction and decay (a wrecking ball demolishing a building). There's even a few moments in the 43 minute running time where its 20-something director Andrei Tarkovsky displays some of the brilliance that one would see later on in his career. One such scene, a memorable one if maybe a little too short and strange, is where the boy Sasha (Fomchenko) is looking at a broken or cracked mirror in a store window and we see a kaleidoscope of images, of Sashaa, of his surroundings, of fragments of things and objects, and it comes closest to something out of Vertov in terms of the splicing and dissection of an image.The problem though in looking at this film today is context. If one can look outside the fact that one of the great directors of world cinema made this as a student film to get his diploma- not a true-blue revelation of his genius but a foreshadowing of his technical skill and sensitivity to actors- then one can see it as a decent little movie about unlikely friendship between a blue collar worker and a lonely little kid who each have their own knack at something. I'm sure if I saw a fellow student filmmaker make something like this when I went to college I would be impressed, but only because I was taking this and this person's previous work, a super-short adaptation of the Killers, as his only creative output.In being more critical, while the story isn't bad the performances are only average at best, with Fomchenko and Zamansky as the duo being only engaging enough as to not get too bored. It's mostly due to seeing some creative direction and little moments of beauty like the Steamroller listening to the Violin, so to speak, that one is really drawn in to the emotion going on. It's a minor work that doesn't say a whole lot that is truly great about Tarkovsky (or, for that matter, his co-writer and future director Konchalovsky), and seeing it once is enough... then again, seeing that last shot, the over-head of the boy coming up to the steamroller and riding away with Sergei in a moment of bliss, is a truly amazing image to be looked at repeatedly.
Galina
Andrei Tarkovsky's school graduation project, the short film Katok i Skripka or Steamroller and the Violin (1960), by the words of Russian critic Maya Turovskaya, the first rate film, is promise of the things that would come so powerfully in his later films. The most important part of the little film was the joy of showing the beauty and poetry of the ordinary familiar things. The whole world of the film is saturated in colors, filled by myriads of playful solar spots, mirror reflections (yes, mirror - one of the favorite Tarkovsky's images is already presented here), patches of light on water, all living, pulsing, sparkling. Tarkovsky's camera man, the famous cinematographer Vadim Yusov recalls that the idea of the film came to young director after watching the French short film "Red Balloon" (1956) by Albert Lamorisse that ran successfully in the theaters at the time. "Red Balloon" defined the color palette of Tarkovsky's movie. The dominant color for Katok i Skripka was red mixed with yellow and compared to blue in the sky above and in the clothing of two main characters, the young boy playing violin and the grown up man, the driver of a steamroller, who had became his friend, even if for a short time.I'd say that the first Tarkovsky's work is perhaps his most accessible, light, sweet, and warm - the terms we don't usually associate with the master of serious metaphysical, deeply philosophical, even cosmic films that lack conventional dramatic structure. I think it would be a good starting point for anyone interested in Tarkovsky's work. It is interesting to compare Katok i Skripka to Tarkovsky's next work, his first feature, astounding Ivanovo Detstvo (Ivan's Childhood), another film about a boy but completely different from Steamroller and the Violin.For his diploma project, Andrei Tarkovsky won the first prize at the New York Student Film Festival in 1961.