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| Violin And Roller |
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  (6/10)
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Runtime: 45 m |
| Public Rating: 8.33 (3 votes) |
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Drama |
Year: 1960 |
| Writer(s): Andrei Konchalovsky, Andrei Tarkovsky |
| Reviewed by: Vadim Rizov |
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Before Andrei Tarkovsky made the films he's remembered for, the ones about God, humanity, nuclear annihilation and other fun topics, he had to make his master's thesis. Tarkovsky was in Russia's most prestigious film school, and it was time for him to show his stuff. Wisely, he decided not to get too controversial his first time out and concentrated on making an "acceptable" film, full of "correct" themes and appropriately broad symbolism. If the result sometimes seems like an homage to Soviet silent film rather than a real Tarkovsky film, it's still an interesting watch.
Violin And Roller: the violin is represented by Sasha (Igor Fomchenko, who apprently never acted again), a young violin student struggling hard to gain the approval of his teacher, despite the fact that she thinks he plays too extravagantly. The roller is a steamroller, operated by Sergei (Vladimir Zamansky, a veteran Russian actor of all sorts of films that never made it over here), who gets the neighborhood kids to stop picking on Sasha. A friendship soon develops between the pair, as they learn about the necessary relationship between art and labor.
Full of stunningly obvious symbolism, even for the non-symbolically inclined, Violin And Roller is everything you'd expect from an ambitious student film: full of unnecessarily complicated shots, symbolism, and pretty disjointed in its pacing. Nevertheless, it's pretty entertaining, though it's definitely not representative of Tarkovsky's work as a whole. For example, the split-screen sequence comes straight out of the technique exercises of Soviet silent film. The story is party line stuff about the friendship between art and labor, young and old, etc. The only element that feels fresh (and the only really Tarkovsky-esque thing) is the ending, which defers the expected big speech in favor of a dreamy, wistful ending. Though Violin And Roller tells us a few things about what was expected of Soviet filmmakers in the 60s, it tells us only a little bit about Tarkovsky...except that he could make pure entertainment as well as anyone. Not half bad.
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