The Steamroller and the Violin, Andrei Tarkovsky's graduation project (1960), received eulogy and criticism at the same time, but despite much trouble was finally made open to the public. While this film contains the subject based strongly on the so-c...
The Steamroller and the Violin, Andrei Tarkovsky's graduation project (1960), received eulogy and criticism at the same time, but despite much trouble was finally made open to the public. While this film contains the subject based strongly on the so-called Soviet style, it also does some of the film director's individual styles of film language, image, techniques, and themes, either in their early embryonic form or in somewhat direct one.
Interestingly enough, in this film are there several images of mirror, water and sound, and a couple of techniques related to the images are experimented. First, mirror in the film indicates Sash‘s exploration into the fantastic, unrevealed and anti-automatized world and the impossibility of communication between Sasha, the main protagonist of this film, and his mother who does not permit him to go outside. This technique in turn appears repeatedly in his later films such as Ivan's Childhood (1962), Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1973-4), and Nostalgia (1980).
Like mirror, water image - suggesting the reflection of the objects as it's the main image - provides a unique unreal atmosphere, combined with the effect of sound. The sound of the steamroller and violin, for instance, can be music themselves closely related to the stream of the narrative. As Tarkovsky puts it, not only the harmonized sound of the violin but also the noisy sound of the steamroller can be a music that is created from player's or driver's soul. More importantly, Andrei Tarkovsky intends to show the consolidation between work and art under the Socialist regime, between the spiritual and the material, and between Sasha and Sergei, through combining the cacophonic image between the violin and the steamroller, which, however, goes for nothing, expecting the future; it takes more time to accomplish.