User Reviews

I am not a Tarkovsky fan and I feel rather proud that I've not spent the boring hours needed to take in his whole oeuvre. But I like this little film for itself, without reference to his later works. To me, it is full of the sounds, sights, terrors and illuminations of the days of childhood. While on some political level, the little violinist's situation may be a metaphor for the artist in Soviet society who is both persecuted and envied, to me it simply expresses the reality of childhood bullying. The child's encounters with his violin teacher, with a little girl, with a roadway worker and with his mother are all realistic and plausible. I love the realism of the situation of a fatherless child striving for male bonding and constrained by the feminine and orderly influences in his life to renounce it. And I can also see the extremely well-crafted photography, lighting and composition, the interplay of rain and sunlight and the almost ethereal primary colours of the film as the basic components of a lonely seven-year-old's day as transcended by imagination and poetry. Anyone who has spent his childhood in a moderately ancient and relatively unpolluted urban landscape, who has been singled out from his peers because of a special talent or status and who has on occasion taken refuge in daydreams can identify with this film.

Spoilers herein.

I credit Tarkovsky with genius, PLUS he was able to use that genius to create a few of the world's most powerful films.

This isn't one of them. This is obviously a film made not from his soul but to run through some jackbooted superior's checklist. It is cloyingly sentimental. It actually tells an unambiguous story rooted in reality. It has some competent framing and images, but they don't annotate the situation in the unique fashion that he would when in his stride.

Tarkovsky's genius was in creating a netherworld halfway between non-film reality and Joycean dreamstate. He was further able to sustain visual meditations, often for a very long time, on elements of that world. Frequently, those elements would trigger lifealtering poetic constructions in one's mind, different in each viewer. There's none of that here. You may be disappointed unless you stay away.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 4: Has some interesting elements.

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.

'The Steamroller And The Violin' is a strange and bizarre film. Indeed, while I was watching it, I kept in mind the state of the world at that time when the film appeared, and the thing that I found most fascinating was being able to get a glimpse of every day Russian life during that time period. The filmmaking techniques are notable and the camera shots are very well-done.

However, I was mostly just puzzled while watching 'The Steamroller And The Violin', mostly because nothing much really happens throughout the film. It is the story of an unlikely friendship between a young boy and a worker who he meets on the streets. The final shot of the film is of the little boy chasing the steamroller and jumping on back as they slowly trudge off into the sunset. There isn't really any moral value to this film in much respect. There is a little bit of anti-bullying material here, but other times the film just feels like a bunch of well photographed scenes of bizarreness a la films like Alejandro Jodorowsky's 'The Holy Mountain' from 1973. At times the film made me think of other oddities like 'Koyaanisqatsi', which also wouldn't appear until another twenty years, but 'The Steamroller And The Violin' is a much more linear tale than films like those two.

Overall, a well-made, strange, and bizarre piece of obscure Russian cinema yet again stands the test of time.

THE STEAMROLLER AND THE VIOLIN -----8/10.

It's hard to trace back exactly when Tarkovsky became a cinematic genius. Local and international audiences were shocked by his cold and bitter film about a kid who's life is engulfed in the horrors of WWII in Ivan's Childhood. He was only 30 and had already developed what would later become his trademark and main philosophy: the way in which time affects the overall atmosphere and pace of the story, while also creating some of the most beautiful shots moviegoers will ever have the pleasure to see. The movie became an instant classic and has never left the general opinion that it is one of the best debuts of all time. Just like Ingmar Bergman said back at the time, discovering Tarkovsky was like a miracle.

If you look closer into Tarkovsky's first steps into filmmaking, you will find that his most important short film is The Steamroller and the Violin. Made only two years before Ivan's Childhood, it was Tarkovsky's diploma film, and the first time with him as the main man behind the camera with directing and co-writing credits.

The film is about Sasha, a young boy who plays violin, and his short encounters with Sergey, a man who works as a steamroller driver. This is what most of the film offers, with its main focus on Sasha's learning about what life is from the perspective of a normal russian worker. He learns to appreciate food, as Sergey yells at him when he throws some bread to the ground, "do you think bread grows on trees?"; Sergey gets angry for obvious reasons, we barely see that he has any possessions, that slice of bread might have costed him hours of work, but Sasha didn't know that, he comes from a higher class than his new friend.

These are two worlds that Tarkovsky sets with the main purpose of making them collide. Sasha doesn't do very well at the violin classes, as he can't keep up with the compositions' tempo, "what am I going to do with you? Too much imagination..." says his teacher; and that exact same description is what Sasha is all about, he's the creative and expressive youth, one which arises from the depressive post-war era that affected the entire world. Some older kids make fun of him and his violin, they are more interested in playing and fighting than in making music, those are the values the last decades have brought upon them. Sergey is also a product of his era, he's destined to drive a steamroller and pray that he gets to bring food to the table, he doesn't know much about music, but we learn that he sees good in Sasha, a sort of good that needs some touch with the real world.

There's a very beautiful sequence when they go see a building being demolished. Sasha gets lost and loses touch with Sergey, and just then the wrecking ball bursts through the walls and the entire thing falls apart. He is afraid at first, but he quickly becomes marveled because of all the work that the people in charge are doing, it's probably the first time he had seen something like that. They then go to eat something in an empty building, and Sasha starts teaching Sergey how the violin works, what is its resonance, and the sounds it can make. He then starts playing, the way it is shot is just as wonderful as the music Sasha interprets, he plays it just the way he wants. Sergey lays back and enjoys the first concert he has heard probably in his whole life. There you have it, the entire short film in two scenes.

It is quite surprising to see something this uplifting and charming in a Tarkovsky film, but his fingerprints are all over here. The wide, textured shots; the atmospheric silences and his original use of music and sound design are present and give signs of what would then be perfected in Ivan's Childhood. Even though, we cannot deny that the short may feel like one of the very few instances where Tarkovsky tries to force certain feelings to come out of the audience, sometimes using music at the wrong time or some very questionable secondary characters. But nonetheless, this short stands by itself because of its attempt to portray the entire scope of what Tarkovsky's people suffered at the time in a very soft and caring way, these are the early marks of a true genius.