Arquivo

A seven-year-old violinist, Sasha, is being chased by taunting schoolmates when a steamroller operator rescues him. After spending a day together, their perceptions of the world change, but the women present in their lives (Sasha’s mother and the operator’s girlfriend) indicate new perspectives. The medium-length graduate student fi lm Tarkovsky made at VGIK, the state fi lm school, has a screenplay written in partnership with Andrey Konchalovsky, who is also the co-screenwriter of his classmate’s first two features. Cinematographer Vadim Iussov and composer Viatcheslav Ovitchinikov, two of the best professionals working in Russian cinema up to that point, also continued contributing to the director’s works during the 1960s. Tarkovsky did not usually speak about this fi lm, which presents a theme that he would later develop more fully: friendship in its deepest meaning and the obstacles before its declaration. The fi lm is not lacking in reflecti ons of the happiness associated with his years of formative fi lm studies next to talented classmates and mentors, who the director would preserve as collaborators and friends until he retired from Russia. The Steamroller and the Violin even manages to deal with the difficulties a character experiences in order to practice his own art, a theme that would be developed in depth with Andrey Rublev (1966).