Andrei Tarkovsky is universally acknowledged to be the greatest Soviet filmmaker of the last half of the twentieth century. In Kurosawa’s assessment following Tarkovsky’s death in the late 1980s, he had “no equal among film directors alive now.” In Ingmar Bergman’s words, Tarkovsky’s work was “a miracle.” His films are beautiful, intellectually challenging, and spiritually profound. They range from Ivan’s Childhood, an exploration of wartime experience through the eyes of a child; to Solaris, a philosophical essay in the form of a science-fiction thriller; to Andrei Rublev, an investigation of the power of art and spirituality. In this course, we will study Tarkovsky’s films and life, with attention both to his formal and artistic accomplishments, his thought and writings concerning art and film, and the cultural and political contexts of his work.