Nostalgia · reception & legacy

1983 · Andrei Tarkovsky

How Nostalgia has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Divisive at Cannes '83 — many found it punishingly slow even by Tarkovsky standards — it's since settled comfortably among his most revered works, a pillar of the slow-cinema canon.

What's debated

The eternal Tarkovsky-ranking fight: is this his most profound film or his most inert — the one where the patience-as-virtue debate gets loudest.

Its footprint

The candle scene — one agonising, unbroken take at the drained baths of Bagno Vignoni — is one of the most referenced single shots in art cinema, shorthand for what 'slow cinema' can do that nothing else can.

Where it stands

A cinephile rite of passage: the Tarkovsky people graduate to after Stalker, and a fixture of every 'greatest final stretch of a career' conversation.

★ Did you know? At Cannes 1983 it shared a specially created prize (the Grand Prix du cinéma de création) with Bresson's L'Argent — and Tarkovsky was convinced Soviet jury member Sergei Bondarchuk had lobbied to block him from the Palme d'Or; within a year he announced he would never return to the USSR.