Andrei Tarkovsky in "Voyage in Time," Facets Video, 1983

Non-masterpieces have their place: you may not have thought that Andrei Tarkovsky in his spare corpus never made a tepid or uninventive piece of cinema, from his student films to "The Sacrifice," but he has. Self-exiled finally from the Soviet Union and languishing in Italy with Antonioni screenwriter movie machine Tonino Guerra, Tarkovsky documented the ruminative, locale-hunting gestation period for the drama "Nostalghia," filmed for Italian TV in 1983. Credited to both Tarkovsky and Guerra, "Voyage in Time" (a redundant title that should’ve been translated from the Italian as the slightly more suggestive "Time Traveling") is a rare oddity for the Tarkovskyite, at times pretentious, but valuable as a casual (if not spontaneous) portrait of the man at work, trying to articulate his desires for the as-yet-unmade film, and also often not even attempting. Dislocation is everything: Tarkovsky’s apparently lost in the relentless Mediterranean sun, outside of Russia, despite having been perpetually at odds with his home country for his entire career, nurturing a universalist-cum-spiritual perspective that he nevertheless saw as Russian and struggled to make universal in his own head.

There’s a lot of landscape here (never as spacious as Russia in Tarkovsky’s films, of course; he clearly did not like densely populated areas, and never made an urban film), and bits of the old pals swapping discomfitures (the two "trade compliments like prostitutes," Guerra snorts, and Tarkovsky rolls his eyes), and Tarkovsky even admits that "Solaris" is "not so good," for being a genre film. "Voyage in Time" is a completist’s requirement, even if the last thing you want from a timeless, technology-less, transcendental zone-trip like "Nostalgia" is a better understanding of exactly how Tarkovsky worked his magic, and even if the disc’s subtitlers didn’t quite understand that when Tarkovsky discusses Antonioni’s "adventure," he means "L’Avventura."

"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" (Criterion Collection) and "Voyage in Time" (Facets, available as part of the two-disc "Tarkovsky Rediscovered" with "The Steamroller and the Violin") are now available on DVD.

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