This is possibly the only book that captures the essence of Tarkovsky even better than his own "Sculpting in Time", which is surely one of the greatest film theory books ever written. Extremely personal, the diaries offer a close-up view of T., from daily minutiae to spiritual and emotional crises. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to anyone who loves Tarkovsky.

At this time, this book book *is* in print in the UK, and is available from Amazon.com's British sister site, Amazon.co.uk.

Andrei Tarkovsky Diaries are real, 1st hand exprience from a talented writer and great cinematographer. He is giving reader a very real exprience from Russia in years 1970-1986. I wished I could read this book in it's original language when I felt it too close to my soul, and I wished pages never ended when I finished this book. Read it even if you are not a movie goer or watched none of his movies.

This is an excellent book that provides the non-experienced and experienced Tarkovsky viewer entry into the wonderful worlds in which he lived.

I also think that this book is too full of academic theory and techniques, and this may be the reason it comes off as so cynical. It works best in providing factual background that would be difficult to find otherwise. But when the book shades into critique, the tone becomes dry and pre-occupied, if not positively dispiriting - particularly when the co-authors subject Tarkovsky to their brand of Freudian analysis. The result is a disjointed collection of facts and vexing speculations, which on balance does a disservice to the poetry of the films. I personally much prefer Maya Turovskaya's book, which doesn't have the encyclopedic range of facts one finds in "Fugue" (a friend of mine described "Fugue's" method as "trainspotting") but is a far more inspired and illuminating combination of intelligent insight and love of its subject.

Johnson's and Petrie's work is an absolute essential resource for any student of film and any fan of Tarkovsky's wonderful work. When I bought the book, I was hoping that it would help me better understand the Russian context of Tarkovsky films and to help make some of the "murkier" parts of the films a little more lucid. The work does all this and more. This book offers a great deal of background on Tarkovsky's life, the Soviet film industry in which he worked, the people he worked with, and the cinematic style that made Tarkovsky's works so memorable. This is an absolute treasure of a book. Ignore those people who complain about the poor analysis of the films; they're wrong or stupid or both. The book's main focus is to help make Tarkovsky's work easier to understand and to provide background on Tarkovsky himself.

The first chapter's title is "A Martyred Artist?" and the question mark hints that some cherished preconceptions are about to be overturned. Tarkovsky seems to have enjoyed thinking of himself as a martyr, and the image has been enthusiastically endorsed by those in the West who believe in Hollywood freedom and Moscow manipulation - four legs good, two legs bad. Johnson and Petrie provide a perspective without slipping into that Charybdis of revisionist critics, the Dreaded Debunker Mode. The director emerges (from extensive interviews with a commendably large number of his collaborators) as a deeply dedicated, troubled artist, charming, impossibly perfectionist, sometimes childishly arbitrary and spiteful, hell to get along with but definitely worth getting to know. After some useful background information on the various hoops to be jumped through in the Soviet film industry and on Tarkovsky's own methods, there are individual critical chapters on all the major works after Ivan's Childhood, and the information they offer is often invaluable for a proper appreciation of the films. Particularly useful is the chapter on the outstanding masterpiece Andrei Rublev, which fills in some of the historical detail behind Tarkovsky's elliptical storyline. At the end are detailed plot summaries, running times and notes on different versions (interestingly, films like Solaris, released intact in the USSR, were horrendously hacked about in the "free" West); and four chapters covering matters of style which are perhaps the least substantial parts of this very satisfying book. The authors are remarkably fair to the Soviet film industry, presenting its bureaucratic meddlers' committees as not so very different from a Western studio or executive producer, and certainly not as monolithically philistine as we've often been led to believe. Tarkovsky was allowed virtually to make Stalker twice over when the original version didn't satisfy him - something Stanley Kubrick might possibly have finagled for himself, but it's hard to imagine anyone else in the West being permitted to do anything of the sort. Quite apart from its very fine critical comment, this book is a much-needed corrective to those myths about the director which have distracted too much attention away from the films themselves - attention which, as the book also shows, they ruthlessly demand and richly deserve.