Andrei Tarkovsky died in December 1986 in Paris, aged fifty-four, from lung cancer. He had been in exile from the Soviet Union since 1982. His body of work - seven feature films - was scattered across Soviet archives, West German production companies, Italian co-productions, and various distribution arrangements that had accumulated with no central coordination.
The question of what happened to those films after his death is not a cinephile curiousity. It is a question about the conditions under which cultural objects survive, are preserved, and remain accessible - conditions that are almost entirely legal and economic rather than cultural or aesthetic.
THE RIGHTS SITUATION
When a filmmaker dies, the rights to their films do not automatically go to a single coherent estate that can make rational decisions about preservation and distribution. They go to whoever held the rights before the filmmaker died - which may be the production company, the studio, the national film archive of the country where the film was produced, the filmmaker's personal estate, or some combination of all of these.
For Tarkovsky's Soviet-era films - Andrei Rublev, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker - the rights were held by Mosfilm, the Soviet state film studio, which transferred to the Russian federal government after the Soviet Union's dissolution. Mosfilm's archives are enormous and historically mismanaged; the condition of the prints and negatives varies enormously. The rights situation for international distribution is complicated by the post-Soviet reorganisation of film rights across what had been a single state.
For his later films - Nostalghia, made in Italy, and The Sacrifice, made in Sweden - the rights were held by different European production companies, each with their own decisions about distribution and restoration.
THE RESTORATION QUESTION
Restoration requires money, a rights holder willing to fund or co-fund the work, and a rights holder who cares about the result being as close to the filmmaker's original intention as possible. None of these is guaranteed.
The Criterion Collection has been the most significant force in funding restorations of films that have no commercial champion - Tarkovsky, Ozu, the Taiwanese New Wave, various others. The restoration of a classic film from degraded prints can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; Criterion funds those restorations as part of the release package, using the edition's sales to partially recoup the cost. This model works for films that have an established cinephile audience willing to buy physical editions. It doesn't work for films without that audience.
WHAT STANLEY KUBRICK UNDERSTOOD
Stanley Kubrick was meticulous about the legal structure around his films in ways that were, at the time, unusual for a filmmaker. He maintained creative control over distribution through contractual provisions that limited how his films could be shown, on what formats, with what alterations. He personally oversaw the colour grading of video releases. He withdrew A Clockwork Orange from UK theatrical distribution in 1973 and maintained that withdrawal until his death in 1999.
The Kubrick estate - administered by his widow Christiane - has maintained this level of control over his work after his death, resulting in high-quality restorations and considered distribution decisions. Warner Bros., who holds the rights to most of the Kubrick catalogue, has worked with the estate rather than against it. The result is a body of work that is available in better quality and better presentation than many filmmakers' comparably significant work.
THE FILMS THAT GET LOST
For every Tarkovsky that gets eventual restoration and distribution, there are dozens of films that don't. The international cinema of the 1960s and 70s - the African films, the Latin American films, the Asian films that received limited distribution and even more limited preservation - exists in a state of partial loss. The BFI National Archive, the Library of Congress, FIAF (the International Federation of Film Archives) work to address this, but the resources available for preservation are a fraction of what the scale of the loss requires.
The specific films you can't watch on MUBI or BFI Player or anywhere else are not absent because they're unknown. Many of them are known, celebrated in their national cinema contexts, historically significant. They're absent because the legal and economic infrastructure for preservation and distribution hasn't been built for them.
The specific films you can't watch on MUBI or BFI Player or anywhere else are not absent because they're unknown.