The Steamroller and the Violin

The Steamroller and the Violin (Каток и скрипка, 1961) is a short drama by Andrei Tarkovsky, available to watch online on iFILM. It was the graduation film of the director who would later make Solaris and Mirror, shot in the courtyard of an old Moscow building and already stamped with his eye.

Seven-year-old Sasha heads to violin practice every morning, and every morning the local boys are waiting to mock him. One day Sergei steps in — the driver of the red steamroller flattening the road outside. That small act of protection grows into a friendship between a grown man and a child: Sergei lets the little "musician" take the controls of the machine, Sasha plays the violin for him. The whole story unfolds across a few hours of a single day, with a promised trip to the cinema and the jealous glances of a young woman working the yellow roller nearby.

These are intimate forty-six minutes in which Tarkovsky first tries out what would become his visual language: puddles, reflections, rain, light on wet asphalt. He wrote the script with Andrei Konchalovsky, and the film picked up a prize at a student festival in New York. Anyone curious about where the director began should start right here. Stream The Steamroller and the Violin (1961) online on iFILM.