There Will be No Leave Today

Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky, Aleksandr Gordon

1959

****

There Will be No Leave Today is a student film by the directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Gordon who both attended the Russian State Institute of Cinematography in 1959. Based on a real postwar incident, the film is about an army unit trying to dispose unexploded bombs to save a small town. It was Tarkovsky's and Gordon's second film after The Killers and was produced while being students at the State Institute of Cinematography. It was commissioned by Soviet Television for VGIK students to make a film to be aired on Victory Day, the anniversary of the Capitulation of Nazi Germany in WWII, May 9, 1959. It was aired each year on this day for at least 4 years beginning with the initial 1959 broadcast. For a long time it was thought to be lost after it stopped being broadcast in the 1960s, but the camera negatives were discovered in the mid-1990s. It’s far more professional than any student film I ever made or any that my class-mates produced. The level of suspense captured is quite incredible, when it also feels like an ordinary day in many respects.  The short begins where we find a group of Construction workers as they find an old cache of bombs from World War II in an unnamed Russian town. An army unit is charged with solving this problem and we follow them as they get to work. The municipal committee decides that exploding the bombs would inflict too much damage on the town and so the army unit must transport the bombs manually to a safe site. After the entire town is evacuated, the soldiers carry the bombs one by one to the armored transport truck. The danger of explosion looms. As the army unit concludes its mission the population returns to the town as the bombs are simultaneously destroyed at the safe site. A rather simple tale but also very striking. If you cross The Hurt Locker and the last scene in 1974’s Juggernaut but take away all of the melodrama, then There Will be No Leave Today is sort of what you’re left with. The idea was suggested by the State Institute of Cinematography to Tarkovsky and Gordon as a practical exercise for the two film students. The main objective for Tarkovsky and Gordon was not to produce a masterpiece, but to learn the basics of filmmaking through making an uncomplicated and easy-to-consume film. The project was based on a real postwar incident. To prepare Tarkovsky and Gordon interviewed witnesses of the incident and visited army barracks to study the military. The script was written jointly by Tarkovsky, Gordon and a third scriptwriter who was later replaced by a group of scriptwriters. The main storyline of the film was created in the beginning of writing the script, and survived with the exception of some minor changes. According to Gordon, Tarkovsky finished and contributed the majority of the script, with the hospital scenes and the civilian/soldier who volunteers to detonate one bomb being Tarkovsky's ideas. Contrary to Tarkovsky's other student film The Killers, this film had a relatively high budget. The VGIK film school provided the equipment and a small part of the budget. The major part of the budget was provided by Soviet Central Television. The higher budget allowed for professional actors in the main roles, such as Oleg Borisov who was quite famous at the time. Other actors were Tarkvosky's and Gordon's classmates such as Leonid Kuravlyov and Stanislav Lyubshin. Other actors in non-lead roles were people from the province where the film was shot, working without receiving any compensation except the chance to appear in a film. The army also provided some support in the form of military equipment and troops as extras. The film was shot in Kursk over a period of three months, while editing took a further three months to complete. There Will Be No Leave Today isn’t a typical Tarkovsky film and it more resembles a Soviet propaganda film or docu-drama, with heroic soldiers and the grateful population of the town. The Killers was Tarkovsky experimenting and also imitating the gangster genre, while There Will Be No Leave Today was all about the skill of film making. It was two years later, with The Steamroller and the Violin where we saw a glimpse of his visionary genius. It’s a well constructed film with suspense and drama, but it’s for Tarkovsky compleatists and film students only.