'The Steamroller And The Violin' is a strange and bizarre film. Indeed, while I was watching it, I kept in mind the state of the world at that time when the film appeared, and the thing that I found most fascinating was being able to get a glimpse of every day Russian life during that time period. The filmmaking techniques are notable and the camera shots are very well-done.However, I was mostly just puzzled while watching 'The Steamroller And The Violin', mostly because nothing much really happens throughout the film. It is the story of an unlikely friendship between a young boy and a worker who he meets on the streets. The final shot of the film is of the little boy chasing the steamroller and jumping on back as they slowly trudge off into the sunset. There isn't really any moral value to this film in much respect. There is a little bit of anti-bullying material here, but other times the film just feels like a bunch of well photographed scenes of bizarreness a la films like Alejandro Jodorowsky's 'The Holy Mountain' from 1973. At times the film made me think of other oddities like 'Koyaanisqatsi', which also wouldn't appear until another twenty years, but 'The Steamroller And The Violin' is a much more linear tale than films like those two.Overall, a well-made, strange, and bizarre piece of obscure Russian cinema yet again stands the test of time.THE STEAMROLLER AND THE VIOLIN -----8/10.

Tarkovsky has said that Ivan's childhood was his first "real movie" - meaning, a movie which he put his heart and soul into, and a movie which defined to him if he got what it took to be a director or not (needless to say the answer). So I think it's justified to say that this movie actually is more of a dress rehearsal to his later works.In "Sculpting In Time" Tarkovsky presents very strong, even extravagant opinions on the use of colours-, on the structure-, on the use of music etc.- in cinema, which shows best in this picture in it's strange visual look. The strong and flashy colours make it look almost like a colouring book - it's not the most visually brilliant Tarkovsky, but you can clearly see the experimentalism, and how he was trying those theories in practise while making this, which to me, as a Tarkovsky fan, was very interesting to see.Overall, not a masterpiece - good human description (as expected), good actors, nice cinematography, but nothing too mind blowing. I think you get most out of this if you have a bit wider understanding about Tarkovsky's works, which allows you to see this as a gateway to understanding how Tarkovsky became Tarkovsky.

I am not a Tarkovsky fan and I feel rather proud that I've not spent the boring hours needed to take in his whole oeuvre. But I like this little film for itself, without reference to his later works. To me, it is full of the sounds, sights, terrors and illuminations of the days of childhood. While on some political level, the little violinist's situation may be a metaphor for the artist in Soviet society who is both persecuted and envied, to me it simply expresses the reality of childhood bullying. The child's encounters with his violin teacher, with a little girl, with a roadway worker and with his mother are all realistic and plausible. I love the realism of the situation of a fatherless child striving for male bonding and constrained by the feminine and orderly influences in his life to renounce it. And I can also see the extremely well-crafted photography, lighting and composition, the interplay of rain and sunlight and the almost ethereal primary colours of the film as the basic components of a lonely seven-year-old's day as transcended by imagination and poetry. Anyone who has spent his childhood in a moderately ancient and relatively unpolluted urban landscape, who has been singled out from his peers because of a special talent or status and who has on occasion taken refuge in daydreams can identify with this film.

Spoilers herein.I credit Tarkovsky with genius, PLUS he was able to use that genius to create a few of the world's most powerful films.This isn't one of them. This is obviously a film made not from his soul but to run through some jackbooted superior's checklist. It is cloyingly sentimental. It actually tells an unambiguous story rooted in reality. It has some competent framing and images, but they don't annotate the situation in the unique fashion that he would when in his stride.Tarkovsky's genius was in creating a netherworld halfway between non-film reality and Joycean dreamstate. He was further able to sustain visual meditations, often for a very long time, on elements of that world. Frequently, those elements would trigger lifealtering poetic constructions in one's mind, different in each viewer. There's none of that here. You may be disappointed unless you stay away.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 4: Has some interesting elements.