In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

'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.

The Steamroller and the Violin is a nice little film that gains its underlying traction from being about two people who connect on a human level among others in this small Russian village who are mean (i.e. bullies) or just impersonal (a music teacher) or images of destruction and decay (a wrecking ball demolishing a building). There's even a few moments in the 43 minute running time where its 20-something director Andrei Tarkovsky displays some of the brilliance that one would see later on in his career. One such scene, a memorable one if maybe a little too short and strange, is where the boy Sasha (Fomchenko) is looking at a broken or cracked mirror in a store window and we see a kaleidoscope of images, of Sashaa, of his surroundings, of fragments of things and objects, and it comes closest to something out of Vertov in terms of the splicing and dissection of an image.The problem though in looking at this film today is context. If one can look outside the fact that one of the great directors of world cinema made this as a student film to get his diploma- not a true-blue revelation of his genius but a foreshadowing of his technical skill and sensitivity to actors- then one can see it as a decent little movie about unlikely friendship between a blue collar worker and a lonely little kid who each have their own knack at something. I'm sure if I saw a fellow student filmmaker make something like this when I went to college I would be impressed, but only because I was taking this and this person's previous work, a super-short adaptation of the Killers, as his only creative output.In being more critical, while the story isn't bad the performances are only average at best, with Fomchenko and Zamansky as the duo being only engaging enough as to not get too bored. It's mostly due to seeing some creative direction and little moments of beauty like the Steamroller listening to the Violin, so to speak, that one is really drawn in to the emotion going on. It's a minor work that doesn't say a whole lot that is truly great about Tarkovsky (or, for that matter, his co-writer and future director Konchalovsky), and seeing it once is enough... then again, seeing that last shot, the over-head of the boy coming up to the steamroller and riding away with Sergei in a moment of bliss, is a truly amazing image to be looked at repeatedly.

A foreshadow of things to come, which in its own right is a little-known jewel of Russian and world cinema...I would advise any beginning Tarkosvskologist to view this film twice: before and after viewing his masterpieces. Then, they'll understand...