Andrei Rublev

Andrei Rublev (1966)
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Actors: Anatoly Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, Ivan Lapikov

Synopsis: A portrait of medieval Russia refracted around the proxy of the icon painter, Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn).

Review: In a body of work containing celluloid tomes of such staggering force and poetry, Andrei Rublev might be Andrei Tarkovsky’s most purely sensory film. That’s quite a claim considering it is a three-hour epic centred around an actual historic figure – Russian icon painter, Andrei Rublev – but what makes the film so special and enduring is the way that Tarkovsky’s vision transcends the mere people politics of his frame to conjure an idea about Russian history (Rublev intones “Russia will endure” – echoing themes from Aleksandr Sokurov’s masterly Russian Ark), and human history in general.

Focusing on the first 25 years of the 15th century, Rublev is less the film’s main player than its conduit, as the panorama of Russian medieval life appears around him. It is, of course, purely coincidental, but Andrei Rublev – though different in immediate style – reminded me very much of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthazar of the very same year. Both take a nominal ‘messiah’ figure and place them on an odyssey of cruelty and exaltation, all the while depicting the politics of the society around them, and also of the dark heart of human nature.

The episodic nature of Andrei Rublev is one of its greatest strengths. We go from scenes of great viscerality and consternation (the Tatar raids and the casting of the bell) to great introspection and meditation (Rublev’s time in the workshop of Theophanes the Greek and when Rublev takes a vow of silence after his monastery is ransacked by Tatars).

It’s the sheer sensory excellence of Andrei Rublev that endures the most though. It embellishes the notion of Tarkovsky as a poet with a camera. Some of the most mesmerising sequences are the most distanced and depoliticised: the frequent segues into rainfall (imprinting the permanence of existence versus the ephemerality of human striving), the boy shot with an arrow and falling serenely into a river of peaceful reeds (echoing the opening scenes of Solaris), and, most mesmerisingly, Rublev recapturing his calling when comforting the young, desolate bellmaker after his passion project is over. The near-closing shot of painter (sight) as one with bellmaker (sound) is almost an actualisation of the philosophy of Tarkovsky – a filmmaker dedicated to sanctifying the special, mysterious properties of existing as a transient being in this permanent, tumultuous world. (April 2018)