Andrei Rublev is a beautiful study of an artist’s relationship with his/her social circumstances. With patient camera movement and long takes, Tarkovsky presents Rublev, the 15th-century Russian icon painter, as someone who is internally split between a desire to paint in ignorance of social turmoil and a curiosity to get as close as he can to feudal power, non-Christian beliefs, or the lives of the Russian peasantry.
There is no shortage of memorable scenes in Tarkovsky’s body of work, but the scene of the pagan feast in Andrei Rublev might be one of his most masterful feats. In the beginning of this scene Rublev is in his curious mode. He is gravitating, almost floating, towards the bacchanal of naked men and women shouting, dancing and running between trees. For part of the scene it is easy to believe that none of the pagans see Rublev or care about his presence. When his trespass is finally noticed, the viewer snaps out of the dream at the same time as Rublev.
My most recent viewing of Andrei Rublev coincided with my reading of Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. As the latter looks at the scientific ideas of Johannes Kepler and Galileo, the book finds in the history of astronomy points when religion and science were complimentary to creativity and when they were in conflict. Religion and art are the two tectonic plates of Andrei Rublev; Rublev is the historical needle that is sensitive to their shifts and collisions.
Long films are scrutinized before they are watched. The prospective moviegoer wants to know if the long runtime is “worth” it, whatever that means. A typical Tarkovsky film is slow and long, and the unsympathetic audience hates the style that makes one of his films beautifully contemplative, often dream-like. Andrei Rublev is structured in eight parts and book-ended with a prologue and an epilogue. The film’s pay-off is that Tarkovsky is able use a long runtime to show the extent to which Rublev’s suffering is cumulative. The accumulation of suffering is revealed in the eighth part, when Rublev is a marginal observer of a young bell-maker tirelessly working to cast a bronze bell for a church. Everything Rublev has seen and done–including the killing of a soldier who attempted to rape Durochka–surfaces in his sympathy for the young bell-maker, who ends his successful bell casting alone in a field sobbing, thinking that he failed because he never knew his father’s secret to casting.
notes on cinema 