Tarkovsky Season: Andrei Rublev (Dir Andrei Tarkovsky, 3h 3m, 1966)

Cinema loves the artist. Almost since the biopic came of age in the 1950s, so films about artists have seen cinema take in the great panoply of artistic expression, from the melodrama of 1965's The Agony and the Ecstasy, in which the painting of the Sistine Chapel becomes a battle of faith and practical artistic statement, to the more hagiographic, from Mike Leigh's Mr Turner to Ed Harris's Pollock, to the openly conceptual and artistically inspired, such as Loving Vincent, that places itself within Van Gogh's art, and Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch (1974), that spectacularly blurs the artist's style with his life in Watkins' familiar docudrama style. If these films have a single shared flaw, though, it is in their focus, in those of interesting men and women. Warhol, Van Gogh, Kahlo, Basquiat, become figures in abstraction, the films more interested in who they are and what they made, rather than what drove them to do so.

A few films manage to feel like wider critiques, to place the artist or artists in context. Tim Burton's Big Eyes, one of the best films of the latter half of his career, perfectly encapsulates, through the work of popular artist Margaret Keane, the devalued sense of female artists, and the changing gender politics of the 1950s. Last year's Hidden Away, explores the life of the outsider artist Antonio Ligabue, inside a film that otherwise focuses upon societal views of mental illness and physical disability. And above them all, a cinematic holy relic that takes in the wide sweep of life in 15th Century Russia, the loss and regaining of faith and creativity, not to mention the imagined life of one of Russia's greatest religious figures, is Andrei Tarkovsky's second film, Andrei Rublev.

Across three hours-that belie both the speed and scale of this nevertheless dense piece of cinema and a quarter of a century in Russian history, Tarkovsky explores everything from the very nature of Russia, its bloody, violent forging in the wake of Tatar invasion, and political upheaval, to the intimate nature of faith, to the downtrodden muddy fragile lives of the innocent serfs caught in the middle between power-hungry outsiders and princes, all the whilst exploring, through conversations, the experiences of Rublev and his followers, and finally, spectacularly, the icons themselves, the nature of Rublev's art and its importance in Russian history. 

But Rublev is a film as fascinating behind the scenes as Rublev's life itself. In the four years between Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev, Khrushchev had been deposed, The USSR had drawn itself back inward, and whilst Brezhnev’s rule from the 1960s to the early 1980s saw some continuation of the relaxation of cultural, if not social ideas-a difficult feat given the explosion of youth culture across Western Europe and the USA-Rublev is certainly one of the Brezhnev era's highest profile victims. Its disapproval, for a film practically bathed in the violence of the period-Tarkovsky at no point breaks away from depicting the violence meted out from Tatars, soldiers and the infighting of the period-comes from its perceived anti-historicality, in, of all things, its failure to depict the growth of cities.

Thus, the film suffered. Despite being immensely popular in its native Russia, the only critique of Russian audiences being towards the film's violence, Soviet authorities barred it from appearances at multiple film festivals and even attempted to ban its release abroad wholesale, both of which ended in failure for the state, as the film was critically acclaimed (winning a critic's choice award at Cannes in 1969 despite showing out of competition) and widely available due to rights already having been arranged prior to its international release with the French, gaining it two of the most prestigious prizes of French Cinema in the early 1970s.

Here, one film becomes two, as Tarkovsky cuts 14 minutes off his own film, largely incidental removals of material, with the uncut 205 minute cut largely disappearing into obscurity until, of all people, Martin Scorsese, armed with a version long kept under editor, Marina Tarkovsky’s bed, returned from the USSR with the original cut, known in the west as the aptly named The Passion According to Andrei. Thus, the film we get is already a honed vision of the original film-Tarkovsky's "Director's Cut", and certainly his preferred version of the film, goes on to be the more widely available version is promptly released by the pressure of other film makers, and Dmitri Shostakovich among others, and goes on to be wildly successful, selling out theatres across Russia.

Despite a butchered American cut (building on an already sanitised cut of the film for Russian television), making the film nigh incoherent, and inviting utterly bizarre comparisons with David Lean's 1965's similarly epic but utterly un-Russian Doctor Zhivago, its popularity, and impact on cinema only grew over the decades, until both the 183 and 205 minute cuts were reunited by those great curators of cinema, Criterion, in a full-scale remaster in the late 2010s, taking its rightful place alongside the rest of Tarkovsky's filmography as a stunning sweeping piece of cinema, in which art and faith are the focus of a tale of Russia itself.

Yet, Rublev begins with a sequence seemingly divorced from the rest of the film, in which a balloonist briefly takes flight over the Russian countryside, only to crash back to earth as the balloon falls apart. Yet, it feels like a thesis of the film in miniature-many times over the following three hours, Tarkovsky's camera takes to the air, takes on an angle, a veritable cinematic view utterly impossible for the people of the 15th Century, a representation, in pure cinema, of the bird-or even God's-eye view. Moreover, the hapless Yefim (Russian poet and dissident, Nikolay Glazkov) represents the artist, whose dreams of flight are quickly crushed, the ignorant mob who attack his assistants emblematic of the warring forces that will later silence Rublev, turn him from artist to mute wanderer, and inflict bloody acts of carnage upon the people of Russia. It is the film, in short, in miniature, its central concepts of faith and creativity and violence explored through the mere act of a man taking to the air.

From here, we meet the central duo of Andrei (the great Anatoly Solonitsyn) and Kiriil (Ivan Lapokov). Solonitsyn is the heart of this film, carrying it upon his shoulders, going from previously unknown actor to this riveting performance through both the decision of his historical consultants,and Tarkovsky's belief in him as an actor, and would become Tarkovsky's great muse. His appearances in Andrei's next three films, (Solaris, Mirror and Stalker), are stunning performances, although, as we will come to discuss later when discussing the utterly insane risks taken during the making of the latter, his death before the making of Tarkovsky's final films (Nostalghia and The Sacrifice) not only precede the director's death four years later, but almost certainly come from the same cause.

In simple terms, Rublev is positively Christ-like-at points particularly in the final sequence, subtitled The Bell, age and experience has clearly worn him, the beard is long and messy-but throughout much of the rest of it, he takes on the role of observer, of the great documenter, a man sure of the inspirational power of art, rather than as tool to frighten the ill-educated masses, dressed simply, the one consistent figure throughout the great sweep of Andrei Rublev. At one point, we see him balk at the concept of The Last Judgement, of the idea of art being there to scare, rather than inspire, but throughout the film, Tarkovsky is keen to show his godliness (Rublev would become a saint in the Eastern Orthodox church two years after Tarkovsky's death), his gentleness towards people, including the tender, emotive performance of Rausch's holy idiot, and even the pagans who wish to drown him after he comes upon them in the fourth sequence.

There is also the strong pacifist angle that the film takes with its hero, that carries on perhaps the major strand of Tarkovsky's films in the 1960s, in their depiction of war as brutal, cruel, and meted out against the innocent. This we see perfectly through his revulsion at the actions of the Tatars, and the Boyers, the grimmest of which, coming in the chapter The Raid, sees this most holy of men take an vow of silence to repent for his murder in self defence of a Tatar. He is, undoubtedly, at his strongest in an actor in the second half of the film, where the violence overtakes even this most optimistic and holy of men, and where, for the entire of the seventh sequence, Silence and much of The Bell he is mute, acting only with his body and his face, expressive, his face lined with grief, a Christlike figure overcome by the grief and bloodshed of Russia, only brought back to speech and art by another creative spirit warring against all this.

Nevertheless, in Rublev, Solonitsyn performance holds the film together; through him we see not only the mundane muddy little lives of peasants, from the opening scenes of the film's second sequence, to his faith alongside the figure of the worldly Theophanes The Greek, to the blood and carnage of Tatar attacks and indeed of Russians against other Russians, to the broken figure of Andrei returned to his fellow monks alongside companion and holy fool Durochka (Tarkovsky's first wife, Irma Raush), to his return to art, spurred along by the work of a young bell-maker (Nikolai Burlyayev, the sole other returning figure of Ivan's Childhood) whose struggles to make a colossal bell for a church inspires the monk, and takes up almost the entire final third of the film, in an extended treatise upon the creative process.

The structure of the film is episodic, moving across time and space with a simply inter-title, Tarkovsky rather wisely dividing the film into eight sections, preceded by the ballooning sequence and succeeded by the arrival of colour as Tarkovsky's camera moves over Rublev's icons in all their majesty, (a sequence bizarrely left in black and white when shown on Russian television, even after the advent of colour, that utterly misses the point of the post-script to this film). The first thus opens with Rublev, together with his companions, taking shelter in the hut of a village, where the jester (the great post-modern film-maker, Rolan Bykov), rages against the state and church, in a wildly raucous and energetic performance that skewers all of the ruling classes, from church to state. Whilst Daniil (Nikolai Grinko) largely disappears from the film after this sequence, this cannot be said for Kiriil.

Kiriil is, as he appears over the film, a man struggling with faith. Lapikov's performance rages through the opening two sequences-it is he who eventually outs the jester-his penitent apology to the jester later in the film echoing the sea-change in his character perfectly, and his lapse of faith precedes the film's jump into the darkness, into the depths of violence prologued by the savage beating Kiriil inflicts on his dog, and the ever-denser discussions of faith and piety of the third and fourth segments. By the time he returns, broken by his experiences, and deeply pious, it is as attempted redeemer, begging his friend to speak, to paint, to return to the world, and not to squander his god-given gift. It is an astonishing performance that buttresses, rather than opposes Solonitsyn.

It is also the film's religious struggle in miniature-at one end we have the figure of Kirill, the repentant sinner, the man who tries to attest to his sins, at the other Andrei, the man who never lapses from his faith but tries to reconcile it with his art, to create something that is both religious and inspiring. In the centre though, is perhaps the film's most arresting figure, that of Theophanes (Nikolai Sergeyev), an artist not beholden like the two monks to his faith, as a layperson but still a god-fearing man, and, crucially as he becomes both a physical, and later, spiritual mentor to Andrei, an established artist. Sergeyev gives him an astonishingly modern sensibility; his introduction is a scene not with Rublev but Kirill, in which Theophanes is lying down for much of the sequence, whilst the key sequence, a great religious and metaphysical debate between Theophanes and Andrei about the very nature of faith in Russia sets up much of the rest of the film's depiction of violence and damnation

Over eight minutes, shot in Tarkovsky's incomparable long takes, the duo discuss faith; Theophanes is a godfearing man, assuming, as many Russians do that the Last Judgement is fast approaching, that humans are inherently selfish and will only continue to be, and that religion is a tale of Christ's betrayal, whilst Andrei's perspective is more hopeful, believing that people are inherently good and worthy of redemption. The scene changes but the debate continues, and over their dialogue, comes perhaps the closest thing this film has to a truly religious moment, as a Russian passion play echoes the words of the two men discussing Christ's crucifixion. Andrei waxes lyrical on the condition of the Russian peasant, of their attempts to carry on despite everything as the Russian villager is held aloft, the recreation of this most holy of moments on a Russian hillside an astonishing moment of cinema, as the camera holds upon a crowd below.

But it is also perhaps the last time the film feels so holy, so focused upon the love of God, until the film essentially proves Andrei right; we see, in the next sequence, pagans turn on Andrei, we see them persecuted, we see in Part V Andrei's distaste for things like the Last Judgement, of the threats of fear and death inherent in most religious iconography, and we see these fears come to bear in brutal fashion in Part VI as that same church is put to the torch. That Tarkovsky essentially connects the violence in Andrei Rublev with the ebbing faith of its protagonist is no mistake, but how he depicts war is second only to Kurosawa in the sweeping scale of it.

At the centre of this violence is Edigu (Bolot Beyshenaliyev) and the two princes (both played by Yuriy Nazarov). All three of these figures are violent, cruel men who tear their way through medieval Russia, either as outsider raider or as cruel wielders of power. We see them send their men to torture, kill, and maim people, and nowhere is this more inherent than in part V, where the Grand Prince, jealous at workers going to work on his brother's palace, sends his men to gouge their eyes out. The following sequence is as close at Tarkovsky gets to the harrowing sense of violence throughout Ivan's Childhood, in a shocking moment where the artisans are set upon and mutilated, not in close-up, to quickly cut away but in another long-take where the blinded figures stagger across shot, where the camera follows fluidly this way and that.

Nothing, though, compares to the scale of Part VI, simply subtitled The Raid. And here, perhaps, for the first time, we see the mask of Tarkovsky slip, because it, simply put, is impossible not to assume some sense, even among the beautifully shot carnage, of this being propaganda. Here, Tarkovsky pictures a foreign invader attacking defenceless people and massacring them, and it may not have the Soviet realism, the fast-cut style and durm und strung of Prokofiev's score, of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938), it may not be absolute propaganda, but the sensibility is the same.

What differs is the execution. Rather than the fast cutting of the social realists, Tarkovsky's camera holds, almost verité-we see figures enter shot, combatants rage through it-at one point, as the doors of the church are battered, the camera simply holds on the corner, moving slowly back and forth in great long-takes, adjusting occasionally as new figures enter and leave. Only several minutes in, as the camera moves inside to the helpless church goers, do the doors give way, and here the violence teems around the camera-at one point a woman is dragged off, and we see the massacre only as a background detail, framed perfectly in the door.

After the torture of one of them, the film returns slowly to outside, shooting the survivors outside in a colossal long-take from the roof of the now defiled church, the scale of the violence and death as disturbing as it is colossal. Yet, perhaps the greatest shot comes at the very end of the massacre, where the younger of the princes stands impassive, as his men strip the church's roof of lead, utterly unmoved by the chaos he has wrought, whilst inside, the harrowing carnage of war, the burning of Andrei's art, the murder of those around him, and his own action of violence break even this man of god's spirit.

The violence abates, and over Part VII, we see the figure of Andrei almost ghostlike, silent, and grief-stricken. It is only in The Bell, arguably a film in a film, that the film arguably comes to a final apotheosis. Here, the film essentially steps away from Andrei's story-indeed, he only appears in a few sequences across the casting of a bell by a young man and his helpers-to tell that of Boriska; here the film breaks from its key thematic structure, of artists failing, of failure after failure, to a final triumph, despite everything, encapsulated by the beatific form of the returning holy fool.

This triumph, despite everything, despite the mud and chaos, despite the hardships of being alive in medieval Russia, is enough to find hope in Andrei, and he comforts the boy. One only has to compare it to another grimly medieval Russian film, in the form of the epicly scaled, long gestating Hard To Be A God (2013), to see where faith drives the film, hope colours the ending. But it is also, undoubtedly, the artistic process in miniature, the ability to adapt, to go on instinct, to create something that, like Rublev's paintings, have lasted centuries. For all their religious devotion, it is hope in human form that returns Andrei to the creation of his icons.

There are few films in the cinematic canon like Andrei Rublev, fewer still that manage to capture both a national identity and its relationship with faith and war, all of this through the figure of a single man. It is a staggering mirror to the Russian people. It is nothing short of a masterpiece, in its recreation of the world of five centuries past, and as it bursts into colour, you begin to realise that Rublev's icons and the churches of Russia are fragments, remnants of that world in ours. Tarkovsky would never make a film of this scale before, and never another historically set film. He didn't need to. He made this one

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)