Andrei Rublev: An Icon Emerges

When Andrei Tarkovsky’s dark, startling Andrei Rublev first materialized on the international scene in the late 1960s (the film first showed in the Soviet Union in 1966 but was withheld from international release until a few years later), it was an apparent anomaly—a pre-Soviet theater of cruelty charged with resurgent Slavic mysticism. Today, Tarkovsky’s second feature seems to prophesy the impending storm.

Its greatness as moviemaking immediately evident, Andrei Rublev was the most historically audacious production made in the twenty-odd years after Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. Tarkovsky’s epic—and largely invented—biography of Russia’s greatest icon painter, Andrei Rublev (circa 1360–1430), was a superproduction gone ideologically berserk. Violent, even gory, for a Soviet film, Andrei Rublev is set against the carnage of the Tatar invasions of Russia in the Middle Ages and takes the form of a chronologically discontinuous pageant. The otherworldly hero wanders across a landscape of forlorn splendor—observing suffering peasants, hallucinating the Scriptures, working for brutal nobles until, having killed a man in the sack of the city of Vladimir, he takes a vow of silence and gives up painting.

At once humble and cosmic, Rublev was described by Tarkovsky as a “film of the earth.” Shot in widescreen and sharply defined black and white, the movie is supremely tactile—the four classical elements appearing here as mist, mud, guttering candles, and snow. A 360-degree pan around a primitive stable conveys the wonder of existence. Such long, sinuous takes are like expressionist brushstrokes; the result is a kind of narrative impasto. From a close-up recording the impact of a horse’s hooves on the surface of a turbid river, Tarkovsky’s camera swivels to reveal a Tatar regiment sweeping across a barren hill. Other times, the camera hovers like an angel over the suffering terrain. The film’s brilliant, never-explained prologue shows some medieval Icarus braving an angry crowd to storm the heavens. Having climbed a church tower, he takes flight in a primitive hot-air balloon—an exhilarating panorama—before crashing to earth.

Tarkovsky began production on Andrei Rublev in September 1964, two years after his first feature, Ivan’s Childhood, won the Golden Lion at Venice and one month before Nikita Khrushchev was deposed. By the time principal photography stalled because of weather in November 1965, the cultural thaw had frozen over. When Rublev was finally completed in July 1966, the state film agency demanded extensive cuts. The film was too negative, too harsh, too experimental, too frightening, too filled with nudity, and too politically complicated to be released—especially on the eve of the Russian Revolution’s fiftieth anniversary. After a single screening in Moscow (the Dom Kino cinema supposedly ringed with mounted police), this version, titled The Passion According to Andrei, was shelved. Trimmed by a quarter of an hour, a cut Tarkovsky would later endorse, Andrei Rublev was scheduled for the 1967 Cannes Film Festival only to be yanked by the Soviets at the last minute. Two years later, thanks in part to the agitation of the French Communist Party, Rublev was shown at Cannes, albeit out of competition. Although screened at four o’clock in the morning on the festival’s last day, it was nevertheless awarded the International Critics’ Prize. Soviet authorities were infuriated; Leonid Brezhnev reportedly demanded a private screening and walked out midfilm.

With questionable legality and over strenuous objections by the Soviet embassy in France, Andrei Rublev opened in Paris in late 1969. Ultimately, the Soviet cultural bureaucracy relented, releasing the film domestically in 1971. Two years later, Rublev surfaced at the New York Film Festival, further cut by its American distributor, Columbia Pictures. Time compared the movie unfavorably to Doctor Zhivago; those other New York reviewers who took note begged off of trying to explicate the film, citing Rublev’s apparent truncation.

What was there to say? The artist Rublev is introduced, along with two brother monks, taking refuge from a storm in a stable where some peasants are being entertained by a bawdy jester. Such buffoons, one monk observes, are made by the devil; the sequence ends with the clown being arrested. In the next sequence, two monks discuss aesthetics while outside the church a prisoner is tortured on the rack. (Eventually, in a fit of jealousy, one of the monks will leave his monastery, cursing the devotion to art that has corrupted his brothers.) Later, Rublev refuses to terrorize the faithful by painting a Last Judgment scene. His principles harm his career; the irony, surely not lost on Tarkovsky, was that, a century after the painter’s death, the Orthodox Church accorded his icons absolute authority, a standard “to be followed in all perpetuity.”

The first (and perhaps only) film produced under the Soviets to treat the artist as a world-historical figure and the rival religion of Christianity as an axiom of Russia’s historical identity, Andrei Rublev is set in the chaotic period that saw the beginning of the national resurgence of which Rublev’s paintings would become the cultural symbol. Indeed, it was precisely the veneration of icons that came to distinguish Russian art from that of the West. As the Renaissance gathered momentum, sacred images were transmuted into secular works of art; Russian paintings, however, remained less representations of the world than embodiments of the spirit.