Review: Andrei Rublev

It evinces a complex understanding of spirituality and faith that would inform all of Tarkovsky’s subsequent films.

Andrei Rublev
Photo: Janus Films

Andrei Tarkovsky’s second feature, Andrei Rublev, takes place against a vast backdrop that magnificently illuminates the vision and soulfulness of the eponymous 15th-century monk and icon painter (Anatoly Solonitsyn), evincing a complex understanding of spirituality and faith that would inform all of the Russian auteur’s subsequent films. Andrei is introduced to us as a man who radiates serene piety, projecting the ideal image of devoutness as he travels the countryside of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, visiting cathedrals in search of places to ply his art. His behavior sharply contrasts with the nervousness of his colleagues, fellow monk artists Daniil (Nikolai Grinko) and Kirill (Ivan Lapikov), who move through the cold, harsh land in scuttling fashion, motions that give away their anxiety about leaving the safety of their monastery. The other monks’ pragmatism becomes a foil for Andrei’s idealism, which is increasingly challenged over the course of Andrei Rublev’s running time.

Daniil and Kirill’s fears are somewhat justified by the despair of feudalism that rages outside their monastery. Incessant rain turns barren lands—dotted by the craggy, inextricable stumps of recently felled trees—into muddy quagmires, defying attempts to render them hospitable. Villages look as if they’re constantly being reclaimed by nature, and various campfires blanket these hamlets in a hellish haze of smoke. In this context, the cathedrals the monks visit seem less like houses of God than bulwarks against the innate hostility of the nature he created—the only buildings strong enough to withstand the erosion of rain and wind. Tarkovsky’s mastery at conjuring up hypnotic atmospheres is evident in Andrei Rublev’s massive vistas, which he shoots with an oneiric tone that communicates nature’s untamable energy.

Later in the film, churches function less as places of spiritual renewal than sanctuaries for villagers harried by civil war and Tartar invasions. And though these cathedrals boast splendiferous exteriors, they’re scarcely ornate within. Inside, the monks are confronted by bare, white walls—blank canvases that seem to beckon for adornment. These uninspiring, bland interiors offer a subtle reminder that so much of the Eastern Orthodox Church’s image of splendor, as well as its authoritarian heft, was projected by artists’ individual efforts. Thus Andrei, whose humility is a model of devout faith, is tied to a machine that produces such systematic horrors as public executions.

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A schism forms between the serene inspiration Andrei finds in religious tenets and the Church’s violent enforcement of them, exposing how easily belief can be tarnished when used as the foundation for social order. Intriguingly, the only time Andrei Rublev depicts a unified expression of individual and collective joy—one freed of the corrupting effects of structural power—involves a pagan orgy that Andrei stumbles across and watches as if in a trance. The orgy disrupts the film’s calm, dreamy atmosphere, as does a later staging of a Tatar invasion. Tarkovsky, one of the most elliptical of filmmakers, is shockingly blunt throughout this sequence, depicting wholesale slaughter and pillage with the same expansive framings with which he captured the harsh Russian countryside earlier in the film. The moment feels like hell on Earth, and when Andrei emerges from the massacre as one of the few survivors, he pledges to give up not merely painting but speech altogether, taking a vow of silence as an act of penance over his survivor’s guilt.

Tarkovsky balances his wide panoramas of human atrocity and nature at its most unsettling with intimate shots of Andrei that make the monk look as much like a religious martyr as the figures he paints. Andrei is also regularly framed within windows and door frames that replicate the borders of many paintings. Tarkovsky also uses this framing effect to emphasize the way that Andrei uses his art as much to retreat from the world as to give glory to God.

Andrei Rublev cemented a theme that would remain a constant throughout Tarkovksy’s filmography: that of superficial shows of faith, whether spiritual, religious, or existential in nature, being challenged until they transform into something that doesn’t exist in a vacuum, something that reckons with a world larger than any individual’s knowledge. As such, Andrei’s eventual return to his work is treated not only as a display of the man learning to cope with his trauma, but as a spiritual awakening. In the lengthy montage of the real-life Rublev’s actual paintings that closes Andrei Rublev, the art that we glimpse echoes Tarkovsky’s framing of Andrei throughout the film. Yet where Tarkovsky’s images of Andrei himself feel claustrophobic, the filmmaker shows how the paintings that Andrei produced reached beyond the borders of their frames and to the beauty of the world around him, wherever it may lie.

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Score: 
 Cast: Anatoly Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, Nikolai Sergeyev, Nikolai Burlyayev, Ivan Lapikov, Yuri Nikulin, Rolan Bykov  Director: Andrei Tarkovsky  Screenwriter: Andrei Konchalovsky, Andrei Tarkovsky  Distributor: Janus Films  Running Time: 183 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1966  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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