Andrei Tarkovsky (1966)
Yefim (Nikolay Glazkov) prepares to fly in a hot air balloon that is tethered to the spire of a riverside church. Despite the efforts of a mob to frustrate his efforts, the balloon takes to the air. ‘I’m flying!’ declares the euphoric pilot – and we see the world from his astonished point of view: the river, the church and the people far below. One screen minute later, the balloon is in free fall to a crash landing and Yefim isn’t seen again, dead or alive, in the course of Andrei Rublev but the impression made by this brief prologue persists throughout Andrei Tarkovsky’s long film (183 minutes). Yefim is the first of several creatively enterprising figures to feature in the narrative, most notably the title character. The short-lived aerial sequence anticipates Tarkovsky’s repeated use of God’s-eye-view shots. At the same time, Yefim’s reaction to the unprecedented, dizzying experience of being airborne establishes instantly the pastness of the world that the film recreates.
In Ingmar Bergman’s opinion, Tarkovsky was, among film-makers, ‘the greatest of them all’. Andrei Rublev is occasionally boring (the philosophical-theological discourse, of which there’s plenty, is stubbornly inert); often appalling in its depiction of human violence (and in the cruel treatment of animals involved in the filming); but chiefly awe-inspiring. As a realisation of the middle ages, it stands comparison with Bergman’s medieval masterpieces, The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960), even though it lacks their concentrated virtuosity (its running time is almost exactly that of the two Bergmans put together) and it’s consciously epic in ways that The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring don’t try to be. The Russian Orthodox monk and icon painter Andrei Rublev was born between 1360 and 1370 and died between 1427 and 1430 (says Wikipedia). Tarkovsky’s film comprises, in addition to the prologue and an epilogue, eight episodes, and the first seven of them span just twelve years (1400-1412). The priority is evidently to dramatise, as much as Rublev’s life, the brutally turbulent times in which it was lived. That, at least, is the impression made by the combined impact and length of the sixth episode, ‘The Raid’, in which the city of Vladimir, where Andrei (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and fellow painter Daniil (Nikolai Grinko) have been working on the decoration of a church, is invaded by Tartar horsemen, in cahoots with the perfidious younger brother of the absent Grand Duke who commissioned the work on the church. (The brothers are played by the same actor, Yuri Nazarov.) As you watch, the sustained carnage of ‘The Raid’ eclipses much of what’s gone before. It was only after the film was over that I could properly recall earlier parts of the story.
Thank goodness I could because graphic maiming, torture and killing are far from the only amazing things in Andrei Rublev. A couple of examples of good things that aren’t appalling … The first episode is rightly named for its standout character – ‘The Jester’. Andrei, Daniil and their colleague Kirill (Ivan Lapikov) have recently left the Andronikov Monastery in Moscow to seek work as painters. Walking through countryside, they’re caught in heavy rain and shelter in a barn where a group of locals is enjoying the performance of a skomorokh. Brilliantly played by Ronan Bykov, this little man is like a kind of medieval rapper – and nothing like the traditional English cap-and-bells figure, either in his derelict appearance or in the force of his bitter, sometimes obscene invective, which satirises the powers-that-be both religious and secular. (The scene does turn appalling when soldiers arrive at the barn, drag the jester outside, break his stringed musical instrument, hit his head against a tree and carry him off, unconscious. He reappears briefly, and to great effect, in the last of the eight episodes.) Pausing briefly in his work at the Grand Duke’s mansion, Andrei is suddenly on the receiving end of a spray of white liquid. It’s not paint but milk, thrown by a little blonde-haired child (the Grand Duke’s daughter?). Andrei is amused; he laughs and jokes along with the little girl. This is tonally so unusual in the film, and the child and Andrei’s reaction to her are so beautiful, that the moment has a paradisal quality, all the more potent for being unstressed.
As suggested above, Andrei Rublev isn’t on screen continuously. It’s no surprise that he’s not a major player in ‘The Raid’, even though he does, in the course of it, kill a soldier in order to save a holy-fool young woman (Irma Raush) from rape. Andrei thereafter takes a vow of silence, to atone for killing the man, and returns to his Moscow monastery, where he no longer paints. In terms of screen time, he doesn’t feature strongly either in Tarkovsky’s final episode, ‘The Bell’, which takes place in 1423-24, some fifteen years after the Tartar raid on Vladimir and eleven years after the immediately following ‘Silence’ episode. Yet Anatoly Solonitsyn is such a distinctive and, whether speaking or silent, an eloquent presence that Andrei remains the central consciousness of the film even when he’s not the evident protagonist. Despite a superficial resemblance to Dennis Hopper that’s a bit distracting at the start, Solonitsyn soon becomes, in screen terms, his own man. His handsome, persistently troubled, potentially noble face does more than hold the camera. It registers so strongly that, when we’re not seeing it, we imagine it observing what we are seeing.
The main character in ‘The Bell’ is a youth called Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev), the son of a master maker of bells. When the Grand Duke’s men come looking for the latter to cast a great bronze bell, Boriska explains that his father, like most local residents, has died from the plague that has recently ravaged the community. Boriska also claims, untruthfully, that his father passed on to him, and to him alone, in-depth knowledge of his craft. Sceptical at first, the Grand Duke’s men take Boriska at his word and charge him to construct the bell. In the course of what proves a lengthy and expensive project, Boriska’s dogmatic decision-making, informed mostly by instinct, leads to repeated fallings out with his late father’s workers. At this point, three important characters return to the scene – Andrei, the jester and Kirill. Recognising Andrei, the jester accuses him: it was Andrei, he claims, who reported him to the soldiers and so brought about his abduction from the barn and consigned him to miserable years of imprisonment. While Andrei maintains his silence in the face of these accusations, Kirill admits that it was he who reported the skomorokh to the soldiers. Kirill also urges Andrei not to waste his God-given talent for painting. As work on the bell nears completion, Boriska’s surface self-confidence is replaced by increasing apprehension; he tries, unsuccessfully, to fade into the background. At the climax to the grand, highly suspenseful ceremony to inaugurate the bell, it rings perfectly and Boriska collapses, sobbing in relief. Andrei breaks his vow of silence to comfort Boriska, telling him that they will work together – ‘You’ll cast bells, I’ll paint icons’.
Each one of the main players in ‘The Bell’ matters in Tarkovsky’s scheme of creativity – including Kirill, because he isn’t a naturally gifted painter, for all that he’s ambitious and smart, and finally admits as much. The jester, like Yefim, more than earns his place in the film’s gallery of daring, subversive talents that hidebound minds find threatening. Boriska’s brass-necked bravado forces him to prove he’s capable of becoming what he lies about being. Kirill’s words and Boriska’s deeds lead Andrei to recover his voice and return to his artistic vocation. (This final episode brings to mind the message of W B Yeats’s Lapis Lazuli: ‘All things fall and are built again/And those that build them again are gay.’) Tarkovsky’s epilogue – the only part of the film in colour rather than black and white – comprises some of the fruits of Andrei’s final resolve, as the camera moves over Rublev paintings of religious scenes. The images are accompanied by suitably otherworldly music, composed by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov.
The bell’s colossal size expresses the immensity of the effort involved in constructing it, and the huge sound that it makes the magnitude of the achievement it represents. Whether or not he consciously intended it, these things also (the word has to be) chime with what Tarkovsky undertook and accomplished in Andrei Rublev. The visual ambition and scale of Vadim Yusov’s cinematography, decades before CGI, is confounding. Over the course of the film, you ask yourself, again and again, How on earth did they do that? The forces determined to thwart creative enterprise in the story told by Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky, who shared the screenplay credit, also had a correlative in reality, in the form of Soviet censorship. Tarkovsky’s biography of an icon painter was considered a work of iconoclasm: in the words of the Central Committee of the Communist Party’s review, ‘the film’s ideological erroneousness is not open to doubt’. Its release was delayed by several years but in December 1971 Andrei Rublev eventually opened in Moscow theatres, to sellout audiences.
29 January 2023
