Andrei Rublev

Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966

Once again, I find myself wrecked and confounded by my expectations of films, versus what they actually are. Going into this, buffeted by Andrew O'Hehir's description of the film as kind of transcendentally boring, I hoped for long, meticulous shots of painting (and maybe even of paint drying) in beautiful technicolor.

Aside from the fact that it's in black-and-white (except for a brief montage of Rublev's paintings at the very end), the film isn't about artistic creation in and of itself. Which is probably all to the good, as watching artists work, much like watching writers write, can prove very boring. Rather, it's about how artistic inspiration and endeavor play out against the sweeping pageant of history. I think the choice to go with the black-and-white stock (ignoring the fact that budget cuts plagued this film) was the right one, as it seems to better capture the stark, dingy brutality of the time period. And that glorious color at the end, and the camera's careful lingering over Rublev's work, feels like a real artistic triumph over adversity and ugliness.

My classmate's suggestion that I watch Tarkovky's films chronologically really paid of. Vast shots of trees and water reminded me of Ivan's Childhood. Tarkovsky seems to be working similarly with nature, only on a much grander scale; we get a sense of Russia as a stark but beautiful land, a vast canvas to draw the trajectory of history on. And yet small details also astonish us; a shot of reeds moving underwater struck me as particularly beautiful.

Long takes and slow, deliberate camera movement dominate the visual palette of the film. Indeed, serious camera movement strikes one as positively necessary for a film of this scale. Often one gets the impression that the camera moves like an eye making its way across a giant historical painting. The scene early in the film where a man goes up in a primitive hot air balloon, the camera movement thrills, exhilarates, and makes you a wee bit queasy. Another shot that pans across the stunned faces of monks floating in a boat as they watch the capture of pagans takes your breath away.

Andrei Rublev actually can function as a meditative exercise; if you really focus and let yourself fall into its rhtyhm you can get transcendentally locked into its beauty. If you can stay there for the entire three-plus hours you're a better man than I. There were moments when I felt almost spiritually captivated; I was bewitched by the horror of the sack of Vladimir. I lost patience and the trance was broken in the last half hour, but I found myself captivated in a new way by Nikolay Burlyaev (Ivan in Ivan's Childhood) as Boriska, who with a bit of age has gained a lithe elegance that plays nicely against a vital determination to get the job done. At this point in the narrative Andrei has given up painting, and though the film explores the "What's the point of creating art in such a rotten world!"/"But we must continue to create art!" debate fairly and thoroughly, we never doubt Andrei's old enemy Kirill's assertion that his not painting is a profound sin against God. It's easy for us to see how Boriska, with his sheer force of will, inspires Andrei to paint once more.

Comments

[Berckem]

I like your style. Your choice of movies/actors/directors is also great (Bill Murray, Wes Anderson, Tarkovsky, Bresson). Please keep it up. An admirer from Brazil.

[Julia Sirmons]

Thanks for reading...I'll try to keep mixing it up