Reviews and notes

Like Solaris, ANDREI RUBLEV is in part the story of one man's awakening to the time and the world in which he lives. An observer rather than a participant in much of the film's action, it is only towards the end that Tarkovsky's hero relinquishes his aloof, idealist's role and reconciles himself with humanity as it is: first by killing the Tartar, secondly by comforting the young bell-caster in whose courageous act Andrei sees the leap of faith that has eluded him throughout his own work.

ANDREI RUBLEV dramatises the conflict in the artist between dispassion and involvement with the world around him, and sets that conflict in a mediaeval Russia in which all lives and classes so relentlessly intersect - pagan, Christian; rich man, poor man; old and young - that no man, once having crossed the threshold of that society (at the film's opening Rublev and his friends have lately quit the monastic life to become painters) can isolate himself from his fellow-men.

The fool who is dragged off by a pair of ducal horsemen in The Buffoon reappears in The Bell to complain that he was "betrayed" by Andrei. To be an onlooker at an unjust action, Tarkovsky suggests, is to be an accomplice to it; and if, in Andrei's words, "Russia must be reminded that she is one people", her enemies are not only her invaders (the Tartars) and her betrayers (the Duke's brother) but those who passively stand by and watch. Andrei does not intervene in the fool's arrest; and he is caught up only reluctantly in the pagan revels of The Holiday (although here his emotional complicity is suggested by a shot of his gown catching fire as he gazes in sensual awe at the naked revellers).

Tarkovsky embodies the argument between detachment and involvement in a camera style that alternates stunningly between orthodox ground-level set-ups and soaring high-angle views. In contrast to the shots that isolate Andrei in close-up against distant groupings, or stalking solitarily in the background of scenes (as throughout The Bell), Tarkovsky uses aerial shots in which Andrei is forced into the human crowd by the film's sudden bird's-eye view of a battle-torn village (The Raid) or a peacefully crowded landscape (The Bell).

Although period and place are meticulously described throughout the film, even to the year-by-year dating of the separate episodes, Tarkovsky works equally hard to project the story outside its localised, historical setting. Not only is ANDREI RUBLEV a political parable for succeeding eras of social oppression ("I do not understand films that are purely historical", Tarkovsky has said, "with no relevance to the present"), but the film's image patterns aim at an elemental purity that is also 'timeless'.

The continuing antiphony between water and fire works to deepen the meaning of whole scenes (rain falls at times of grace or release - the deaf-mute girl's first appearance, Boriska finding the right clay for the bell-cast; sun lights harsher scenes - the buffoon's arrest, the forest ambush); and also recurs in the story's incidental images - the burnt-out straw doll on the river that marks the extinction of the revels in The Holiday, Andrei dousing a live coal in the snow as a gesture of artistic abdication at the end of The Raid.

As his restless staging of dialogue scenes and his constantly roaming camera illustrate, Tarkovsky's Middle Ages are an epoch in which everything is in flux. Season melts into season, prosperity into penury, peace into war, order into chaos. Tarkovsky confronts Andrei with three contrasting human responses to this inexorable cycle. The deaf-mute girl is the powerless victim of history's changes (and Tarkovsky's emblem for the Russian people?), who cannot understand or resist her oppressors, although she has - the redeeming grace of the Russian 'idiot' - an intuitive perception of disorder. She weeps at the paint smeared angrily on the church wall by Andrei when he hears the news of the ambush; and after the massacre in the church, she devotes herself diligently to plaiting a dead woman's hair.

Then there is Theophanes the Greek, who arms himself against change by a dogmatic and immovable religious faith. Between these two, Tarkovsky places the boy Boriska. Neither foolish (unlike the girl, he can learn new things), nor dogmatic (unlike Theophanes, he wants to learn them), it is by faith in himself and in his own creative powers that he casts the bell and succeeds - where the hesitant Andrei failed ~ in uniting the people in a common peaceful objective.

Some of the optimism of Tarkovsky's ending is lost in the 146 minute version of the film that omits the matching prologue (in which a team of craftsmen try and fail to raise a bell with hot-air balloons), but its sense of fulfilment leads effectively into Tarkovsky's one direct, climactic tribute to the Russian painter's work: a colour montage of details from his religious paintings. It is hard to know how much damage has been done by the removal of 40 minutes. What survives is enough to satisfy expectations roused by the film's awesome reputation; but hopefully no effort will be spared in the future to secure a fuller version of the one indisputable Russian masterpiece of the last decade.
- Nigel Andrews, Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1973.


ANDREI RUBLEV handily demonstrates one of the intriguing curiosities of Soviet film. Although the U.S.S.R. had possibly the worst record for banning and bowdlerising their cinematic masterpieces, a surprising majority of the 'lost' films, like ANDREI RUBLEV, have been recovered, intact, in the forms originally intended by their makers. When an American or British film is altered by its producers, the original seldom survives. Who are the unnamed archivist heroes at Mosfilm? Or was the filing system itself the real hero?

Our print of this spectacular film is a joy to behold. It does, however, have one small flaw: the intertitles are not all present. For the record, the film has eight chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. For the record, they are: the Prologue (balloon flight); The Mummer [The Buffoon in the review above], 1400 (the fool in the barn); Theophanes the Greek, 1405 (Kyrill meets Theophanes); The Passion According to Andrei, 1406 (Andrey and Theophanes discuss theology; vision of a Russian Passion); The Feast [The Holiday], 1408 (a pagan Midsummer's Night celebration); The Last Judgement, Summer 1408 (the blinding of the masons); The Assault, 1408 (the sacking of Vladimir); The Silence, 1412 (Andrey's silence; famine); The Bell, 1423 (Boris & Andrey find their voices); Epilogue (Rublyev's frescoes and icons). The prologue and the first five chapters comprise part one of the film; the remainder part two. As far as is known, no prints of the film identify the Prologue and Epilogue as such.

Weblink: Review by Steven D. Greydanus, Decent Films.com

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