Andrei Rublev (Widescreen)

Insanely overlong, maddeningly opaque, visually striking but bleak, violent, stark--this would be a very easy movie on which to let the tiger out of the cage. But it also has a great reputation, both among cinephiles in general and among conservatives and the religious. So one is willing to give it more chances than it might otherwise deserve. And if you do stick with it until its final third or so, the rewards are bounteous.

Andrei Tarkovsky tells the story of the great 15th Century icon painter, Andrei Rublev (Anatoli Solonitsyn), in a series of vignettes. The film opens with a famous scene of a man being dragged aloft by an escaping hot air balloon. He soars overhead beckoning the people bellow to follow him, but they can't or don't. Much of the rest of the film is taken up with Rublev's wanderings about Rus (old Russia) during a time of paganism, plague, poverty and marauding Tartars. Rublev is so disturbed by what he sees and by one violent reaction of his own, that he retreats into silence and gives up his artistry. But the final episode that he witnesses, which really makes the film, restores his faith and revives his desire to create art.

In this last story a young man, the son of a bell maker, convinces a noble's men that he can cast a great bell for them, that his father has handed down the secrets of the trade to him. But as the work progresses the boy, Boriska, makes missteps and squabbles with the workmen who served his father. At one point he is in desperate need of clay to fortify the mold for the bell, but can't find earth of the right consistency anywhere. Then fate intervenes and, chasing a lost shoe, he slides down a hill into a muddy patch of just the right kind of clay. Insisting that he be given a precise mix of precious metals, teetering on the edge of exhaustion, Boriska drives himself until the bell is done. Amazingly, when freed from its mold it proves beautiful and the tone it produces rings true. Only then does the boy reveal how truly miraculous it is that such beauty has arisen from the mud because his father died with the secrets unspoken and Boriska was actually learning as he went. In the end he got by on little more than faith. Rublev, who in this section as in most of the others is more a spectator than a player, goes to the boy and breaking his silence urges the boy to come with him and cast church bells while he, Rublev, will paint icons to adorn the walls. In particular, Rublev has been asked by Abbott Nikon of Radonezh of the Holy Trinity Monastery in Moscow to paint an icon commemorating the prior abbot, St. Sergius of Radonezh.

All that has gone before is in black and white, but in the last images of the film Tarkovsky shows color details of Rublev's greatest work, the Icon of the Holy Trinity (1410), based on Genesis 18, when the Trinity is understood to have appeared to Abraham :

1: And the LORD appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day;
2: And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door,
and bowed himself toward the ground,
3: And said, My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant:
4: Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree:
5: And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant.
And they said, So do, as thou hast said.
6: And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes
upon the hearth.
7: And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it.
8: And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree,
and they did eat.
9: And they said unto him, Where is Sarah thy wife? And he said, Behold, in the tent.
10: And he said, I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. .

Obviously the director is telling us that the themes he has been exploring in Rublev's life, about which little is actually known, have come together in this magnificent artwork. As always with Mr. Tarkovsky, it's difficult to impose precise meanings on his narrative, but some of the ideas we can trace include the idea that the artist, though he must get down in the muck and experience life, must at least in his art rise above and lead the rest if humanity. The Trinity with its mysterious unity may also represent the necessary unifying of the various strata of the society that Rublev encountered--the wealthy nobles, the impoverished peasants, the churchmen who uneasily occupy the middle ground, perhaps even the Tartars. The painting and the film are certainly both invitations to us to join with the Trinity in the unity of love that they offer. On a more personal level the struggle of Boriska to create a bell on his own, without access to his father's wisdom, apparently represents Tarkovsky's own belief that each generation must discover artistic truths for itself. On all these levels, and many more that I'm sure eluded me, the film communicates its fascinating and beautiful ideas to us, so long as we've the patience to let it unwind to the end.

GRADE : A

Andrei Rubliov is the masterpiece of Andrei Tarkovsky. I 've watched very carefullly all his works, and Andrei contains the quintessential thought of this unique film maker.
What Tarkovsky made with this film may be one the most overwhelming and haunting achievemnts in all the story of the world cinema.
Rubliov is a icon painter who after an important fac, decides not continue in that office.
The powerful of the barbarian invassion into a church, where he acquires the human experience gets far away the world, he isolates and becomes in a wanderer.
The unforgettable images that appear before the viewer are of a trascendental poetic beauty never seen before and even now.
All the journey along the Russia of XVI century is a reflexive gaze of the human condition , the sense of the life and how dealing with it, the unsaid code of one must behavior humanly, even in inhuman conditions, facing the world, with his singleness, its little moments of joy, his infinite sadness and its miseries.
The opening sequence in which the fall is shown before us, is a original metaphor of how facing with the failure; and is depicted with such kind of beautiness that mesmerizes you. No other film n the story, with the exception of the ending of A man escapes from Robert Bresson reveals with so frehness and vitality the epic sense before the life.
When Rubliov knows this teenager, in the final chapter, and faces with him the huge challenge that implies to make the asgned mission, turns back ēRubliov and it invites him to keep on going in his mission or the moira term greek, his place in the universe, his meaning in this brief stage in the world.
This superb masterpiece, has countless remarkable sequences, the dialogues are feed of a blissness and poetic raprure without a drop of effectism.
When the mission is completed, and everybody celebrates the fact our young hero remains alone and Rubliov will gather with him and will tell wisdom words that I must not tell.
This is the goal of the artist; he must go to the forrest and seek the mushrooms; the people will be just waiting from the safe place for him; and no matter how dangerous or hazardous be the journey; they only expect for your bag. They will consume these gifts; but the creator must seek them.
Tarkovsky was in the middle of the creative universe (remeber his father Arseni Tarkovsky was a poet)in 1966; the script has an inner mytical force ; and every bit of this film is sublime, perfect.
Tarkovsky showed what many film makers haven't been able to do; express with a camera such landscape of images, in all his whole meaning.
Andrei Rubliov will be always a landmark ; an eternal triumph ; a epic statement that will be with all of us till the end of our lives.
And even more.

Andrei Rublev is probably the greatest looking film of all time. It was shot on a Konvas (you can pick one up on Ebay for $1000) and film students will be stunned by what has been achieved in terms of cinematography with such an old and dated 35mm motion picture camera. It is inspirational in terms of film-making and this is the core reason why you should watch the film. If you are interested in Kino Art then Andrei Rublev can probably lay claim to the greatest art film ever made. If you are looking to experiment with Tarvoksky, then Andrei Rublev is not a bad place to start.

Like most of Tarkovsky's films, Andrei Rublev is extremely artistic, conjectures much on the human condition, metaphysics and Russian life - that all seem to have some hidden meanings that contains the film's truth that Tarkovsky expounds on - namely the wickedness of men and the temptations that they face. It is also about triumph of the will and the nature of man. This is all done via the "narrative" and the look of the film. Tarkovsky mixes moments of dialogue about the metaphysical (a doctrine that would continue to be a theme in all of this other films giving a sense of what was to come - especially the intricateness of Stalker, Solaris), arrestingly simple and slow cinematography (his trademark water shots), complex action sequences (there are full scale battles like from a Kurosawa movie) and visionary set designs (15th century villages, towns and cities). This is Tarkovsky's biggest film ever (and quite possibly the biggest Russian film ever).

The premise is complex. Andrei Rublev, a monk with the gift of painting, is invited to paint churches around the country and in Moscow. Between travelling from job to job he encounters - monks who have lost their faith, monks with too much faith in themselves, fools who are imprisoned for their beliefs, Wicca festivals (the pagan ceremonies of St. John's night), murder, torture (the Russian crucifixion), death, error, the sacking of towns by the Tartars (the sacking of Vladimir), vows of silence and of course the most striking final piece of the film - the making of the bell (the casting of the bell). Characters appear and disappear (a cinematic technique found in The Thin Red Line), but there is also a lot of hidden imagery (every time you watch it you find something new), in particular scenes of novice monks putting dirt on their cheeks which makes no sense at the time yet later on we seen Andrei put the same dirt as a stain on a church he has painted because of the bureaucratic blinding of artists (an extremely violent scene of which there are many. As a note: Andrei Rublev happens to be an extremely violent film and there are several disturbing scenes. Also a scene where a horse falls down a stairs was cut because of animal cruelty but this has been restored for the DVD). All of these scenes are done via several chapters that each tells a story in which Andrei Rublev is present either as the central character of focus, a participant or an observer. If you pay close attention to the chapters you will realize that the themes of each chapter are contained in all the chapters. Tarvoksky plays with the audience in so many ways that you can only hope to watch the film again and again until you make ALL of the connections. You will likely not see a more striking film for imagery. The ending is obviously what got Kubrick working on his trip scene in 2001. Tarkovsky returned a nod by filming Solaris.

Andrei Rublev is shot in monochrome although the ending does a little Wizard of Oz for us. The story is divided between two discs. You have 86 minutes in the first disc and 99 in the second for a grand running time of 185 minutes. This DVD is PRICEY but this is Kino Art at its finest and worth every penny. The extras are many and there are some very important historical interviews about Tarkovsky. However I will say that DVD is totally unsuitable for Tarkovsky's films and possibly you will do better to watch a widescreen video or even better a 35mm print of the film in the cinema next time it comes to town. Even though the transfer is sublime for a 1966 picture (a Russian one at that) and there has been a lot of digital correction, the DVD produces artefacts on nearly all of Tarkovsky's films because of his complex imagery, but this is just quibbling and is not the fault of the DVD producers. Tarkovsky has simply exceeded the limits of what DVD mpeg compression can handle, even after this film is spanned over 2 discs... and that says a lot about the quality of this man's vision.

Kino Art does not come much better than Andrei Rublev.