Andrei Rublyov: Reviews

Made on an epic scale, it does not flinch from portraying the savagery of the time, from which, almost inexplicably, the serenity of Rublev's art arose.

The great set-pieces - the sack of Vladimir, the casting of the bell, the pagan ceremonies of St. John's Night and the Russian crucifixion are tours-de-force of visceral filmmaking.

Episodes in the life of Andrei Rublev, an icon painter in 15th century Russia... Rublev lived in violent times, marked by fighting between rival princes and the tartars. The savagery Rublev witnessed reduced him to creative silence, and he gave up painting. But his involvement with a young boy's project to make an enormous bell restored him to life. The black-and-white film ends with a colour sequence showing some of the icons that Rublev went on to paint.

Rublev really existed, though Tarkovsky's film is mostly invented. Andrei Rublev was his second feature, and at this stage in his career he was still working within recognisable genres: the war film (Ivan's Childhood), SF (Solaris), and in this case the historical epic. His remaining four films - Mirror, Stalker (based on a SF novel, the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic, but a considerable distance from its source), Nostalgia, and The Sacrifice, the last two made in exile from the USSR - are much more personal, denser, more overtly poetic, mixing colour and black and white in occasionally startling ways… and to the unsympathetic, even slower and more obscure. Tarkovsky's visual strategies as a director are very much those of the European art movie rather than Hollywood: long-held shots requiring the viewer to take in a lot of finely textured visual detail. His films do lose something on the small screen, though DVD is the next best thing to a good 35mm cinema print.

One advantage filmmakers had when working in the USSR was that, once the script had been approved, immense resources were at your disposal. Sergei Bondarchuk's stunning seven-hour, four-part version of War And Peace is a case in point, but Andrei Rublev is another. This is an out-and-out art movie made on a David Lean-type scale, and it's impossible to imagine this being made in Hollywood then or now. Decades before CGI, there really were thousands of extras in certain scenes, and the big set pieces such as the tartars' sack of Vladimir are quite awe-inspiringly huge in scale...