Episode 009: Andrei Rublev (1966/1971‪)‬ So Long, Suckers

Fellow travellers,
In the late 1960s, Soviet students and lecturers held a debate on the merits of Andrei Tarkovsky’s second feature, which had premiered to controversy in December ‘66 and would not be passed for release—slightly cut down—until 1971. Tarkovsky quotes from the debate’s transcript in his diary of September 1, 1970, and this speech from one of the film’s defenders sounds eerily familiar to us Suckers:
Almost every speaker has asked why they have to be made to suffer all through the three hours of the film. […] It is because the twentieth century has seen the rise of a kind of emotional inflation. When we read in a newspaper that two million people have been butchered in Indonesia, it makes as much impression on us as an account of a hockey team winning a match. The same degree of impression! We fail to notice the monstrous discrepancy between these two events. The channels of our perception have been smoothed out to the point where we are no longer aware. However, I don’t want to preach about this. […] Only the point is that there are some artists who do make us feel the true measure of things.
That closing description—attributed to a Maths professor—could either be of Tarkovsky himself or of Tarkovsky’s subject, the medieval monk and icon painter Andrei Rublev. This duality is, to say the least, appropriate for the film, being as it is about art and art-making—or, more precisely to its oblique, elliptical presentation, around art and art-making. How does one begin, or end, with something this fluid, that takes the complexities of the historical film (whereby it is about the era on screen and its era of production; about the figures on screen and the figures presenting them; and so on) to such esoteric, instinctual extremes? This is, to put it modestly, a biography of a Great Man—although it only rarely decides to analyse that man, and sometimes declines to involve him in the narrative at all. And, of course, much of this biography is completely made up.
Though ultimately named, simply, Andrei Rublev, this epic is better thought in terms of its original title, The Passion of Andrei, which would refer more generally to the events and hardships that surrounded its subject (played by Anatoly Solonitsyn). Tarkovsky and his co-writer, Andrei Konchalovsky, understand their biopic not as that of a Great Man in the classic sense, nor even its cousin, the wannabe “complex” picture of a Tortured Genius. Their Rublev is, rather, part of the landscape, something of a Great Conduit for a higher calling, a possibly divine talent—that which we call art. In other words, their subject is not presented necessarily as some special genius in and of himself. He is little more (yet no less) than a spiritual vessel who channelled his historical moment (and, to follow the mindset of both Andrei the monk and Andrei the filmmaker, his access to God) into something creative. Historically Great, yes, but the provenance of that greatness is here profoundly diffused.
This complex view of creative sensitivity—where the artist is at once passive, reactive and active, an onlooker and an agent, a face in the crowd and the story’s protagonist—infuses every part of the film and adds up less to another workaday hagiography than a living, breathing manifesto on the nature and meaning of artistic creation. It continues to demonstrate how cinematic biography can be used fully as cinema rather than the prosaic, over-plotted, essentially unimaginative point-and-shoot televisual garbage that comes around like clockwork every so-called awards season. (Tarkovsky once commented on filmmakers who rely on adaptation: “they have no ideas of their own. … If you stand for the truth, then you have to speak the truth. And if you do that it’s not always going to please everyone. So directors turn to adaptations.”)
This thoughtfulness is manifest in the film’s loopy structure, which sees the whole break down not j