Left Field Cinema

Continuing Left Field Cinema’s exploration of the work of Russia’s greatest film maker: we start with a quote from the director’s film making book Sculpting in Time:

“The only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise. Artistic creation demands of the artist that he ‘perish utterly’, in the full, tragic sense of those words. And so, if art carries within it a hieroglyphic of absolute truth, this will always be an image of the world, made manifest in the work once and for all time. And if cold, positivistic, scientific cognition of the world is like the ascent of an unending staircase, its artistic counterpoint suggests an endless system of spheres, each one perfect and contained within itself. One may complement or contradict another, but in no circumstances can they cancel each other out; on the contrary, they enrich one another and accumulate to form an all-embracing sphere that grows out into infinity. These poetic revelations, each one valid and eternal, are evidence of man’s capacity to recognise in whose image and likeness he is made, and to voice this recognition.”

Eloquently written by Tarkovsky, this in many respects is his philosophical basis for his sophomore feature and follow-up to Ivan’s Childhood. Art and faith, God and Man. In Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky would truly begin, riding on the back of his debut war movie this substantial epic in many respects best resembles the films that would follow; but also conversely it is possibly his most unique and brazenly experimental film, which of his works achieves this status is up for debate but there is definitely enough evidence to support the argument.

The plot (such as it is) loosely follows the life of the 14th and 15th Centaury Icon painter, the titular Andrei as he moves through the various providences of a very turbulent Russia, damaged by internal rivalry and outsider invasions. Rublev lives in an unstable world, and we examine this world through his journey.

This is a difficult film to categorise; indeed I maintain that the first mistake a viewer can make with a Tarkovsky film is to attempt categorisation: it is not a biography picture; Tarkovsky makes no attempt to expose the private life of this man, or delve deep enough into his character for us to examine his virtues and vices. He is in fact barely a main character, the perspective often shifts away from the events surrounding him, then gently floats back to him with no structure or signifiers to explain his absence or his return. In terms of narrative Tarkovsky takes his unashamed abandonment of traditional plots one step further, the films title suggests a character piece, a historical piece; but neither historical accuracy or the detailing of character have any place in Tarkovsky’s vivid, visceral, disparate, esoteric world.

The real Andrei Rublev is considered to be the greatest Russian iconographer, but so little of his life is known, and so few of his works survive that any film about the man would rely very heavily on speculation. Even basic information like date of birth or date of death are not one hundred percent certain let alone the company he kept, or his social political views etc. Religious proclivity is one area we can be certain about; he belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as a painter he was also a monk.

As a political and religious figure in the hundreds of years after his death, he has posthumously fallen in and out of fashion depending on how religiously tolerant the current Russian regime was. But despite what the films title may suggest, this film isn’t about Rublev the man, what we’re shown of him is a very ambiguous and possibly entirely false portrayal. Rublev the monk is shown murdering a man, fascinated by a naked pagan woman (barely more than a child), and taking a sixteen year vow of silence for which most of the film takes place within. Not only that but at no point does Rublev paint during the entire film, to give a modern example: it would be like Michael Mann not including a single boxing match for his Mohammad Ali biopic. Instead of the narrative following Rublev, Rublev follows the narrative, he serves as a connector between the various fragmented events of the film. It’s not about Rublev’s life, it’s about Rublev’s world and his place within it. Tarkovsky once stated that:

“Our film about Andrei Rublev will tell of the impossibility of creating art outside of the nation’s aspirations, of the artist’s attempts to express its soul and character, and of the way that an artist’s character depends upon his historical situation. The question of the artist’s place in the life of the nation seems to us one of the most contemporary and important questions on the cusp of our future.”

If the films title and its content seem contradictory then it is in many ways reflected in Tarkovsky’s style of film making, forgoing dramaturgy but maintaining naturalistic performances, a historical film with little to no historical accuracy, simultaneously episodic yet expansive in scope. Riddled with paradoxes and contradictions much like the director himself. But his focus on the artist and the artists and arts place in the world gives Andrei Rublev a reflective and almost narcissistic undertone, not that Tarkovsky is comparing himself to Rublev but the comparison between both men’s struggle to find an artistic response to the turbulence of their times can be read.

It’s a wonder that Andrei Rublev actually made it through the production stage, a religious protagonist is hardly the sort of hero that soviet and ostensibly “atheist” Russia wanted to be making films about. It lack of traditional narrative would also cause trouble for Tarkovsky as the authorities wanted cinema which the masses could relate to, propaganda films, not art films. Frequently accused of being an elitist film maker through out his career, Rublev is by no means exempt from this criticism. If the film had some how miraculously survived pre-production and production then post production would be an entirely different matter, the film was nearly shelved completely, Tarkovsky was forced to make numerous changes to the edit and even today two or three differing versions of the film are widely available. The first cut was six hours long, not unexpectedly this was totally rejected. Tarkovsky returned with a 205 minute cut (the version most available on DVD in the U.S.) this was then subsequently cut to 185 minutes which is the version available in the U.K. Of the cuts made, the most significant was the removal of the “Famine” episode, an episode which made even less sense in the narratives entirety; there were also cuts to the scenes of violence as well, meaning that the 205 minute cut is by far the more explicit of the two. The two more common cuts of the film actually cancel each other out, in attempting to make the film less ambiguous they’ve instead succeeded in making it doubly confusing. The authorities read into Andrei Rublev as a comment on the nation’s then current state of affairs, repressive, and at times chaotic. Other film makers of the time had their films destroyed and in some cases were imprisoned for making anti-Russian cinema, Robert Bird makes this statement on the matter in his 2004 BFI companion to Andei Rublev:

“The film remained forbidden fruit for most Soviet filmgoers until well into the liberalisation of the Soviet system in the era of perestroika. Still, Tarkovsky was lucky compared to Konchalovsky and Aleksandr Askol’dov, whose 1967 films were released only in 1987, or Sergei Paradzhanov, who was imprisoned in the 1970s for crimes he committed against Soviet sensibilities in his films Shadow of Our Forgotten Ancestors and The Colour of Pomegrantes.”

Wanting to minimise the films international success the authorities refused to enter it into Canne Film Festival, then later allowed it to be shown but only out of the competition. The audience response was so strong that it was given the FIPRESCI award despite not competing.

The film is difficult at best, bloated at times, and quite possibly overindulgent to Tarkovsky’s vision, it’s plus three-hours of almost pure ambiguity: there is no obvious interpretation for the audience to draw on, its meaning is wide open, but plot concerns are secondary, maybe completely irrelevant when compared to Tarkovsky’s all important ambient atmosphere and mood. The film is peppered with flashbacks and fantasies which are almost indistinguishable from the films present, there are no “plot” orientated scenes and likewise there are no “character” orientated scenes. Tarkovsky compared his film with examining a mosaic picture: “You can stick your nose into some fragment, beat it with your fist, and scream ‘Why is it black here? It shouldn’t be black here! I don’t like to look at black!’ But you have to look at a mosaic from afar and on the whole, and if you change one colour the whole thing falls apart.”

If the narrative is meaningless, then it is propped up by and surrounded by meaningful imagery, filled with subtle links and repetitions which if you’ve studied Russian religious art work from centauries past every shot will have a noticeable detail. However for most people this might be a very empty experience. There is much to be read from the film with even a surface understanding of iconography, as Tarkovsky’s approach was that of an icon painter. Bird again states:

“As a visible image of the invisible realm, the icon is filled with spatial and temporal discontinuities which are tangible traces of the compression of spiritual reality into two dimensions. These discontinuities decentre and destabilise the viewer’s sovereign point of view. Other discontinuities are caused by the depiction of eternal reality in terms of earthly time. The icon compresses temporal sequence into a composite moment, showing Christ child with his adult face, or depicting Mary twice – as a corpse and as an eternal soul.”

So what’s good about it? Why should you watch Andrei Rublev? It is a film which stands out for both good and bad reasons, and you’re either going to consider it a masterpiece of world cinema, or a pretentious exercise in personal indulgence and hermetic film making. For my opinion it is very much the former. The complexities of its very nature aside, its lack of coherence and frequent deliberate discontinuities discounted and what we are presented with is an audacious audio visual tapestry, with a truly unique sense of mood. Almost entirely in black and white with the exception of the final five minute when Tarkovsky presents a series of Rublev’s paintings to close the film, the photography is incredible and the infrequent battle sequences, and extended tracking and dolly shots illustrate what a marvel of creation it remains to this day. Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s disturbing and ambient score is almost modern in approach and adds an eerie tension of many of the films longer scenes. Of course Anatoli Solonitsyn’s performance as Andrei Rublev, an actor who took his own vow of silence for over a month so that he could accurately depict what a man sounds like after he hasn’t spoken for an extended period of time. Solonitsyn would go on to forge an excellent creative relationship with Tarkovsky and starred in, Solaris, Mirror, and Stalker.

Most of Tarkovsky’s films are quite lengthy this is by far the longest and also the most lavish. The first and only time Tarkovsky was allowed a meaningful budget to play with, never again would he be trusted with such expense. Rublev would be criticised by many as an exercise in over intellectual and pretentious film making, this pointed criticism is made as much today as it was in the years surrounding its release. This may have been the type of film Tarkovsky would continually return to but at the time it was totally original, even forty years later few motion pictures have opted for this sort of difficult nature. Its own influences can be found in cinema from across the globe but it doesn’t stop this from being one of Tarkovsky’s most unique cinematic outings, along with Mirror, it is arguably his most inventive, challenging and original.

M.Dawson