A Portrait of the Artist as a Russian Monk

It’s the early 80s at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, and Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky steps to the podium to make a speech following his acceptance of the Telluride medal for career achievement. Tarkovsky speaks calmly, then gives his translator, the Polish director Krzyzstof Zanussi, time to pass along his words. “The cinema,” Zanussi begins in broken English, “she is a whore. First she charge a nickel, now she charge five dollars. Until she learn to give it away for free, she will always be a whore.”
Keep in mind that this likely mistranslated denigration flew from the mouth of a man enraptured with the ineffable power of the cinema, an artist who was rivaled only by the likes of Dreyer, Bresson, and Bergman in his temperament of moral seriousness. Thankfully in his films, Tarkovsky left us with less dubious ideas about the relation of the artist and his art to society and commerce. Over a period of nearly three decades in which he directed only seven features, Tarkovsky secured the position of the most influential Soviet filmmaker of his generation. He picked up on Eisenstein’s later works (Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible) and Dovzhenko’s nature-related lyricism, worked at the same time as the mystic Paradjanov and the restless Kalatozov, and paved the way for today’s mavericks, Alexander Sokurov and Bela Tarr.
Now, nearly sixteen years after his death, Manhattan is enjoying a veritable Tarkovsky festival.

The retrospective, held at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, was consistently sold-out last month. In the next two weeks, Film Forum will present brand-new prints of Andrei Rublev and Solaris in week-long runs. The perfect entry point into Tarkovsky’s body of work, Rublev is not to be missed.

As his second and most well-known movie, it established a place in the canon years ago, but until now it’s been seen in butchered prints. Essential to the Soviet 60s, Rublev has a complicated history, which left it battle-scarred from censorship cuts and further charged its meaning with significance to Tarkovsky’s own life.
Completed in 1966 and shelved the same year for its political ambiguity, harsh violence, and formal experimentation, Rublev didn’t turn up until three years later at Cannes in a version that was 15 minutes shorter. After its 1971 opening in Moscow, 20 minutes of footage were snipped by Columbia Pictures for the United States release in 1973. Film Forum is showing the 205-minute version restored in 1988.

Classifying Rublev as a historical and biographical epic ignores its radical unconventionality. Tarkovsky’s film revolves around Russia’s greatest icon painter, Andrei Rublev, but is almost entirely fictional. Shot in monumental widescreen and black-and-white of intense severity and definition (until the vibrant color coda), the movie is structured as seven discontinuous chapters bookended by a prologue and epilogue. Rublev figures in the periphery or not at all in a number of the episodes, as the action is set against the brutal Tatar invasions of the Middle Ages. Tarkovsky portrays the artist as an exceptional individual who is attempting to create amid historical chaos caused by the power of the Russian state and the Orthodox Church and the clash between Christian ceremony and Slavic pagan ritual.

Though Tarkovsky explained in his 1986 book Sculpting in Time that it was a film meant “to explore the question of the psychology of artistic creativity, and analyze the mental and civic awareness of an artist who creates spiritual treasures,” Rublev is less an analysis than it is an evocation, one of poetic articulation over clear narrative and fleshed-out dramaturgy. It’s a movie that places its most mysterious, exhilarating, and mesmerizing sequence up front, right in the prologue, and never feels the need to connect it to what happens afterwards. A patched-up dirigible takes flight, and the camera is taken along for the ride, high above a landscape of glacial lakes and skeins of tributaries, scattered livestock and muddy grasslands. As in his two greatest works, The Mirror (1974) and Stalker (1979), this is Tarkovsky at his most elemental—with startling images that dwell on earth and water—and most formally entrancing, as he strings together long, sinuously moving takes at a pace of haunting, contemplative deliberation.