Andrei Rublev (1966)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966.
Plot
Eight episodes stretched across more than three hours, loosely tracking the life of Andrei Rublev, the 15th-century Russian monk who painted the icons now hanging in the Tretyakov Gallery. We don’t see him paint much. We see him wander through wars, famine, snowstorms, and political murders. We watch a pagan fertility festival by a river. We watch Tatar raiders sack a church and blind its stonemasons. We watch a poor teenage boy, Boriska, lie that he knows his dead father’s secret for casting a giant bronze bell, and then somehow — through sheer will and panic and luck — succeed.
Rublev takes a vow of silence after a battle in which he kills a man to defend a holy fool. He keeps the vow for years. He only breaks it at the end, when he watches Boriska collapse weeping after the bell rings true, and tells the boy they should go paint icons together. The final sequence — in color, after three hours of black and white — shows Rublev’s surviving icons, the actual ones, in patient close-up.
What It’s About
Andrei Rublev is a theodicy movie disguised as a historical epic. The question it keeps circling is: how does an artist keep faith in a God who permits this much suffering? Medieval Russia in the film is not romanticized — it’s mud, it’s cruelty, it’s brothers betraying brothers to Tatar princes, it’s a woman drowned for practicing pagan rites. And Rublev is a monk who is supposed to paint the love of God while walking through all of that.
Tarkovsky refuses to answer the question directly. He answers it through Boriska. The boy’s bell-casting sequence is the emotional climax of the film because Boriska doesn’t actually know how to cast a bell. He bluffs. He prays. He works himself into a fever. And the bell rings. The lesson Rublev draws is that faith isn’t certainty about God — it’s a willingness to commit to the work before you know if it will hold.
This is the same problem Dostoevsky gives to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, and the same problem Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor tries to dissolve by taking freedom away from humanity so they don’t have to suffer the weight of choosing faith. Tarkovsky sides with Alyosha. The film ends on the icons because the icons are the answer: faith made material.
Visually it’s one of the most beautiful black-and-white films ever shot — long takes, horses in rain, snow falling through a burning church.
Connections
- Andrei Tarkovsky — his breakthrough; the film that defined his entire theological register
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — the Grand Inquisitor’s problem of evil; Alyosha as the Tarkovskian ideal of active faith
- Crime and Punishment — the saint-figure (Sonya / Rublev) whose silence redeems the murderer
Lineage
Predecessors: Russian Orthodox iconography; medieval Russian chronicles; Dostoevsky’s religious novels; Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (which Tarkovsky explicitly wanted to counter with something slower and more spiritual).
Successors: Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark; Terrence Malick’s The New World; Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies; basically every “slow historical” film about art and faith made since.