ANDREI RUBLEV Movie Review

Among the many glories that I had the privilege of discovering at the 1973 New York Film Festival was a two-and-a-half-hour version—a big fragment, really, some 30 minutes shorter than the original—of Andrei Tarkovsky's already-legendary Andrei Rublev. Tarkovsky's second feature, a sprawling, three-hour mosaic of imagined moments in the life of the 15th-century icon painter, was in trouble with Soviet authorities from the moment of its completion some seven years earlier, and had been screened only sporadically, usually clandestinely, and even then in versions of varying length. Since not much was ever known about the real Rublev, the authorities were hard-pressed to claim distortion of the facts, but Tarkovsky's emphasis on the importance of art and the artist, particularly in a time of savagery, tyranny, and general barbarism, clearly made Andrei Rublev a hotter potato than Mosfilm Studios had bargained for. (As if to twist the knife of censorship still further, Andrei Rublev's American distributor, which picked up the film in time for the New York Film Festival press screening, decided to cut the already shortened version by another 20 minutes, most likely to get in one extra show each day!) It wasn't until the 1980s that the efforts of those such as New York—based distributor Corinth Films resulted in the availability of the full version of Andrei Rublev. It was immediately apparent that Tarkovsky's film was indeed the masterpiece that its shorter versions hinted at; this is a stunning, visionary, hallucinatory portrait not only of an artist but of the times that create one. Far from a standard “biopic,” Andrei Rublev is at times only obliquely about the painter himself; its eight distinct sections—not episodes exactly—suggest living frescoes that collectively provide a feeling for an era in which art was not a luxury, it was almost literally the only means by which the human soul might survive, and even then by the slenderest of threads. The film is photographed in a spell-bindingly beautiful black and white, and Tarkovsky generously presents us with Rublev's actual surviving creations, in widescreen and full color, at the conclusion. It is the ultimate tribute to the filmmaker that, while it's a joy to be able to see the real icons, they ironically have less impact than the dark and unforgettable work of art that Tarkovsky himself has created. The script, incidentally, was co-authored by Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, brother of Burnt by the Sun director Nikita Mikhalkov, and later a transplant to Hollywood, where he ended up directing Sylvester Stallone in Tango & Cash. Go figure.

NEXT STOP … Ivan the Terrible Parts 1 & 2, The Wild Bunch, Mother and Son

1966 185m/C RU Anatoli Solonitzin, Ivan Lapikov, Nikolai Grinko, Nikolai Sergueiev; D: Andrei Tarkovsky; W: Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Konchalovsky; C: Vadim Yusov; M: Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. VHS, LV FXL, NOS, FCT