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ANDREI
RUBLEV
7/10
USSR
1966 : Andrei Tarkovsky : 165 minutes
Tarkovsky’s
1962 debut Ivan’s Childhood marked the arrival of a bold new eye
in world cinema - if not a voice, narrative being perhaps a weakness.
But how were these gifts to be applied? Andrei Rublev reveals an
artist experimenting with future paths, and while marginally a less successful
film than Ivan’s Childhood, and perhaps even the least satisfactory
of all his works - it’s a vital stage in his development, paving the way
to his 1970s golden age.
Rublev
contains nine sections - a discrete prologue; seven episodes from the
life of Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn, the director’s usual alter-ego), a
15th century icon painter; and finally, switching into colour,
a long coda of close-ups from the surviving works. Each section examines
some aspect of Tarkovsky’s interconnected themes: religious and artistic
faith; the role of the artist in a troubled society; artistic development;
acts of inspiration, creation and destruction. The results are wildly
uneven, and Andrei Rublev can be counted only a partial success,
the patchy fruit of exuberant, ambitious over-reach.
As
would so often be the case with Tarkovsky, Rublev starts on a terrific
high - ensuring that, whatever the longueurs of the rest of the movie,
the viewer will give the benefit of the doubt. The prologue sees a group
of peasants launching a rudimentary hot-air balloon - a patchwork of rags
- from a church tower. The pioneer aviator - like the viewer - is thus
granted a ‘privileged’ view of his surrounding countryside - but there’s
a drastic price to pay for sharing God’s perspective, represented by one
of the most startling, virtuoso uses of freeze-frame in all cinema.
The
seven proper ‘chapters’ unfold in chronological order. ‘The Buffoon’ is
a violent vignette establishing the harsh repressiveness of middle-ages
Russian society. Then the pace slows to a familiar Tarkovsky grind during
the tedious ‘Theophanos The Greek,’ in which Rublev visits a living legend
of icon painting. Slightly more diverting, ‘The Passion of Andrei’ sees
Rublev explaining his controversial version of religion, illustrated by
stark images of a wintry crucifixion - Christ eating snow, etc. Next,
‘Pagan Holiday,’ 20 minutes quite unlike anything else in Rublev,
or, indeed, in any other film, as the painter stumbles across a subfusc
pagan ceremony. Distant, sharp violins fill the soundtrack, naked pagans
run out of the forest, Rublev is tempted by a lusty wench, mist swirls
and flames flare among the dark trees, sacrificial candle-lit boats float
out over a black river, the pagans are hunted down and forced to swim
for their lives as an impassive Rublev sails silently by.
‘Pagan
Holiday’ is a magnificent, hallucinatory glimpse of ‘the other side’ -
the dreamiest, liveliest, least narrative-based passage in the film, but
so powerful that it’s doubly unfortunate the next chapter, ‘The Last Judgment,’
is such a clunker. A lengthy re-enactment of a Tartar attack on the city
of Vladimir - which Rublev only narrowly manages to survive - it’s shot
in a stilted manner, scored with blaring music, that would look old-fashioned
in the most basic thirties westerns. It’s hard to figure what’s going
on or why, and the whole section feels like Tarkovsky trying out a form
of narrative cinema to which he clearly wasn’t suited. The viciousness
of the Tartar attack is presumably supposed to appal the audience as much
as it does Rublev - but the only truly harrowing footage is of a horse
stumbling painfully down a set of stairs: shocking that he filmed it,inexcusable
that he included it.
After
a low-key caesura chronicling the impact of Vladimir upon Rublev - ‘Vow
of Silence’ - we’re then ready for ‘The Bell,’ a self-contained film-within-the-film.
Rublev is a withdrawn, peripheral figure, watching the efforts of teenage
bell-founder’s son Boris, (Kolya Burlyayev, from Ivan) hired by
a prince to strike a new bell. Boris, Rublev learns, has never actually
made a bell himself, and makes it up as he goes along: faith in
action, and the results are enough to restore Rublev’s speech and his
desire to paint. Tarkovsky sees aspects of himself in both Boris and
Andrei, of course - the kid orders his superiors around like a wunderkind
film director on-set, and the coda of icons also has cinematic parallels.
It’s like a story-board, the raw material from which these imaginary episodes
were constructed, or perhaps a recap of what we’ve seen. Then we hear,
then see rain, finally fading into a classic Tarkovsky shot of horses
by a river, echoing the brief, shattering equine glimpse from the airbound
prologue.
Rublev
is a self-consciously epic work - a convincingly recreation of 23 years
during a distant historical period, peopled with melodramatic, grumbling,
bible-quoting monks, picturesque peasants, grinning Tartars. When it’s
good, it’s astonishing. When it’s bad, it’s very tough going. But even
the Vladimir siege has its moment of glory. Tarkovsky cuts again to a
static, divine perspective, looking down on the devastation from an impossible
height - two geese struggle upwards, sideways, out of shot. Remarkable
the concept, dazzling the execution.
25th
January, 2001
by Neil Young
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