Andrei Rublev

[poliphilo]

That's the third time I've watched Andrei Rublev.

The first time was back in the 70s and what I saw was the version the Soviet censors mutilated. Theophanes popped up here and there without it ever being explained who he was. The film was obviously a masterpiece, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

The second time was back in my vicaring days. I remember writing a triumphalist piece in the parish magazine about how the movie heralded a return to Christian values in Russia.

And now? Well the first thing to report is that I ache like I spent last night hauling my sorry ass across those endless, boggy, Russian grasslands in the rain. Or as if I'd been digging a bell-pit. Three hours of medieval mysticism and barbarity really do take it out of one.

And I spotted, what I failed to spot before, that when Andrei loses his faith, it's faith not in God, but in the People. This is a movie about the Communist experience. About the Great Patriotic War and Stalin and the gulags.

The censors may have butchered the film, but the astonishing thing is that it got made in the first place. It's as if Robert Bresson had been handed the reins on Dr Zhivago. Hollywood never indulged its bloody-minded auteurs the way the Soviet system indulged Tarkovsky. Hollywood epics- even the best of them- are always a bit stupid. The only other directors who ever got away (God knows how) with making uncompromisingly intelligent epic movies were Kurosawa and Kubrick.

But Ran and Barry Lyndon are still a long way from being as punishingly intelligent as Andrei Rublev.

Even after three, widely spaced viewings, I don't altogether know what to make of it. My responses shift. First two times I was heartbroken when the Fool of God rode off with the Tartar horsemen. Third time I thought, "good for you, girl!" Tarkovsky is in love with complexity, ambiguity, mystery. He shows, he doesn't tell.

When I was a vicar I wilfully misremembered the film as ending on a close-up of the eyes of Rublev's iconic Christ. It doesn't. Nothing as straightforward as that. It ends on a shot of some horses on an island in the rain.

Comments

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

I've only watched it once, last year. I have been thinking about a repeat viewing but haven't had the time (particularly since I watched Mirror last week, which is essentially a 'heap of broken images' and not especially easy to follow).

I think the ability to do epic intelligently is probably quite specific to Tarkovsky. It's not something I would say of Eisenstein, for example.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Eisenstein was working for Stalin. I don't suppose he had much room in which to display his intelligence. Most of his films are high-class propaganda and (apart from their dazzling visuals and editing) fairly simple-minded. Ivan the Terrible could be the exception, but I don't have a clear enough memory of it to pronounce either way.

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

Ivan is an improvement, but on the whole I don't think intelligent is really a word I'd want to assign to it. It needs to be recalled that although the film is a portrait of a tyrant that figures Stalin, this was licensed to a large extent. The difference between tyrant and the strong leader was apparently a slim one.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I must watch Ivan again.

The two parts are available on low-price DVDs so I really don't have much of an excuse.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've just been reading an interview with Tarkovsky in which he says that for him horses represent life. I rather thought as much. There are horses all over his work.

(I look forward to continuing the plagiarism debate)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Eistenstein's Alexander Nevsky?

Oddly enough, Tarkovsky hated that film. He thought it was theatrical and false.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I suppose they're the two greatest Russian directors as T & D are the two greatest novelists.

Tarkovsky is often compared with Dostoevsky. I think they share the same deep, very Russian (meaning Orthodox) spirituality.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's odd how we set artists up in opposition to one another.

I've spent my entire life wondering which was the better- Lennon or McCartney.

As if it were somehow forbidden to like them both.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's an intriguing thought.

We should obviously resist the binary urge. Reject "either/or" in favour of "both/and".

[ex-roomette173.livejournal.com]

I have yet to have an unobstructed viewpoint. After I left the theatre I realized that I had a high temperature. It explains why the scene when the paint is spilled into the water and swirls there sticks with me so much.

Some part of it leaves such an uncomfortable feeling in me that I've resisted seeing it since. I can't quite put a finger on it. Its not that I can't deal with ambiguity - but more that I was a bit hung between thinking that he himself was not entirely sure what he was saying or that he'd done something so clever it had slipped by me. The latter is not a pleasent thing to admit but highly likely.

The theatre was going through a spell of playing all his films. I did quite like Ivan's Childhood for certain things. Though it is more direct and obvious.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's a film I keep coming back to. It's the first Tarkovsky I saw and so, probably, the one that means most to me. I think it's an inexhausible work. Every time I see it I read it differently. I don't think it's too much of a leap to call it (and Tarkovsky's work in general) Shakespearian.

Ivan's Childhood is the only one of the feature films I haven't seen. I must order it.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Ah, the rain. My God, the rain.

Thank you for introducing me to Tarkovsky's horses and rain and long, slow glances.

I need to order this one now--good old Netflix.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

This is probably his most accessible film.

I've been reading extracts from his diaries on-line. It's curious to see how harassed and fallible and unsure of himself he was when he wasn't behind a movie camera.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I made a point of watching his Solaris, followed by the recent George Clooney Solaris, and I was interested in how rain was also used in the new version. No horses. Lots of Clooney staring soulfully at the camera.

I found Clooney's wife irritating rather than exotic and mysterious. But eventually her very irritating qualities became--uncanny: her neurotic clinginess, staring eyes, odd accent. So it worked.

The most uncanny moment for me was when Clooney sealed her into the space capsule: how she looked out at him with that same uncanniness. Well done. Eerie, rather than scary.

Of the two-Clooney aside--I preferred the more recent version, which I found chilling without being depressing.

There was an overlay for me of the Communist issue while I watched the Tarkovsky film: I kept wondering how a private citizen could live on such a lovely, expensive farm. (Although a former astronaut would surely have been given unusual benefits.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the Clooney version. I guess I will some day, but I'll have to steel myself to it.

Mind you, Solaris isn't my favourite Tarkovsky film. It wasn't his either. He felt it was too generic. He didn't like having to work within what he considered to be the limits of sci-fi.

He was happier with Stalker- another sci-fi story, but one with which he felt he'd transcended the genre. Stalker is a very odd film. Very, very odd.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Very, very odd.

Of that I have no doubt!