Christian Art vs. Barbarism, Both Medieval and Soviet

In cineland, every so often another obscure treasure gets dusted off and rolled out in pristine new form for reconsideration or, in most cases, consideration. A certain excitement grows: Could this be a masterpiece I’ve missed? When I showed up at Lincoln Center on a Monday night for a 50-year-old black-and-white three-hour film about medieval Russia, more than 100 people were in the audience.

The work (I hesitate to call it a movie) is Andrei Rublev (1966), a bleak and sprawling tale of art and Christianity vs. barbarism. It stands at number 27 on the list of greatest films of all time in the Sight and Sound critics’ survey. It’s playing through September 6 at Lincoln Center and will be reissued on DVD and Blu-Ray by the Criterion Collection on September 25. Or you can watch it now on the subscription streaming service Filmstruck, the leading app-based source of classic films, which you should really have anyway. (If you don’t have it, don’t be one of those people who whines that there are no classic films on Netflix or HBO.)

Andrei Rublev is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–86), Russia’s most acclaimed filmmaker since Sergei Eisenstein. Tarkovsky made only seven films, two others of which also made the Sight and Sound top 100 — The Mirror (1974), at number 19, and Stalker (1979) at number 29 — but he is best known for Solaris (1972), which was remade by Steven Soderbergh with George Clooney in 2002. Unlike the propagandist Eisenstein, the D. W. Griffith of Communism who twice won the Stalin Prize, Tarkovsky strayed pretty far from the Party line. Rublev was a painter of Christian icons and Tarkovsky’s film about him is a deeply Christian work. In 1966, the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union was intent on presenting itself as a cultural superpower but not yet ready to allow its shameful history of persecuting Christians to be alluded to, even obliquely. The Soviet solution was to play hide-and-seek with Andrei Rublev, waiting until three years after it was completed to allow it to be show at the Cannes Film Festival, but only once, at 4 a.m. In an expert trolling move, the festival’s critics unburied the film by awarding it their top prize, though it seems likely that few of them actually saw it (or, to be frank, managed to stay awake for the duration). Yes, critics were anti-Communist, or at least anti–Soviet repression, at this particular moment at least.

All of this, plus several rounds of cutting by the state censors, gave Andrei Rublev the aura of legend. Martin Scorsese himself once brought back from Russia the best print of the longest edition of the film, 20 minutes longer than the definitive, 183-minute cut approved by Tarkovsky, which is the version being shown at Lincoln Center. The actual film is less inviting than its own backstory, though. Like Scorsese’s Silence, which covers similar thematic ground, it’s a trial to sit through, an exacting, austere, almost punitive experience, relying on literary and theatrical techniques as much as cinematic ones. It is defined by long, airless scenes driven by dialogue that strays frequently into monologue. At times Tarkovsky makes Ingmar Bergman look like Judd Apatow.

Circa 1400, Andrei (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and two other wandering monks, Danil (Nikolai Grinko) and Kirill (Ivan Lapikov), are painters heading for Moscow when their paths cross with a peasant-beloved jester who runs afoul of the upper class and a master painter, Theophanes the Greek. Andrei is mock-crucified by a gang of mischievous pagans, which inspires his reverent thoughts on the Crucifixion, restaged beautifully by Tarkovsky in the Russian snow. After he and Danil paint a church, it is sacked in a nightmarish attack by an evil prince aligned with Tatars who might as well be Bolsheviks in their wickedness and iconoclasm. Andrei survives the pillaging but retreats in despair to the monastic life again, and the third hour of the film shifts its focus to a neighboring youth who engineers for the evil prince’s brother, the grand prince, a church bell. He claims he is using knowledge passed down by his dead father, although in reality he is just winging it, knowing that should the bell fail to toll when it is finished, the price will be his head. When the bell succeeds, tolling majestically across the land, it heralds a rebirth of Christianity and reawakens Andrei’s fervor to glorify God in his art. “Let’s go together, you and I,” a jubilant Andrei tells the younger man. “You’ll cast bells, I’ll paint icons.” It was just a couple of years before the film was made that the Khrushchev-era Soviet Union had lifted a partial ban on ringing church bells.

The artist’s quest is, for Tarkovsky, intertwined with the need for individual autonomy and reverence for God, these things being continuously under threat from the barbaric and depraved, whether they be the thoughtless mob of peasants who try to sabotage a hot-air balloonist in the film’s opening minutes or the fully organized and uniformed forces of a cavalry unit. Tarkovsky is relentless, brutal in establishing the contrast. A horse was killed in the course of filming the gruesome pillage scene, which culminates in the torture of an official who refuses to reveal to the invaders the location of the church’s gold. Like Scorsese in Silence, Tarkovsky stages the most stomach-turning scenes of agony to illuminate the scale of suffering of our forebears as they fought to keep Christianity alive. Tarkovsky ends the film joyously, shifting dramatically to color and dazzling us with the immortal outcome of Rublev’s life: images of his spectacular painting, such as Christ the Redeemer, which hangs proudly to this day, six centuries of Russian turmoil later, at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery. Draining as it is to endure, Andrei Rublev is an intensely devoted act of respect for the artists whose brilliance and courage were equally essential to keeping the Christian flame burning through the darkest hours.

IN THE NEWS: ‘[WATCH] North Korea’s Media Says U.S. Plotting against Them’