Andrei Rublev

I mentioned at the beginning of the month that I've had Andrei Rublev on my DVR for quite some time, and was going to be watching it this month because it was getting a new DVD release courtesy of the Criterion Collection. That DVD came out on Tuesday, so I finally watched the movie to post on it.

Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn) was a painter of reigious icons in early 15th century Russia, a time before the tsars when Tatar hordes were still raiding the country and the country as a whole was in a state of flux. At the start of the movie in 1400, Rublev and his friends Daniil and Kirill, also icon painters, were at a monastery but they eventually leave to become itinerant painters, something that was in some ways necessary considering that a good portion of the work involves painting frescoes and you kind of have to go where the walls are.

Andrei Rublev the movie tells the story of Rublev's suffering -- indeed, the subtitle is "The Passion of Andrei" -- through seven fictionalized vignettes of events from about a dozen years in Rublev's life. In reality, very little is known of Rublev's personal life, so the film is not conceived as a biopic in the way that something like Lust for Life was. Each of the vignettes is given a title card and lasts somewhere between 20-30 minutes, so although the movie is long, you can easily break it in two. Finally, at the end, we get to see some of Rublev's actual icons, filmed in color to contrast from the black-and-white photography of the rest of the movie.

Director Andrei Tarkovsky shows himself to be a very competent filmmaker with Andrei Rublev, although I have to say that having watched this, I find it hard to understand why he gets so much mention on "greatest movies of all time" lists. Each of the vignettes was interesting as a standalone, but put together I found it a bit of a baffling whole, especially with the prologue that seemed totally unrelated to the rest of the story.

The movie also has a lot of stuff that may be difficult viewing for some people. One of the vignettes involves a Tatar sacking of the Russian city of Vladimir, and that scene involves a bunch of people getting killed, a cow being set on fire (although the cow was wearing an asbestos blanket), and a horse literlly being killed (Wikipedia says the horse was rented from a slaughterhouse and so destined to be killed anyway, but still). There's quite a bit of violence in some of the other segments too.

As for the DVD, it's a multi-disc set that apparently has both the original version of the movie that runs 206 minutes (that's the one TCM showed, although it was letterboxed and pillarboxed), as well as a ~185 minute version that Tarkovsky said was his favorite. Due to the violence in the movie and the fact that it's about Russia as a whole, Soviet censors ordered cuts and there were quite a few versions around. There's Tarkovsky's "director's cut", as well as the original, which was supposedly saved by an editor who kept her own copy without the Soviet authorities knowing about it.

I can certainly recommend Andrei Rublev, even though I don't think it's the masterpiece that a lot of people seem to think it is.