I Would Like to See It: Andrei Rublev

Hundreds of bodies heave on cords of hempen rope, hauling a newly-cast church bell out of its casting pit as a crowd of thousands looks on in a rapture of nervous excitement. The hawsers creak. The scaffolds groan. Ton upon ton of human machinery strains against gravity and friction to unearth the skilled labor of dozens of craftsmen and hundreds of workers, months of toil hanging suspended in the air, an inch in either direction from being Art or debris. The tension as Andrei Tarkovsky’s historical epic Andrei Rublev reaches its climax is next to unbearable. Will the toil and suffering of the workers mean something, or will it end in profitless disaster? The untried young bellwright Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev) looks on in stunned silence, seemingly overwhelmed by the size of the endeavor he has brought to fruiting, as Italian diplomats speculate as to whether or not the bell will ring and, if it doesn’t, who will lose their heads to the Grand Duke’s axemen? The bell’s clapper swings back and forth, back and forth until finally, perfectly, it tolls, and the crowd of onlookers erupt in adulation.

This is the power of art as Tarkovsky’s film sees it. Breathtaking, divine, and subject to the whims of cruel idiots who think only of their own aggrandizement. In Andrei Rublev, loosely based on the life of the 15th-century Russian icon painter of the same name, art is both an escape from the war-torn muck and mire left behind by Russia’s warring nobles and their Tatar (Mongol) allies and enemies and an extension of those same vicious forces. Andrei (Anatoly Solonitsyn) spends his entire life tormented by this devil’s bargain, explained to him with earthy tradesman practicality by Theophanes the Greek (Nikolai Sergeyev), his master. Tarkovsky captures his long struggle, in the depths of which he swears a vow of silence, with quiet remove, frequently backgrounding Rublev until he is virtually a part of the ensemble for the film’s final act and the drama of the bell-casting. His efforts to avert the tide of fate come to naught, first his passivity and then his daring are condemned — only art provides a refuge for the lonely monk, and so he denies himself its comfort.

For a film about artistic endeavor on such a grand and sweeping scale, Andrei Rublev takes a remarkably limited and clear-eyed position on the nature of art. It carries with it no morality, imparts no special significance, says nothing about the people who make it — it exists only in fleeting moments, in the confluence of long, hard work and observation. It may come into being for the worst of reasons or the best, express the most astonishing ideas or soothe the least worthy thinkers and egotists. It is the peel of a bell and the rapturous cry of the crowd who might still have cheered to see the young bellwright and his crew beheaded, and above all it must be made, it must be mastered, and it must move the heart. It is nourishment of the most essential kind. “What a feast you’ve made for them,” Andrei tells the sobbing Boriska after the latter collapses following the bell’s successful sounding. “What a feast.”