So this is the second Tarkovsky on the list. The first (Mirror) was long and incomprehensible. This one is even longer (about four hours, good lord), but thankfully much more comprehensible.

It’s a historical biopic of the eponymous Andrei Rublev, a (hugely important and influential) icon painter from 14th century Russia; and as you’d expect from a biography of a religious painter, it leans heavily on themes of art and religion, and the difficulty of maintaining belief in both in the face of a cruel and violent society.

The movie has an explicitly episodic structure, with seven numbered acts, each detailing a different part of Rublev’s life. Although it’s maybe more accurate to say in some sense that a lot of them happen around his life: One episode, for instance, is about the casting and raising of a giant bell, work in which Rublev is in no way involved.

The episodic structure prevents the movie from having a narrative drive that keeps you going through the movie — every time the scene switches, it’s back to square one as you try to figure out what’s going on and who everyone is and where they are (Tarkovsky is not especially aggressive about bringing the viewer up to speed in the way that modern moviemakers are). But each episode (with a few exceptions) is compelling in its own right — the bell-making, the raid on a city, the pagan celebration.

Tonally, it’s all over the place, from quiet conversational musings on the meaning of faith, to epic battle scenes with some seriously brutal footage[1], but it all kinda ties together, more so than I would have believed halfway through the movie.

So I mean, look, this movie is long. It is leisurely-paced, and a tight editing job could probably trim it down to half its running length and not feel like it was rushing. But… it works, more than not. I can’t recommend it precisely because ain’t nobody got time for this, but it feels like it belongs on this list (and it’s a heck of a lot more approachable than Mirror).

  1. There’s a part in the raid on the city where a horse falls off some stairs and is then impaled on a spear. When you’re watching it, you’re like “wait… without CG, how did they actually do that?” Answer: THEY FUCKING PUSHED A HORSE OFF STAIRS AND THEN STABBED IT, is how. It was an animal from a slaughterhouse, and they shot it in the head immediately after filming the scene and then turned it into glue. TRUE STORY. ↩︎