The Unknown Classic Film About a Russian Iconographer You Should Know

Russian novels tend to be about as big and sprawling as that larger-than-life country itself: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Goncharov’s Oblomov, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, and the crowd-pleasing Doctor Zhivago by Pasternak. Each stretches well over 500 pages—and even the “short” stories of Chekhov can border on novellas. So it should probably come as no surprise that Russian movies are no mere 90-minute affairs, either.

But that’s no reason to sidestep one unique classic of Soviet cinema that turns 60 years old this year but has a strange timelessness to it: Andrei Rublev.

If that title isn’t quite as familiar to you as other famous Russian films like Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, the movie version of Zhivago, or even the masterfully brilliant 2002 drama Russian Ark, you’re not alone. The movie faced almost constant censorship since the main character, Andrei Rublev, was not only a historical personage but a famous late-medieval monk and iconographer. He was so famous, in fact, that his work is instantly recognizable, even if you don’t know who “wrote” the work (for some reason, iconographers consider their works “written” and not “painted”). The most famous, or at least the most ubiquitous, of Rublev’s work is “The Trinity,” completed about the year 1411 and used on more spiritual/religious book covers than one can probably count.

The fact that a film produced in 1966 about a 15th-century monk who was “world-famous-in-Russia” for his religious artwork was certain to be controversial; and the fact that the movie was made at all, by writer/director Andrei Tarkovsky, is somewhat remarkable. However, the Soviet Premier at the time, the corpulent, humorless atheist Leonid Brezhnev, was having none of it, and the film, all three-and-a-half hours of it, was suppressed.

However, within three years of its one and only release inside the Soviet Union, Andrei Rublev won the 1969 Cannes Film Festival Prize, and suddenly the godless “evil empire” had a hit on its hands. In an attempt to stay ahead of “bootleg” copies of the film being circulated, The State released a truncated cut of the movie inside the U.S.S.R. in 1971. Two years later, in the midst of détente, Columbia Pictures obtained the rights to show yet another redacted version of the movie—this time finally outside of the Soviet Union’s stranglehold and to the general public. While the film garnered critical acclaim, it was not a major commercial success.

Why, then, has the film been preserved in the Criterion Collection and is considered Tarkovsky’s masterpiece? I doubt it’s due to being a cause de scandale, since aside from one scene, where naked pagans are running around, there’s nothing actually scandalous about the film. However, there is a certain genius to it. In a sense, it’s the film equivalent of a Russian novel: a series of chapters bookended by a foreword and afterword (or, if you prefer, a prologue and epilogue).

Part of the difficulty with Andrei Rublev as an enjoyable movie experience is that there is so little to compare it to. However, it’s very alien-ness and originality are worth the hours of viewing. I’m no film scholar, but if I had to compare it to another “greatest-foreign-movie-of-all-time,” one could do worse than contrast its gestalt to that of famed Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini’s 1960 acclaimed classic La Dolce Vita.

Both films are broken up into eight almost discrete parts, both deal with Christianity in a time of crisis (Rublev during the seemingly endless Russian pogroms and internecine warfare, La Dolce Vita in post-World War II Rome), and both are unapologetically epic in scope, making it hard for American viewers to wrap their minds around either one of them—though the statuesque blonde Anita Ekberg certainly helped sell Fellini’s film.

Still, now that the Soviet Union is mercifully long gone and Andrei Rublev can be viewed in its full-length beauty, Andrei Rublev holds up well after 60 years of censorship and cutting-floor clippings because it gives the audience a view (if fictional) of what it was like to be a Christian believer in medieval Russia.

We are all richer for this lesson since, as members of the one, holy, Roman, Catholic Church, we’ve tended to group-think of the Russian Church (along with the rest of the Eastern Orthodox ecclesial communities) as heretics and schismatics since at least 1054. The movie shows that within Russia itself there were faithful and fruitful laity and religious—especially monks—who not only were believers but artificers of incredible works of spiritual artwork.

While the movie centers on the eponymous iconographer, it also takes in the religious architecture of Russian churches, and, in perhaps the highpoint of the film, the arduous casting of a massive church bell with St. Michael the archangel engraved on it.

Occasionally, the film seems to drift into a dreamy, trancelike skein, but it is always being brought down to reality by the quotidian realities of Russian life—not the least of which are the incursions of the barbarous Tatars, the high-handed local potentate and his retinue, and the seemingly live-for-the-moment-only nude pagans. The fact that despite the destitution and, to be even more frank, the lack of a collective civilization (vis-à-vis the city-states in, say, Italy at that time) Andrei Rublev is able to pull off any artwork is something of a triumph.

And yet, as the film shows, he and his confreres did: bell casting—especially on the size the Russians preferred—along with the number of icons written and churches and cathedrals raised: all these are presented as triumphs of Christian Russia, two words most Americans don’t see together very often.

The hagiography behind the actual Andrei Rublev, who is rightfully revered as a saint in the Russian church, is so slim and murky that it allowed the filmmaker great latitude in terms of what might have occurred in his life. What we do know, both by the end of the movie and any web search of icons, is that Andrei Rublev produced some of the most moving icons that have survived to this day.

As for the film itself, despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the film’s entrance in the Criterion Collection, it’s still not easy to find (you won’t find it on Netflix or Prime). In addition to Criterion, it’s available on Kanopy, but your best bet might be your local library. Regardless, it’s worth the search—and the three-hour-plus running time.