It took me several days after having watched Andrey Rublyov (1966) to even begin to start making sense of it all. This is a film that leaves the viewer speechless if they do endure in its watching. This is also not made for the contemporary viewer, since this requires amount of patience that is not required in contemporary blockbusters (as in every Tarkovsky film).
Tarkovsky effectively transports us to wherever he might want his story to take place. It might be medieval Russia, or it might be in a distant planet, an abandoned place where miracles happen, or it might well just be his home.
This is always presented in a slow, methodical way. Tarkovsky demands patience of us. He demands that we sit and reflect upon the events that are unfolding on-screen. Unlike Иваново детство (1962), Солярис (1972), Зеркало (1975), or Сталкер (1979); Андрей Рублёв does not leave the characters lingering together for what could be an unbearable amount of time in contemporary filmmaking.
In Андрей Рублёв, we see the interaction between the different characters be expedited. All their conversations happen in such a rapid fashion that the viewer might lose track if they are not paying attention. It is in solitude that the characters ponder, stop to think, and live.
The art of Becoming
It is often said that an artist should not say things, but rather show them. Cinema is the quintessential art form that can achieve this to its full extent, since it has a vast amount of resources readily available to make art. And Tarkovsky, following the title of his book (as well as the contents of it) Sculpting in Time, is a fierce advocate for this dictum.
It would be impossible to think about ourselves (or about the world, really) in a way that does not deal with Time. If one recalls the first Kant’s Critique, he establishes that both time and space are pure intuitions, i.e., the cognitive structures that makes us make sense of the world. We cannot escape these two concepts since they shape our very perception of the world.
It is this kantian tradition that Tarkovsky roughly follows. Time is not something that exists beyond the cognitive subject, but rather it is a construct that the subject creates in their attempt to understand the world. For this, time (given that it is a subjective element) and memory are intertwined. They both shape the subject, the ‘I’ that is currently reading this text.
With this in mind, Tarkovsky treats the life of Andrey Rublyov as testament of that. Rublyov, as an objective reality, a historical figure, is transformed into a subjective one. We experience what he experiences, and it is in time that Rublyov becomes what he is to become: a true artist that will have a major impact in the history of Russia.
Memory is necessarily a spiritual level. It roots what we are in ourselves, since we are those memories, as well as we remember ourselves in said memories. We make sense of time through our individual experiences. And with this Tarkovsky shows us a key idea in his work: humans become fully humans in time.
In all the films that were mentioned, all the characters are in a given time and place that Tarkovsky very carefully constructs in different ways. Андрей Рублёв is no exception to that. In each of them the characters also are formed, realised, in the specificities of their time. And in this, Андрей Рублёв is also no different from the rest.
Andrey Rublyov is cast onto the world, having been taught that love, charity and all of the christian concepts are what make this life worth living. Humans are to direct his love towards Christ, and that will bring joy to them. Yet this is true only at an intellectual level for Rublyov. He has not experienced actual love, charity and other christian experiences.
It is him leaving his homeplace, walking into the unknown, that he is forced to find himself again. But when this happens, he will be a different man, he will be one that will have lived the things that he thought he lived for but then stopped. It is, as in all of Tarkovsky’s films, a voyage to another place in which we will be bound to find our reflection, a mirror that will show us who we really are. For Andrey Rublyov, this is a Christian artist.
Christianity and truth
It is not a small feat being called the most important director of our time by none other than Ingmar Bergman, yet Tarkovsky rightfully earned this distinction. This comes as everything but as a surprise, since thye share several of the same interests, such as spirituality and religion, christianity and being judeo-christian in the modern world.
On the first film in the Silence of God trilogy, Såsom i en spegel (1961), Bergman presents the viewer both in content and on the title of the movie, biblical the idea of christian love. The name of the movie derives from a bible passage, 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a glass darkly”.
Tarkovsky would go on quoting 1 Cor 13 at length at some point in the movie:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not pulled up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
While Såsom i en spegel deals with love itself and the loss of it and its consequences, which result in the tearing of our social fabric, Андрей Рублёв deals with the personal experience of God, and, in a way, in the absence of God in our world. Rublyov protests the iniquities of our world by removing himself from it, he has not experienced the ἀγάπη (love or charity, depending on the translation) of God.
If Bergman’s film ends up showing that love might be able to hold a person together, given the events that had just unfolded, Tarkovsky’s shows that the love of the craft, the true unrestrained passion for the art that one is making is capable of making miracles.
When we hear the bell ring perfectly, Rublyov understands at a deeper level, what he had already known at a intellectual level from his formation: that love, the community and brotherhood give us the elements to make sense of the world. It is at this moment that the art transcends the subjective experience, for everyone, not just Rublyov and Boriska, hears the perfect ringing. Faith, in its truest form, has granted them something that seemed impossible.
Any type of spiritual phenomenon is spiritual precisely because it transcends itself. It goes beyond what it is expected of it. It gives meaning, by presenting something that is universal. The world is then filled with only our feelings and emotions, by being a deeply subjective experience, pertaining to me as a subject, I transcend that barrier and this experience becomes objective.
Tarkovsky manages to be himself Andrey Rublyov when he made this film. He, too, has transcended the subjective experience and, by transforming it into art, shows a spiritual, objective reality that would be unbeknownst to us. Andrey Tarkovsky’s bell is his filmography, resonating in all those who watch them, having a feeling of amazement at every step of the way.