The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Andrei Tarkovsky · a film · 1966 · released 1971 · about three hours · written with Andrei Konchalovsky · in Russian, as Andrey Rublyov
Mode
Historical chronicle turned against the historical epic; a Passion, the life of an artist who is never seen at work, and a film about making, in one structure
Mythos
The Passion: the artist goes down into his people’s suffering, sins, falls silent and is raised by another’s making; Icarus answered by the bell; the betrayer who returns to confess; the holy fool
Phase
About twenty-three years in a prologue, eight titled episodes and an epilogue, from a man who flies and falls to a boy who casts a bell, and then the icons alone
Presentation
Feature film in black and white and widescreen, about three hours, with a closing passage in colour; in Russian, with some Tatar; Vadim Yusov’s camera, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s score; the version Tarkovsky shortened himself
Register
From a jester’s obscene song in a barn to the sack of a city; mud, rain, snow, smoke and fire as matter; long takes and crane shots that hold one man inside the crowd and the land
Scale
One monk’s passage through a nation: princes and Tatars, church and pagans, masons and bell founders, rivers, horses and weather
Governing Proposition
A monk who paints icons goes out into the Russia of the fifteenth century and is never once shown painting: he watches a jester arrested, a rival consumed by envy, a pagan feast, masons blinded and a city sacked, kills a man to save a holy fool, falls silent, and speaks again only when a boy who never had the secret has cast a bell. The wager of the film is that the holy in a nation’s art is made inside its cruelty, by people who share it, and that three hours of the world without the paintings, followed by the paintings alone in colour, can make the viewer know where they came from.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a man who flies. Yefim has made a balloon of hides, and it rises over a river and a church; the earth falls away beneath him, and the camera looks down with him from the air, until the balloon comes down and he crashes. By the river a horse rolls on its back. Nothing in the prologue says who Andrei Rublev is, and he does not appear in it. It gives instead the shape the film will close on: a man who rises by his own making and falls, whom a boy who makes something and succeeds will answer three hours later.
Andrei Tarkovsky directed the film for Mosfilm from a screenplay he wrote with Andrei Konchalovsky. Vadim Yusov photographed it, in black and white and in a wide frame, and Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov wrote the score. Anatoly Solonitsyn plays Rublev, Ivan Lapikov the monk Kirill and Nikolai Grinko Daniil Chorny; Nikolai Burlyayev plays Boriska, Rolan Bykov the jester, Irma Raush the holy fool and Yuri Nikulin Patrikey. The language is Russian, with some Tatar. After the prologue come eight titled episodes, unequal in length and spanning about twenty-three years: The Jester, Theophanes the Greek, The Passion According to Andrei, The Feast, The Last Judgment, The Raid, Silence and The Bell. Then the film turns to colour.
Andrei is never seen painting. Through three hours of a chronicle that bears his name he watches, travels, argues, refuses, kills and keeps silent, often at the edge of the frame while events happen to others, and his work appears only at the end, alone. The film was completed in 1966 at about 205 minutes, under the title Strasti po Andreyu (The Passion According to Andrei), shown once or very few times, and withheld by the Soviet film authorities. Tarkovsky shortened it himself, and the shorter film, about three hours long, was shown at Cannes in 1969 and released in the Soviet Union in 1971. That version is the film judged here; the longer one survives, the same design at greater length.
Movement II
The first episode belongs to a jester. In a barn, in the rain, a skomorokh sings an obscene song, and Kirill sets off his arrest; the jester is taken away and beaten for his art. It is a small act of envy, and the film does not forget it: Kirill will confess it in the last episode. The jester’s beating is the first of the punishments the film will visit on those who make things.
Theophanes the Greek is the established master, and his view of the people is contempt, argued at length and with wit. Kirill watches him choose Andrei, not himself. He leaves the monastery, and he kills his dog. Lapikov plays the envy raw: a man who knows the gift is elsewhere and cannot forgive it. The dog will be answered by the horses at the end of the film, and Kirill’s leaving by his return.
The Passion According to Andrei keeps the title the whole film once bore. Andrei tells the story of the crucifixion as a story of men who crucified one who loved them, and the film stages a Calvary in Russian snow, with Russian peasants for the crowd. Against Theophanes’ contempt he sets the people at the centre of the sacred story, cruel and loved at once. It is a position, still untested, held by a young monk who has not yet had to act on it; the rest of the film tests it.
Movement III
In The Feast the film goes out at night among the pagans. Torches move on the river in the dark, and naked men and women come down to the water. Andrei, a monk among them, meets the flesh he is meant to judge and cannot judge it. The church hunts these people and burns them out of the woods. The episode does more than its function asks, and part of it sits outside the line the film argues, but it puts Andrei where the film needs him: unable to stand above the people whose faith he is to paint.
In The Last Judgment Andrei is to paint the Judgment on a church wall, and he refuses. He has seen the people suffer, and he will not paint a terror to frighten them. Meanwhile the masons are blinded in the forest, on a prince’s order. The state that commissions beauty takes the eyes of those who make it, and the film shows this in the trees, among ordinary men, without a speech.
The blinding is what breaks the refusal open. In the church paint is thrown across the white wall, a stain where a Judgment was to be, and the holy fool weeps before it. It is the first image the film gives of art made from suffering, and it is not art: the wall is stained, not painted. Andrei has answered Theophanes with a refusal, and the answer has not yet cost him anything.
Movement IV
The Grand Prince’s brother leads the Tatars into Vladimir. Yusov’s camera rides on cranes over the burning town; the cathedral doors are forced, a horse falls from a stair, and Patrikey is tortured. The staging holds hundreds of people, animals and fire in continuous takes that keep the whole sack in one space, and the cruelties accumulate one on another. A brother sells a city to an enemy, and the Russian past appears as it appears nowhere in the national epic: mud, fire and treason among its own princes.
In the cathedral a soldier goes for the holy fool, and Andrei kills him. Then he stops speaking. The monk who would not paint terror has done violence himself, and he answers it with a vow of silence. He withdraws from speech as he had withdrawn from the Judgment, as if withdrawal could keep his hands clean.
Silence is a famine. The vow passes through hunger and years, and through the loss of the fool, whom he killed to protect and now loses to the Tatars. The film lets these stretches go flat, and the flatness is the point and also its cost. Withdrawal buys nothing. The silence helps no one, and the world goes on being cruel around a man who has stopped answering it.
Movement V
The last episode belongs to a boy. A prince wants a bell, and Boriska says that his dead father, a bell founder, left him the secret of casting; on that word he is given the work. Burlyayev plays him driving grown men by bluff: the pit dug, the furnace fired, the crews set to work. Kirill returns and confesses his old sin. The film that opened on one man’s flight now gathers a crowd around one boy’s making, and everything turns on whether a lie can hold.
The bell is raised from its pit before a crowd, the prince and a foreign embassy, and it is struck, and it rings. Afterwards, in the mud, the boy confesses that he never had the secret: his father did not give it to him. Andrei breaks his vow to speak to him. They will go on together, he says, one to cast bells and one to paint icons. Making has proceeded without the knowledge it seemed to need, and the word Andrei gives back after years of silence is given for another’s making.
Then the film turns to colour. The camera passes slowly over the cracked surfaces of the icons, close, with no people, after three hours of grey, and ends on the Trinity, and then on horses in the rain. The chronicle and the paintings are not two worlds; the paintings are what the chronicle produced. Withheld for about five years after it was finished, the film has since been shown, restored, issued and taught for more than half a century, and its questions, grace, the artist under power, a nation formed in suffering, are still read against one another. What has lasted is its shape: a man who flies and falls, a boy who casts a bell that rings, and between them a painter never seen painting, whose work arrives only at the end, as the issue of everything the film has shown.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the structure of the film as released. The episodes are stations, and most are required by what follows: Kirill sets off the jester’s arrest and confesses it at the bell; Theophanes’ contempt is what Andrei answers when he refuses to paint terror; the blinding throws the paint at the wall; the raid is where he kills and falls silent; the bell ends the vow. The prologue looks detachable and is not. What holds the axis lowest is length permitted rather than compelled: the Theophanes episode runs long in argument, the Feast’s night does more than its function asks, and the raid accumulates cruelties past what its argument needs.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Disclosure through image is credited as fully as through words, and this one can be stated. The holy in a nation’s art is made inside its cruelty, by people who share it. An artist cannot buy innocence by withdrawing: Andrei’s silence helps no one. Faith taught by fear is refused, as Andrei refuses to paint a Judgment that would terrify people he has seen suffer. Making is faith without knowledge: Boriska casts the bell without his father’s secret. And the past is opened without hagiography. Held below the top because much of the force is the murk of the age as a mood, and the closing reconciliation is felt more than argued.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is frequent and comes in every kind. The ceiling is reached three times: the prologue’s flight, the earth falling away under a hide balloon; the bell raised from its pit and struck before a crowd, a prince and a foreign embassy; and the camera passing over the cracked surfaces of the icons in colour after three hours of grey. The dreadful comes in the raid, a horse falling from a stair, Patrikey’s torture; the quiet in a Calvary in snow and torches on a river at night. Held off the top because the Theophanes episode and stretches of the famine are flat, and the grimness sometimes lowers the eye instead of raising it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The myth is built, and it bears load. The film was called after a Passion in its first form and keeps that structure: the artist goes down into his people’s suffering, sins, falls silent and is raised by another’s act of making. Within it the patterns are construction: Icarus in the prologue answered by the bell’s rising; a Calvary staged in snow with Russian peasants; Kirill the betrayer who returns to confess; the holy fool as the soul Andrei kills to protect and then loses. Each stays particular: a hide balloon, a monk’s dog, a boy’s lie. Held below the top because the Christian frame sometimes surfaces as statement rather than structure.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance was the Soviet biographical and historical epic, the life of a national genius told as triumph, with Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944 to 1958) as its grand manner. The departure is deep: a film about a painter never shows him painting; the life is broken into unequal episodes; the past is mud, rain and torture, not pageant; a religious subject is treated as religious, in the Soviet Union of 1966. The stake was paid in five years withheld. Held below the top because parts of the grammar were prepared, by Kalatozov and Urusevsky’s moving camera, Bergman, Bresson and Tarkovsky’s own Ivan’s Childhood (1962).
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the icons came out of this. Three hours of a world without the paintings, in black and white, are followed by the paintings alone, in colour, with no people. Scenes of Andrei at work would make the art the hero; this form makes the world the source and the art its issue. The unequal episodes give a life lived among events that do not centre on the artist, and the long takes hold one man inside the crowd and the land. Held below the top because the Theophanes and Feast episodes contain an argument more than they enact it, and dialogue and image at times leave a seam.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: about sixty years of return, with readings that conflict and stay current. A religious film about grace, as Tarkovsky’s own Sculpting in Time frames his work; an allegory of the artist under Soviet power, as its suppression has led many to read it; a film of a nation formed in suffering; a film about making as such. It yields formally on return: the prologue rhymes with the bell, Kirill’s dog with the horses at the close, and water, fire, earth and air run through every episode. Later viewings find Kirill’s anguish, Theophanes’ wit and the doubt in the reconciliation. Held below the top by span: sixty years against centuries.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1960s. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what the historical film could be, a national epic made out of a refusal of epic, with a hero who watches and duration and weather as content. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed by the suppression, entering the West from 1969 and the Soviet Union from 1971, it ran wide within art cinema, to the medieval mud of Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013), the long takes of Béla Tarr and Aleksandr Sokurov, Lars von Trier’s dedication of Antichrist (2009) to Tarkovsky, and slow cinema since. Discounted: the delay, and the share belonging to Mirror, Stalker and the director’s name.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole, and so does the longer version made before it; nothing that made the work is lost, and restoration is repair. Presence: about sixty years from completion, with continuous exhibition, issue and teaching since it was let out, wide within art cinema and narrower outside it; the five years it was withheld are charged a little. Fabric: a fifteenth-century world made in 1966 does not date as a contemporary setting does, though its post-synchronised sound belongs to its studio. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8, below every work that has lasted centuries and below the Parthenon (9.2).
Score: 8.8 / 10
The making bears load in the great sequences. Vadim Yusov’s camera: crane shots over burning Vladimir and across the fields, long movements from a face to a crowd to a horizon. The raid and the bell, each with hundreds of people, animals and fire, held in continuous takes that keep the whole in one space. Rain in interiors, mud, snow and smoke used as matter, not effect. Solonitsyn’s watchfulness, Lapikov’s Kirill raw with envy, Burlyayev’s boy driving men by bluff, Ovchinnikov’s sparse score. The costs fall on a real share of the film: post-synchronised sound that floats free of the image, declamation in the Theophanes and Last Judgment episodes, stiff minor performances.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the jester’s obscene song in a barn in the rain, and the Trinity in colour at the close. One law governs both: the spirit is made in the flesh, among people, at a cost, and is punished, denied and continued by them. The jester is beaten for his art as the masons are blinded for theirs, and Boriska’s bell is made from the same mud. The range runs from comedy to atrocity, and the chronicle in grey and the icons in colour are one physics, since the icons are what the chronicle produced. The strain lies in the Theophanes episode’s register of debate and the Feast’s night, partly outside the argued line.
Score: 8.7 / 10
History is an agent here, in princes, Tatars, a city’s fall and a famine; the state, in the Grand Prince and his brother, the blinding and the commission of the bell; the sacred, in monastery, icon, Calvary and the hunted pagans; art, in painting, song and casting; labour, in the masons, the pit and the furnace; consciousness, in Andrei’s vow and Kirill’s envy; nature, in rivers, horses, rain and snow. They are held by one man’s passage and joined through it, not listed. What keeps the axis below the top is what is thin: the family is almost absent, the women are a holy fool and a pagan girl, and love between persons is barely held.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 9.0, then The Living Form, The Bottomless Well and The Made at 8.9. Elevation in every kind from the flight to the bell to the icons in colour, a form in which three hours of the world without the paintings are the knowledge of where they came from, sixty years of readings that still conflict, and a making that holds hundreds of people, fire and weather in one space.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2: the spine is required station by station, and the prologue and the bell bracket the whole, but the Theophanes argument, the Feast’s night and the raid’s accumulation of cruelties run past what they argue. Above it, The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6: a disclosure that can be stated but arrives in part as the murk of the age, and a reach delayed five years and shared with the director’s later films.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.7, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it covers falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.7 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Andrey Rublyov (Andrei Rublev) in the version Tarkovsky shortened himself from the film completed in 1966, the version shown at Cannes in 1969 and released in the Soviet Union in 1971, about three hours long, from the balloon over the river to the horses in the rain: directed by Andrei Tarkovsky for Mosfilm from a screenplay by Andrei Konchalovsky and Tarkovsky, photographed by Vadim Yusov, with music by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov; black and white and in a wide frame, with a closing passage in colour. The longer version completed in 1966, about 205 minutes and titled Strasti po Andreyu (The Passion According to Andrei), survives and is the same design at greater length; it bears on survival and is not the object. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Russian film; the English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, and nothing here is charged to a subtitle. No line of the dialogue or the intertitles is held to the word with certainty, so the dialogue is described and not quoted, and the episodes are named in English. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact running time of either version, the dates of the shoot, the years the intertitles give, the prizes at Cannes, the contents of the cuts, the film’s reception inside the Soviet Union, its places in polls and its shot count, are not given.