messages from moscow

By Robbie on June 17, 2009

Have you seen the movie Andrei Rublev? I watched it over the course of several nights last week; if you care to check out this 220-minute meditation on God, nature, the urge to create, and the problems of existence, I recommend you set aside a week, too.

Andrei Rublev must be the most artistic movie I've seen. Artistic in almost every implication you can imagine: slow, searing, thoughtful, indulgent, mind-blowingly gorgeous, determinedly engaged with the plight of humanity, indifferent to a mass audience, and, in every frame, the work of a single, unyielding, mad mind. Think of the lush black-and-white compositions of Antonioni, and add in the crazy-complex camera maneuvering of Orson Welles as well as the half-a-Screen-Actors-Guild-directory's worth of extras of a Cecil B. DeMille picture. And animals. And here's the really crazy part -- all three-and-a-half hours of this big-bucks, mystico-monastic musing comes from the 1960s Soviet Union, at the end of Krushchev and into the beginning of Brezhnev. The latter is said to have walked out of a screening midway in disgust. The film was censored, butchered, and withheld from Western eyes for some years.

The 15th-century monk and icon painter who is the film's namesake is called to Moscow by the elderly Theophanes the Greek to decorate the Cathedral of the Annunciation. In his travels he meets a jester and some witches, and is roped to a cross. Trying to paint, he undergoes a crisis of faith. Later, in Vladimir, which is being fiercely contested by two sibling grand princes and a Tatar army, he kills a man in the process of saving an idiot girl from being raped. His crisis deepens into a vow of silence, which Rublev lifts at the end after observing an act of blind faith with a happy conclusion: a teenage boy, all conviction and no experience, leading a group of workers in building a bell. 

The plot is of course not exactly the point, though you can tell from it whether this is your kind of Friday-night fun. Also of minor import are the occasional anti-totalitarian resonances, sensible to crudely hypersensitive viewers like Mr. Brezhnev, evidently, in the occasional political figure behaving absurdly or the intense suffering of the Christian principals. This movie has bigger and more elusive fish to fry than this regime or that. It uniquely provides us with the flavor of life in the 1400s -- the dullness, for one thing, an oppressive dullness relieved only by flashes of sickening violence, the moron prattlings of pandering entertainers, the majesty of a natural landscape, a pretty picture or song, and the perpetually discontented mind of mankind. Speaking of bells, does that ring one? Though we can all get to Moscow much quicker than these monks could, we are evolutionarily in the same stuck condition as the bewildered people in Andrei Rublev.

Having acknowledged its overarching humanism, though, I think it's legitimate enough to consider this film as assigned sociological viewing; you need to watch it as you need to watch Triumph of the Will. More, it's necessary to watch, I'd say, as a sheer human accomplishment, that of an unstoppable visual creator and philosopher, Tarkovsky, who was able to rise above the privations of his time and place, and to triumph over very heavy odds -- those same privations and anti-artistic social restrictions, more or less, under which Leni Reifenstahl and many others caved.

I am counting Sergei Eisenstein among these "many others" after having had a brief, alarmed look at Alexander Nevsky. This unintendedly creepy document from the wonderful Soviet Union of 1938 dramatizes the heroism of the Grand Prince of Novgorod, who in the 13th century crushed the invading Livonian Knights (from what we would now call Germany, get it?) and compromised cannily with the Mongol Horde, militarily on the decline at the time. Eisenstein must have had the same idea of taking refuge in a distant century to save his work from prying paws. But this is a piece of work infected with the hysterical need to save itself. The dazzlingly lit hero intones dumb, bloodthirsty cliches. The Teutons (wearing black buckets upside on their heads and carrying flimsy spears) and their Russian sympathizers and embeds glare and glower as in bad community theater. "Rus! Rus!" yell throngs of staunch, simple villagers. Behind them, a warped and damaged recording of an original score by Prokofiev melancholically rumbles. I don't see what, other than an out-of-control multiculturalism, might lead people to rank this leaden hunk of demented, jingoistic hackery alongside other films of the time -- 1938 alone was the year of "Bringing Up Baby" and "Pygmalion." It's not that I don't feel any compassion for artists under duress; but the sad message of Alexander Nevsky is that the creative urge is sometimes better stifled than shoehorned.