Letters from Vienna #66
Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublëv”
It’s wise and prudent to listen to artists discussing art not because they’re infallible oracles of pure truth but rather on account of their intimate knowledge of the issues involved. Thus, when Ingmar Bergman said of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublëv”, which was released by Mosfilm in 1966: “Tarkovsky gave me one of the best and most unforgettable experiences in my life and in cinema...” his words are to be taken very seriously indeed.
“When film is not a document, it’s dream,” said Bergman. “That’s why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally.”[1]
“My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle” Bergman once recounted. “Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.”
“Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”[2]
The adjective miracle is especially apt when describing the film “Andrei Rublëv”. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about it is that it exists at all. How exactly the secular, materialistic Soviets came to finance this movie about spirituality and art is beyond the ken of this particular writer yet the fact that they did so remains nothing short of a miracle.
The “kino-roman” version of “Andrei Rublëv”, translated into English by Kitty Hunter Blair, which I stumbled across in a Bloomsbury book-shop in the early 1990s, begins with the words: “Age-old hatred swirls up into the torrid sky – clangour of steel, neighing, moans of the dying – and falls lifeless into the dust, beneath horses’ hooves, a warrior, his face covered in blood.”
“Riders are unseated, curved swords gleam in the suffocating crush of battle, princely standards bend over, weighed down by tartar arrows. Shouts, horror, death. Canvas shirts black with blood, shaved heads pierced with arrows, red shields split by axes, a horse thrashing about on its back, its belly split open; dust cries, death.”[3]
“Tarkovsky’s first draft of Rublëv” Philip Strick tells us, “was written after a decade of unsettled wandering and research. He had entered the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow in 1951 at the age of nineteen, only to abandon the course in favour of an eighteen-month geological expedition to Russia’s far north. When he returned to Moscow in 1954 it was in order to find ways of reacting to his experiences; film studies at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) provided an acceptable route. Under the guidance of Mikhail Romm, who had worked with Eisenstein, Tarkovsky absorbed a solid diet of film classics and recycled them into his first feature film, “Ivan’s Childhood”, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 1962…”
“…Although describing Rublëv as a “complete mystery” and having “no intention of unravelling the riddle of his life”, Tarkovsky provides a scrupulous historical context to the screenplay. He opens with the Kulikovo battleground where the prince of Moscow, Dimitri Donskoi, defeated the Tartar Khan Mamai in 1380; Kulikovo was a turning-point in the struggle to extract Russia from the control of the so-called Golden Horde, the western part of the Mongol empire, but another century would pass before the final Tartar invasion was routed by Ivan III in 1481. Rublëv’s lifetime, from c.1370 to c.1430, was a period of protracted chaos in which the Tartars attacked repeatedly. Against this background of unrelieved brutality and hopelessness the only comfort was religious faith.”
“In the 1390s, Rublëv appears to have been associated with the Holy Trinity Monastery at Zagorsk, some fifty miles north-east of Moscow. The monastery’s patron was Sergius of Radonezh, who was the spiritual adviser to Dimitri Donskoi, in his stand against the Tartars and was later proclaimed a saint; the most famous of Rublëv’s works, the “Old Testament Trinity” was dedicated to the memory of St. Sergius. After helping to decorate the cathedral of the dormition in Zvenigorod by 1400 Rublëv was a member of the Andronnikov Monastery in Moscow itself, and in 1405 he was summoned to help Theophanes the Greek decorate the cathedral of the annunciation there...”[4]
Art and Religion
For Tarkovsky art is inextricably intertwined with religion: “In art, as in religion,” he wrote “intuition is tantamount to conviction, to faith. It is a state of mind, not a way of thinking. Science is empirical, whereas the conception of images is governed by the dynamic of revelation. It’s a question of sudden flashes of illumination — like scales falling from the eyes; not in relation to the parts, however, but to the whole, to the infinite, to what does not fit in to conscious thought.”
“Art does not think logically or formulate a logic of behaviour; it expresses its own postulate of faith. If in science it is possible to substantiate the truth of one’s case and prove it logically to one’s opponents, in art it is impossible to convince anyone that you are right if the created images have left him cold, if they have failed to win him with a newly discovered truth about the world and about man, if in fact, face to face with the work, he was simply bored…”[5]
Later-on he writes: “We have almost totally lost sight of the beautiful as a criterion of art: in other words, of the aspiration to express the ideal. Every age is marked by the search for truth. And however grim that truth, it still contributes to the moral health of humanity. Its recognition is a sign of a healthy time and can never be in contradiction with the moral idea. Attempts to hide the truth, cover it, keep it secret, artificially setting it against a distorted moral ideal on the assumption that the latter will be repudiated in the eyes of the majority by the impartial truth—can only mean that ideological interests have been substituted for aesthetic criteria. Only a faithful statement about the artist’s time can express a true, as opposed to a propagandist, moral ideal.”
“This was the theme of “Andrei Rublëv”. It looks at first sight as if the cruel truth of life as he observes it is in crying contradiction with the harmonious ideal of his work. The crux of the question, however, is that the artist cannot express the moral ideal of his time unless he touches all its running sores, unless he suffers and lives these sores himself. That is how art triumphs over grim, “base” truth, clearly recognising it for what it is, in the name of its own sublime purpose: such is its destined role. For art could almost be said to be religious in that it is inspired by commitment to a higher goal.”[6]
The search for truth, Tolstoy once asserted (an idea which Wittgenstein took very seriously indeed) can be considered essentially a search for God; although whether one actually believes in the existence of God or not is ultimately irrelevant. For many a “higher goal” might suffice and as Bergman once put it: art is essentially “life as a reflection, life as a dream”.
[1] https://www.openculture.com/2013/12/ingmar-bergman-names-the-eleven-films-he-liked-best.html
[2] http://www.nostalghia.com/TheTopics/IB_On_AT.html
[3] p.5 Andrei Rublëv, Andrei Tarkovsky, translated by Kitty Hunter Blair
[4] pp. viii-x Ibid
[5] p. 41 Sculpting in Time, Andrey Tarkovsky
[6] p.168 Ibid