Skip to main content

Andrei Rublev

Immediately suppressed by the Soviets in 1966, Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic masterpiece is a sweeping medieval tale of Russia’s greatest icon painter. Too experimental, too frightening, too violent, and too politically complicated to be released officially, Andrei Rublev has existed only in shortened, censored versions until the Criterion Collection created this complete 205-minute director’s cut special edition.

Interesting documentary on Tarkovsky.

Comments

  1. Rick, you had mentioned Andrei Rublev. Great film! Probably Tarkovsky's most accessible film but in it one finds the seed for all his later works.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have Solaris on hold at my local library. What else would you recommend?

    ReplyDelete
  3. The Mirror and Nostalgia are both really good. He also did a fun take on Hemingway's The Killers, which is worth checking out. I think it was his student film. It is included in the Criterion box set of The Killers.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Okay, thanks.

    By the way, everytime I look at the pic accompanying your posts -- that appears to be John Lurie -- I recall that John, his brother Evan and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Worcester, Mass. and played many games of baseball and touch football together as kids.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Good eye. It is John Lurie from his younger days. Love his "Lounge Lizards," not to mention his movies.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Andrei Rublev is my favorite film. The French and Italian directors of the 60s and 70s fill up most of my top 10, but Tarkovsky is the master.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Nice to have you post, antigen. One of my favorite movies is Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes in which he worked with Marcello Mastroianni.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ward No. 6

Ward No. 6 is a short story written by Chekhov in 1892.  It has appeared in various collections of Chekhov short stories, including The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories translated by Constance Garnett in 1921.  In this story, Chekhov explores the inner working of a run-down lunatic asylum in a provincial town.  He  introduces the readers to a coarse porter who speaks mostly with his fists, various patients, a doctor who presides over this ward, and expresses his thoughts with a local postmaster.  It was recently made into a movie , featuring Vladimir Ilyin.  Here's a clip . There's also this very recent short film (30 min.) by Suzana Purkovic, with English subtitles.

Light and Dark

I'm still trying to sort out the ending.  The story had to end tragically but was surprised that Rogozhin actually sought forgiveness in Myshkin after what he had done to Nastya, although I think that Dostoevsky intended the two to be read as one, along similar lines as The Double .  He kept Rogozhin a shadowy figure throughout the novel, ever lurking in the dark of the Prince's soul.  Try as he might, Prince Myshkin could not alter events and thus the fantasy world he had lived in upon returning to Russia crumbled before his eyes, leaving him at a total loss as how to reconcile himself with it. Once again, Dostoevsky plumbs great depths of the human soul.  This is a psychological drama told in theatrical terms, perfectly suited for the stage.  Characters appear and disappear as if moving from the shadows of the stage.  I can see the "green bench" as the central stage piece.  In the final part, one gets the sense that Lebedev is orchestrating event...

The Morning of Our Motherland

I was watching a History channel special on Socialist Realism art of the Soviet Union and this was one of the grand canvases that is now stuffed away in the Tretyakov State Gallery .  The painter was Fyodor Shurpin and he had a wonderful eye for detail, right down to the secret service black car on the road to Stalin's right.  To the left, one sees a row of combines turning over the field of golden wheat, which became symbolic of Stalin's Soviet Union.  Утро нашей Родины is from 1949, with Stalin radiating a post-war confidence.  It is also known as  Dawn of our Fatherland and other titles. Shurpin was one of the better artists to carry over from the pre-war years.  The narrator pointed out how socialist realist art changed dramatically as a result of the war, becoming much more static and propagandist in appearance.  He pointed to two stops along the Moscow subway as an example of this divide.  Here, Shurpin essentially transposes Stalin fo...