Robert Bird,
Andrei Rublev.
London: BFI Publishing, 2004.
ISBN: 1 84457 038 X
87pp
£9.99 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by BFI publishing)

THE BURNING NARRATIVE:
ICON AND AXE IN TARKOVSKY’S ANDREI RUBLEV

Tarkovsky’s work, which includes only seven films made between 1962 and 1986, is surrounded by a growing body of critical texts, testifying to the fact that this director’s films continue to be a challenging critical enterprise. Not surprisingly, Robert Bird’s new reading of Tarkovsky’s second film, the medieval epic Andrei Rublev (Soviet Union, 1966), starts with a reminder of both the fascination and the difficulties critics and viewers inevitably experience with all of Tarkovsky’s controversial films, Rublev included.

Andrei Rublev is an astonishing document of the intellectual maturity and the aesthetic radicalism of the then 32 year-old director. The film’s domestic release was banned for at least five years after its production. Now it is known in three versions; and the director’s cut only became available to the audience in the 1980s, the decade of Russian perestroika. The film has always provided a stumbling-block for both Russian and international critics. In Russia it was predominantly criticised for the frivolous interpretation of genre, history, and of the leading character, the fifteenth century icon painter Andrei Rublev. Western critics mainly considered it a dissident act: an allegorical statement about repression and lack of freedom in the former Soviet Union. The increasing number of texts on Tarkovsky shows a significant expansion of these perspectives and interpretations. Instead of placing the film at one of these two poles, more and more writers are interested in identifying the major themes running through all seven films, a fact that inevitably extends the analysis of a single film to the whole of Tarkovsky’s work. A growing number of critics tend to see Tarkovsky’s films as a consistent director’s statement about the state of civilization and the human condition rather than as individual texts. This awareness of Tarkovsky’s profoundly intertextual approach informs some of the most interesting recent readings of his films, both in Russia and abroad.

In the opening pages of his book Bird makes clear that Andrei Rublev is one of the most ambiguous and controversial films ever made and thus a significant challenge for critics. The huge body of texts on Andrei Rublev (presented in Bird’s bibliography) and the aura it carries of being the “‘film of films’ put[s] it in the same category as the book of books – the Bible.” (7) It has been defined as a revival of religious experience in the contemporary world (Nigel Silvio D’Sa), as a reconstruction of the aesthetics of icon painting in cinema (Angela Dalle Vache), as a search for harmony and unification of the spiritual and the material (Anna Lawton), and even as a “profoundly postmodern” and “post-utopian work” (Denise J. Youngblood). Bird’s book extends this list by emphasizing the ambiguity of perception. On the one hand Andrei Rublev is considered “the most Russian of films”, a “breathtaking movie” and “one of the fifteen best films ever made”. On the other hand, as an “uncompromisingly difficult film”, whose confusion of temporal and spatial planes and uneventful and fragmented narrative undermine common cinematic preconceptions, it is a great challenge even for the most experienced art cinema fans and the most sophisticated writers.

In addition, an understanding of the film requires more than strictly cinematic knowledge. Viewers certainly need some background information about the Russian cultural context: the historical time of the plot, the fifteenth century, and the moment of the film’s production in the 1960s. Keeping all of this in mind, Bird’s task seems almost beyond reach, a desperate attempt to offer a new vision of the film in the limited format of BFI’s Film Classics series – less than 100 pages. Yet Bird bravely confronts the hidden dangers of the enterprise. Even in this limited space he manages to encompass multiple perspectives on the text: the cultural significance of the film, its textual innovations and the director’s experimental predilections, which inform both. Bird’s method successfully illuminates both the intertextual and the intratextual space, while suggesting some new interpretations of the film’s key moments. In this sense his book is a significant achievement, still more evidence of the film’s inexhaustible interpretative resources and of critics’ tireless efforts to penetrate Tarkovsky’s work.

From the very beginning Bird’s book promises impetuous leaps from the context to the text and vice-versa. The fast pace of these shifts corresponds to the dynamics of Tarkovsky’s own trajectory in theorizing and in film practice. In Tarkovsky’s career, Andrei Rublev functioned as both a creative and a theoretical laboratory, a remarkable attempt to redefine the essence of cinema. The director’s major challenge was to examine the possibility of ‘imprinting time’ on the cinematic medium. The film’s aura of radical aesthetic experiment has much to do with its startling narrative structure, which “seems to repel any attempt at viewer ‘identification'” (10). The director’s theoretical statements and the film’s intervention in the Russian ideological and cultural discourse are the necessary background to a discussion of its complex fictional construction of history. Each leap in Bird’s discussion is indicative of the ever-shifting perspectives one should assume in approaching Tarkovsky’s film as both a viewer and a writer. The result is an informative, analytical, and inspiring argument, which takes place on several levels simultaneously throughout the four chapters, weaving the perspectives together and gradually directing the discussion toward what Bird defines as the “central component in Tarkovsky’s innovative cinema aesthetic”, the icon. (11)

The discussion opens by tracing the path from the historical person to the fictional character (Chapter 1). So little is known about the life of Andrei Rublev that he has became almost a mythical figure in Russian cultural history. There is only one icon, The Old Testament Trinity, which can be attributed to him with certainty, although several others associated with his name are extant today. A few historical sources document his collaboration in the decoration of churches in the early fifteenth century. Yet his influence has been detected in many frescoes and his significance was confirmed by his canonisation as a saint. Aware of the importance of the historical context, Bird briefly goes through these facts as well as through the most important events of Rublev’s age – the spread of Christianity, the Mongol-Tartar invasion, and the rivalry between the Russian city-states – while keeping the reader’s attention on the major line of his argument: the intersection between myth, fiction, history, theology, ideology, and aesthetics in Tarkovsky’s fiercely independent interpretation of Rublev’s image.

Bird’s focal point here is the spiritual heritage imprinted in the tradition of Orthodox Christian culture. One of the most important issues he mentions is the duality word-silence (“‘word-weaving’/hesychasm”), the monastic orientation toward the “transcendent and the unknowable” (15), and the intense spiritual experience of the very process of icon painting. Although Bird does not go into much detail, in this case it might be useful to do so, as issues of word/image/silence are key notions in Tarkovsky’s project. Theological theory and practice have moved in different directions in this respect: on the one hand theological texts claim that it is impossible to formulate God as an intellectual concept – His image is beyond description, unknown, transcendent and yet immanent and recognizable through His energies. On the other hand the art of ‘word-weaving’ and icon painting, blossoming in Rublev’s age, have achieved a high level of aesthetic sophistication, embodied in the artistic credo “simplicity without ostentation” (15). With its emphasis on mystic experience as the only path to apprehending God, Orthodox Christian culture ‘disqualifies’ both language and images as forms of communication of the divine essence, and yet uses them extensively to promote the faith, transforming them into fine art in the process. Tarkovsky’s experimental efforts in Andrei Rublev are, to a great extent, an attempt to intervene in the verbal/visual dichotomy, examining the narrative and representational potential of the film medium and pushing the limits of their mutual implication and referentiality further.

At this stage in Bird’s argument a brief comparison of Eastern and Western Christianity might help his reader and the viewer of the film to get closer to the film’s basic underlying semantic structure, which is based on one of the central ‘doctrines’ in Orthodox Christianity, the Holy Trinity. The doctrine of Holy Trinity holds that God is not monad but triad, a Trinitarian image. The Holy Trinity conceptualizes bond, kinship, connection, sharing, love, and reciprocity and denies isolation and bare individualism. The concept suggests that the mission of every human being is to reproduce the trinity’s model on both the social and the individual level, an idea which has reverberated strongly through Russian culture and art for centuries. Designed after the image of God, humans are – or should be – like Him, a Trinitarian unity. Spirituality and perfectionism become the most distinctive characteristics of Christian Orthodox ethics. Andrei Rublev is central to Tarkovsky’s exploration of the Trinitarian model on several levels of the plot, but his fascination with the dramatic possibilities of the triad is echoed in other films as well, for instance, the character structure in Solaris (Soviet Union, 1972) and Stalker(West Germany/Soviet Union, 1979).

Bird’s discussion of “the via cruces of Andrei Rublev” (Chapter 2) is certain to fascinate both Tarkovsky fans and film scholars. It contains details about the two published scripts and the three versions of the film (each with a different duration), and compares the script and the film. In addition, Bird discusses various backstage information involving the scriptwriting and production; the intertextual field informing Rublev‘s thematic and aesthetic innovations; the film’s long road to the audience; and the fierce controversy that has accompanied it at every stage. While the comments in this chapter may seem quite heterogeneous, they are necessary reference points for everyone who may think that the discontinuities and the discrepancies in the plot arise solely from artistic judgement. “[A] past master at making a virtue of necessity” (31), Tarkovsky had to keep a difficult balance between political and ideological demands and his artistic vision. He lived and breathed with the project, constantly changing details throughout the process and never falling into dogmatism.

Bird does not fail to notice the discrepancy between Tarkovsky’s method of filmmaking and his theoretical arguments. If we share Bird’s vision of Tarkovsky’s work as an experimental continuum, as an on-going search involving both the audiovisual medium of film and the verbal medium of theory, then Andrei Rublev certainly appears as an important and logical step on this road.

The notorious critical argument about Rublev‘s narrative – especially heated in the former Soviet Union – is indicative of the consistency beyond discrepancy in Tarkovsky’s work: a departure from the logic, discreteness, and analytical structure of verbal expression [“literary discourse”, (24)], towards the multiplicity, diffusion and syncretism of the image. It is true that Tarkovsky sought “to achieve both authenticity and distance” (27), that he tends “to obscure narrative connections and to stress non-narrative visual motifs and images”, and that for him, (as co-scriptwriter Andrei Konchalovsky claimed), “sensations replaced dramaturgy” (31). The two points mentioned above – the verbal/visual dichotomy and the concept of the Holy Trinity – are the context for what Bird defines as the major subject of Rublev: the gaze, seeing, the education of sight. If the earthly world is designed after the divine, it is understandable that the issue of (icon)representation, the look, the gaze, contemplation and image, have more to do with Andrei Rublev‘s subject than the traditional factual narration of artist’s life and biography. The logic of the look demands that material and space be organised differently than the logic of verbal account and the linearity of (hi)story. Hence, the dialogues in Rublev resemble monologues; the vector of sight and the exploring gaze demand long takes; a slower rhythm becomes almost inevitable. This focussed contemplation is an attempt to penetrate beyond the visible surfaces: the longer the gaze lasts, the closer the mind moves to apprehending the invisible yet omniscient presence of the divine. In Tarkovsky’s hands cinema becomes an instrument of intense exploration and knowledge, not an entertainment.

Not surprisingly, Bird devotes a separate chapter to Andrei Rublev‘s plot. (Chapter 3) Whether Tarkovsky aimed to achieve the effect of mosaic (Bird), or to imitate the cryptic and disjointed form of the medieval chronicle (Youngblood), or to “burn” all narrative conventions (Bird), in any case the story has little to do with the linearity of biography. The suspension of action, the lack of causality, the novelistic structure of chapters, the inactive anti-hero – all these “reject any unified plot and narrative” (Tarkovsky) and build instead a fragmented and discontinuous textuality.

Despite its fragmentary structure and non-linearity, Rublev‘s plot often prompts the critic to follow the film chapters in a kind of linear trajectory when discussing the film, which, in Bird’s analysis, culminates in the final episode, “The Bell”. Correctly identified as the fundamental narrative block, “The Bell” “provides a clear shape to the entire preceding narrative” and “weaves all major voices together and imbues the entire film with a precise logic”. (59) As soon as “the process of constructing the bell can clearly be taken as a metaphor of the movie” (60), it is seductive to apply a spatial metaphor to Rublev‘s narrative: an open bell-shape, another reminder that Bird’s interpretation of the narrative motifs and sub-motifs is subordinated to the paramount topic of vision.

Bird’s analysis of each chapter of the film in chronological order suggests that “[t]here is no consistent point of view for the narration, even when the titular hero is present in the shot” (41). This conclusion is debatable and is not fully shared by other writers. For instance, Hungarian critics Kovacs and Szilagyi (cited in Vida T. Johnson & Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue) claim that the film’s narrative relies on the systematic development of certain narrative themes in each chapter. These themes unite the text, and as a result the film depends “less on plot than on theme” (Johnson & Petrie). Despite the elliptical composition, temporal inconsistency, and missing narrative connections, it is possible to detect the trajectory of several themes and sub-themes across the film chapters. From this perspective the plot reveals an astonishing inner harmony, a well-knit, logical, and unshakable structural unity. Some French critics move in the same direction, emphasizing the sense of unity beyond the ellipses. According to them, the film can be read as a “transparent” or “serene allegory with no apparent connections to historical reality” (Ciment, Demeure & Amengual, cited in Johnson & Petrie). Similarly, the Russian writer Dmitry Salynsky identifies consistent and recurring thematic patterns in each of Tarkovsky’s films, which are then also reproduced on the level of the cycle of seven films. In this sense the analysis of Rublev‘s plot could be associated with the cyclic movement within the whole of Tarkovsky’s work: it prefigures thematic motifs and structural patterns which appear in the subsequent films.

The most controversial aspect of the plot is Tarkovsky’s treatment of the central character, the icon-painter who “fails to paint a single image” (32). In Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky writes that “the logic of a person’s behaviour can transfer into the rationale of quite different – apparently irrelevant – facts and phenomena, and the person you started with can vanish from the screen, replaced by something quite different… for instance it is possible to make a film in which there is no one hero character figuring throughout the film, but where everything is defined by the particular foreshortening effect of one person’s view of life.” (65) Obviously based on this model, Andrei Rublev has neither an action-oriented nor a character-oriented plot. Tarkovsky constantly displaces Rublev to the periphery of the screen action, transforming him into an observing rather than an active agent.

Like many other writers, Bird finds it difficult to consider Rublev a major protagonist: he is central “only in the sense that he sees more than any other character, and the key events are ones of vision and witness.” (37) For Bird the film is a kind of treatise on the ways of seeing, “an education in sight” (39); its actual theme is “the gradual elevation of Andrei’s vision” which results in the “formation of the viewer’s own vision”. (38) The concept of vision informs the visual style of the film, unifying it through a series of recurring patterns: the intra-frame movements to the right; the self-conscious camera work, especially Tarkovsky’s notoriously slow tracking shots; the mise-en-scene arrangements which are reminiscent of iconic composition; the recurring crane shots. One can add to these the recurrent positioning of the camera slightly above the object of shooting, the spectacular high-angle shots at certain key moments, and the perpendicular POV from above, which Chris Marker defines among the landmarks in Tarkovsky’s representation of space and objects [One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch (2000)]. Bird’s account continues with more systematic and consistent patterns: visual rhymes, rhythmic organization based on the contemplative long takes and slow camera motions, a number of similar editing figures. Beyond them one can sense the overarching structural model, consisting of a series of structural “symmetries, doublings, [and] repetitions”. Here Bird includes the framing image of the river at the beginning and the end of the film; the recurring intra-frame movement of the background characters (always!) to the right, “as if in a universal migration to some off-screen destination” (38); the repeated shots serving to link neighbouring episodes, the positioning of the figures in the screen space, and so on. The close attention to style is a director’s strategy: it gradually builds an attitude to space and time through deliberate spatial arrangements and through allowing enough time for the actively searching, exploring gaze. At this stage of Bird’s otherwise comprehensive analysis lacks an emphasis on the systematic connections which Tarkovsky deliberately develops between the thematic grid and its realisation on the visual level.

To support his argument Bird traces the crossing vectors of the gazes of all major characters, beginning with Rublev. “The screen acts as a locus of exchange on which the characters’ and viewers’ gazes run like alternating currents through the tense, pensive images. The viewer is encouraged to acknowledge a manifold of possible plots and interpretations… The screen is not a transparent window on objective reality, but the material basis of a narrative form which takes shape only with the viewer’s active participation.” (41)

The viewer’s active position in the construction of meaning is central to both Tarkovsky’s writings and Bird’s analysis. Yet Tarkovsky’s consideration of the audience’s perception is profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand he undermines all “complacent preconceptions” (7), his self-reflexive style obstructs viewer identification, and the erratic story lines often result in an overwhelming disorientation. On the other hand Tarkovsky deploys a series of techniques to immerse the viewer in the film world, to achieve the totality of sensual effect, deliberately targeting subconscious perception and seeking a “physiological truth” beyond the “truth of archeology and ethnography.” (Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time). Bird pays a great deal of attention to the issue of perception and its subsequent interpretations from the most intimate individual psychological nuances to the broad critical discussion of the film in the former Soviet Union.

Rublev is not only a laboratory for narrative structure and viewer perception. It pushes the limits of cinematic expressiveness while seeking new possibilities for the “mutual implications” (Claudia Gorbman) of sound, image, and word. Bird’s brief mention of sound bridges, key voice-over scenes, the melody of human speech and the distribution of musical themes is especially valuable, keeping in mind that the exploration of the audio-visual continuum is a rarely discussed aspect of Tarkovsky’s work. The director’s growing awareness of the significance of sound in producing synaesthetic effects and in intervening radically in the meaning of images, as well as his brilliant exploration of ambient sound to achieve dramatic tension are not central considerations in Bird’s argument, but the points he makes nonetheless enrich his profound analysis of the director’s style.

The final chapter summarises various intertextual links and influences that Bird has detected in Andrei Rublev. In contrast to Johnson and Petrie’s comprehensive intertextual study, the format of Bird’s book allows him to discuss the topic only partially, referring to the most important connections to world cinema and painting. Among the most obvious examples of cinematic influence he mentions are Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible(Soviet Union, 1944-47) and Alexander Nevsky (Soviet Union, 1938), Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels (Poland, 1961), and Dreyer’s The Passions of St. Joan of Arc (France, 1928). Above all there is Tarkovsky’s favorite, Robert Bresson: the traces of his paradigmatic “depiction of inner experience of a religious man, The Diary of a County Priest (France, 1950)”, “the exploration of the invisible through the visual medium of cinema”, and the “sparse texture of experience” (68) reveal Bresson’s powerful presence in both Tarkovsky essays and practice.

Not surprisingly, alongside Leonardo da Vinci, Carpaccio, and Breugel, the aesthetics of the icon becomes the focal point of reference in this chapter. Remember that no single act of icon painting appears in the film. The viewer is allowed to see selected details of Rublev’s surviving works in the only colour segment, the epilogue. While these details rhyme visually with the preceding episodes, Bird argues that the aesthetics of the icon informs the world of the film in more general and complex way. The Orthodox icon is considered a direct “channel” to the divine, a “window on the absolute” (Gauthier, cited in Johnson & Petrie), a representation and itself a holy object at the same time. In other words, what is depicted and the picture itself are identical. This aspect of icon-painting is, according to Johnson and Petrie, the “most difficult for the Western mind to grasp”.

Tarkovsky transposes this treatment of icon art to cinema. His aspiration to sacralise cinema has been discussed by many writers: “just as icon-painting is considered a pure sacred act, a direct access to the divine, the filmmaking, ‘all great art is at the service of something beyond itself'” (Johnson & Petrie). Bird notes that one of the most obvious – although indirect – demonstrations of this idea is the lack of a privileged on-screen center, as if the camera always is looking forward to some “invisible, off-screen destination” (77). The film becomes “a visible image of the invisible realm” keeping the “viewer’s gaze towards eternity” (79). Yet it “does not break through to eternal stillness and transcendent truth. It remains bound by time … [b]ut this is a time pregnant with eternity, an emptiness pregnant with meaning, and a fiction which is pregnant with the icon.” The uneasy calmness of Andrei Rublev is borne by its immense inner tension, which reveals that love and compassion are not “instantaneous achievement[s]” and that if one does not struggle for them one will not recognize them when they come.

Leading the argument from context to text, from theology to philosophy, from painting to film, Bird completes his discussion on a high note. His primary aim is to help the viewer to comprehend one of the most difficult and the most mysterious film texts in the history of cinema. However, Bird’s balanced and powerful writing finally achieves more than this: like a few critics nowadays, he adopts the dual position of cold-minded analyst and enthusiastic viewer-fan, the one who simultaneously interprets the film and shares the unique experience of viewing it – perhaps the only possible position which can allow us to break the impenetrable shell of Tarkovsky’s film.

Violetta Petrova
University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Created on: Tuesday, 7 March 2006 | Last Updated: 7-Mar-06