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20-Dec-04

96 pages

Published/distributed by BFI Publishing

ISBN/EAN: 9781844570386

Paperback

Price: £4.99

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Andrei Rublev: BFI Film Classics

Bird, Robert

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86) was one of the great poets of world cinema. A fiercely independent artist, Tarkovsky crafted poignantly beautiful films that have proven inscrutable and been bitterly disputed.

These qualities are present in abundance in Andrei Rublev (1966), Tarkovsky's first fully mature film. Ostensibly a biographical study of Russia's most famous medieval icon-painter, Andrei Rublev is both lyrical and epic, starkly naturalistic and allegorical, authentically historical and urgently topical. The Soviet authorities prevented the film's release for five years, until its success at Cannes forced their hand. However, implacable enemies of the regime such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn also found Andrei Rublev's grim realism unsettling. While much remains mysterious in Andrei Rublev, critics have recently begun to re-appraise it as a groundbreaking film which exploits the manifold discontinuities of human experience to undermine comfortable notions of life and spirituality.

Robert Bird's multi-faceted account of Andrei Rublev extends this re-evaluation of Tarkovsky's radical aesthetic by establishing the film's historical context and presenting a substantially new reading of key scenes. Bird definitively establishes the film's tortured textual history, which has resulted in two vastly different versions. He relates the film to traditions in Russian art and intellectual history, but finally his analysis focuses on Andrei Rublev as a visual and narrative artwork which treats the profoundest existential questions by challenging conventional notions of representation and vision.

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