Films about Monks

On how bad art makes Tarkovsky cry

The Venn diagram of films I’m currently watching has two circles: Russian films and films about monks. (I’ve had the flu.) In the middle is my favourite of all time: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966).

Having just watched the first part of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1945), which pleased Stalin for its justification of harsh means to consolidate Russia, I was attuned to the political ramifications of these stories set far in the past. Rather than justify purges, Andrei Rublev plays a more subtle game of cultural politics.

Andrei Rublev was an Orthodox monk and famous icon painter, and the 1966 film follows his life in different parts of Russia during the first two or three decades of the fifteenth century. He spends much of the second part of the film in silence, not painting, as penitence for a particularly bad sin.

At the end, Andrei is revitalised by watching a very young man successfully cast an enormous bronze bell. He resumes painting, and the spectacular last few minutes of the film show us several of his paintings. His faith restored, his skills return.

Still from Rublev, showing the Holy Trinity icon

What I hadn’t noticed before is the film’s subtle dig at American art. Earlier on, while in deep turmoil and unable to complete his commission to fresco a church, Andrei hurls a pot of clay or some kind of paint in frustration against a whitewashed wall and rubs his hands through it. Visually it is strikingly redolent of the Abstract Expressionists.

The film contrasts the despair of an art of individualism - American despair - with the profound beauty of the art of faith: Russian beauty. Tarkovsky even has a critic come along: holy fool Durochka looks at Rublev’s defaced wall and bursts into tears.

As she does so, a boy reads out the passage from St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that says it is a shame for a woman to pray without a covering on her head. Andrei Rublev, not looking at Durochka, assumes it is the Bible verse that made her cry and asks the boy to stop reading.

But the film makes clear that it is not the Bible passage that troubles Durochka. She seems indifferent to it. The bad art makes her cry.

Like Tarkovsky, the Americans were also playing cultural politics. As is well known, the CIA promoted Abstract Expressionism because it could be seen to represent American freedom. Clearly, Tarkovsky wasn’t having it. (Though his film was censored in Soviet Russia for some other reason, I’m not sure exactly what.)

There is still cultural politics happening with Andrei Rublev. In 2023 Putin took Rublev’s famous Trinity icon from the art people at the Tretyakov Museum and gave it to the Church, who have put it in the Trinity Cathedral (where Rublev once worked) in Sergiyev Posad (a town outside Moscow). It’s the Russian equivalent of Erdogan reconverting the Hagia Sophia from a museum into a mosque.

And I wonder why Mosfilm has released so many outstanding Russian films onto Youtube for free over the last few years. The last time I watched Rublev, early lockdown, I had to pay. Now it’s free; same for Ivan the Terrible. Could there be further interests in disseminating these masterpieces?

Bad art makes us cry. It seems like good art makes us cry too.