The Reel Argument: Andrei Tarkovsky

By Bergotte

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Andrei Tarkovsky is the filmmaker most often recommended and least often watched, and the reason for this is a lie — a well-intentioned, widely repeated lie that has done more damage to his reputation than any honest criticism could. The lie is that his films are difficult. They are not difficult. They are slow, which is a different thing entirely, and they are serious, which in an age of ironic detachment can feel like a provocation. But difficulty implies that understanding is withheld, that the films reward only those equipped with the right intellectual tools, and this is precisely wrong. Tarkovsky’s films ask nothing of your knowledge and everything of your willingness to feel, and if you can bring that willingness to the screen — if you can sit quietly in the dark and let what happens happen — they will give you back something that very few other filmmakers have ever been able to give: the sensation of time itself as a living substance, and within it, flickering and persistent, the irreducible fact of the human soul.

Andrei Tarkovsky was born in 1932 in the Soviet Union, the son of the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, and he grew up in the shadow of two enormous presences: the Russian landscape, vast and waterlogged and melancholy, and Russian literature and art, which had for centuries understood suffering as the primary site of spiritual knowledge. Both presences are felt in every film he made. He studied at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where he absorbed and then quietly dismantled the conventions of Soviet cinema, and he made his first feature, Ivan’s Childhood, in 1962, when he was thirty years old. By the time he died of cancer in Paris in 1986, in exile from the country that had suppressed and delayed and mutilated his work at every turn, he had made seven features. Seven films across a career of twenty-four years. The mathematics alone should tell you something about the kind of filmmaker he was.

He is routinely placed alongside Bergman and Dreyer as one of the three great metaphysical filmmakers of European cinema, and the placement is correct — the three are in genuine conversation, each inheriting from the others and transforming what they receive. But Tarkovsky is in certain respects the most radical of the three, because what he attempted was not merely a cinema of spiritual inquiry but something more fundamental: a reimagining of what cinema is for. He believed — wrote, in his essential book Sculpting in Time, with the passion of a man who has thought of nothing else — that cinema’s unique gift to human experience was its ability to capture time. Not events in time, not stories that unfold across time, but time itself: the texture of duration, the weight of a moment, the way that memory and dream and waking life are all made of the same substance and cannot, ultimately, be separated. This belief shaped every decision he made behind the camera, from the length of his shots to the way his films move between past and present without announcement or apology. To watch Tarkovsky without understanding this belief is to miss the instrument he is playing. To understand it is to find that the instrument produces music unlike anything else you have heard.

The lie about difficulty

Let us deal with the reputation directly, since the essay has committed to doing so. The charge against Tarkovsky is that his films are self-indulgent, opaque, wilfully obscure — that they withhold conventional narrative pleasure and offer nothing in return except the vague prestige of having sat through them. This charge is made almost exclusively by people who have not seen his films, or who have seen them in the wrong conditions, or who have approached them with the wrong expectations. It is the charge of a viewer trained by commercial cinema to expect that meaning will be delivered efficiently, that images will serve narrative, that nothing on screen will be present without a plot reason for its being there. Tarkovsky’s films do not work this way. But the conclusion to draw from this is not that they are failing to do what cinema should do. It is that they are doing something different, and that the difference is the point.

Consider what actually happens in a Tarkovsky film. There is always a world — rendered with an almost hallucinatory physical specificity, rain-soaked and fire-lit and thick with the smell of earth and water that you can almost perceive through the screen. There are always people in that world who are trying to understand something about their lives — their guilt, their faith, their love, their place in a history larger than themselves. And there is always, underneath the surface of what is shown, the pressure of what cannot be shown: the sacred, the irretrievable, the dimension of experience that exceeds the capacity of language to contain. These are not abstract concerns. They are the concerns of every human being who has ever sat alone at three in the morning and felt the full weight of being alive. Tarkovsky’s films are not remote from ordinary human experience. They are ordinary human experience pressed to its limit, filmed with a patience that ordinary cinema cannot afford.

The world of Andrei Rublev

Andrei Rublev is the film that makes this case most forcefully, the film that silences the objection of difficulty most completely, because it is Tarkovsky’s most openly epic, most historically grounded, most narratively accessible work — and also, simultaneously, his most mysterious. It runs to over three hours, it is filmed in black and white (with one extraordinary exception at the end), and it depicts the life of the fifteenth-century Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev across a series of episodes that move through decades of medieval Russian history — the Mongol invasions, the fratricidal wars between Russian princes, the famines and the plagues and the darkness of a society that has not yet found its form.

But to describe it this way is already to misdescribe it, because Andrei Rublev is not a historical epic in any conventional sense. It does not follow the rise and fall of a great man. It does not have a protagonist who wants something and overcomes obstacles to get it. What it has, instead, is a witness — Rublev himself, played by Anatoly Solonitsyn with a stillness that is the opposite of passivity — who moves through a world of extraordinary violence and beauty and tries to understand what it means to make art in the face of such a world. Why paint? Why create images of the holy when the world is so comprehensively unholy? What is the relationship between the suffering that surrounds the artist and the beauty the artist produces? These are not fifteenth-century questions. They are the questions that every serious artist in every period has asked, and they are, in a deeper sense, the questions that everyone who has ever tried to find meaning in a world that resists it has asked.

The film is structured as eight episodes and a prologue, each of which could stand alone as a short film but which together build something that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. There is an episode in which Rublev witnesses a pagan celebration in the forest — naked bodies by firelight, ancient ritual, the persistence of something pre-Christian in the Russian soul — and is both horrified and drawn in. There is an episode in which a Fool, a holy simpleton, is beaten and taken prisoner by the Tartars, and Rublev watches and can do nothing. There is an episode, the most devastating in the film, in which the Tartars sack the town of Vladimir and Rublev — who has taken a vow of silence after committing an act of violence he cannot forgive himself for — watches the cathedral he has painted be desecrated and destroyed around him. And there is the final episode, set apart from the others by a different structure and a different emotional register, in which a young boy named Boriska claims to know the secret of bell-casting — a secret his dead father supposedly told him — and drives a team of workers to cast a great bell for the prince.

The bell and what it means

The Boriska episode is the key to everything in Andrei Rublev, and it is worth dwelling on it at length because it is the most audacious thing Tarkovsky ever did, and one of the most audacious things in all of cinema. The boy is perhaps fifteen or sixteen. He has never cast a bell. He does not, we gradually come to understand, actually know the secret his father told him — or rather, whether he knows it or not is a question the film refuses to answer, because it is not the right question. He drives the workers forward with a combination of terror and inspiration, bullying and pleading, and the clay bell-mould is shaped and fired, and the great pit is dug, and the bronze is poured, and everyone waits. And the bell rings. It rings with a clarity and a resonance that fills the screen with sound and the workers with something that looks very much like religious awe, and then Boriska sits down in the mud and weeps, and tells Rublev that he never knew the secret, that his father told him nothing, that he has done it all on faith and instinct and terror.

Rublev, who has not spoken in years, who has watched his art be destroyed and his faith in the purpose of art collapse, speaks. He speaks directly to the boy, tells him that they should go together — he will paint again, the boy will cast bells, they will do the work that the world needs them to do. And the film cuts, for the first time, into colour — into Rublev’s actual icons, golden and luminous, horses running free in the rain, the faces of saints looking out from the screen with an aliveness that icon painters spent lifetimes trying to achieve and that Tarkovsky achieves in three minutes of colour photography. It is one of the most overwhelming endings in cinema, not because it is triumphant in any simple sense, but because it earns its emotion through everything that has preceded it. Three hours of darkness and violence and silence, and then this: the bell ringing, the icons burning with colour, the argument made not in words but in the most direct cinematic terms possible.

The argument is this: that art is made in spite of the world’s cruelty, not because the world has earned it. That the bell rings not because Boriska knew the secret but because he was willing to act as though he did, to commit fully to the work without the guarantee of its success. That Rublev’s silence — his withdrawal from the act of creation — was itself a form of faithlessness, a refusal to believe that beauty can persist in a world that contains the things he has seen. And that the answer to the world’s darkness is not silence but more painting, more bells, more icons, more of the human impulse toward the sacred and the beautiful that no amount of Tartar invasion can permanently extinguish. This is not a naive argument. Tarkovsky has shown you too much brutality for naivety to be available. It is an argument made in full knowledge of the counterargument, and it is more powerful for that knowledge.

Time as the medium

To understand why Tarkovsky shoots the way he does — the long takes, the slow camera movements, the extended contemplation of rain falling on water or wind moving through grass — you need to understand his theory of time, which is not an abstract theory but a felt one, the theory of a man who experiences duration as the primary substance of human consciousness.

He wrote that cinema was the only art form capable of capturing the direct imprint of time, and by this he did not mean that films record events as they happen — any camera can do that. He meant something more specific: that the texture of a moment, its particular quality of duration, the way it feels from the inside to be present in it, can be preserved in film the way nothing else can preserve it. A painting gives you a frozen instant. A novel gives you time reconstructed through language. But a film, if it is shot and cut with the right kind of attention, can give you time itself — can make you feel, sitting in the dark, that you are not watching a representation of an experience but having the experience directly.

This is why his shots are as long as they are. A shorter shot would give you the information — you would see the rain, register it, move on. A Tarkovsky shot holds the rain long enough that you stop registering it and start inhabiting it. The duration of the shot is not empty time waiting to be filled with event. It is the event. The rain falling on the surface of a pond in The Mirror is not background or atmosphere. It is the subject. It is time made visible, and in making time visible Tarkovsky makes you aware of your own position within it — your own memories, your own sense of the past pressing against the present, your own experience of being a consciousness moving through duration toward an end you cannot see.

This technique is not, it must be emphasised, an intellectual proposition that you need to understand before the films work on you. It works before you understand it, in the same way that music works before you understand music theory. You sit in front of a Tarkovsky film and something happens to your sense of time — it expands, becomes elastic, loses the urgent forward momentum that commercial cinema instils in you — and in that expansion something else becomes possible. Feeling, of a kind and at a depth that faster cinema cannot reach, because it does not give feeling the time it needs to develop.

The exile and the sacred

There is a biographical dimension to Tarkovsky’s work that cannot be entirely separated from its meaning, though he himself was resistant to autobiographical readings. He spent his entire career in the Soviet Union fighting with the state film authority, Goskino, over every film he made. Andrei Rublev was completed in 1966 and suppressed for three years, shown only at Cannes in 1969 before being released in the Soviet Union in a mutilated version. The Mirror, his most personal film, was rejected by the state on the grounds that it was incomprehensible to ordinary audiences — a judgment that tells you a great deal about what the Soviet state required from its cinema and nothing about the film. He was eventually, in the early 1980s, allowed to travel to Italy to make Nostalghia, and he did not return. He died in Paris, in exile, missing Russia with an intensity that saturates his final film, The Sacrifice, made in Sweden the year before his death.

The exile matters because it was, in a real sense, the culmination of his subject. Tarkovsky’s films are always, at some level, about longing — for the sacred, for the irretrievable past, for a wholeness that the modern world has broken and cannot reassemble. Nostalghia is literally about a Russian scholar in Italy who cannot stop missing Russia, who is so saturated with longing for home that Italy’s beauty becomes a kind of torment. But the nostalgia Tarkovsky depicts is not merely homesickness. It is something closer to the theological concept of exile — the condition of being separated from the place where you most fully belong, which may not be a geographical place at all but a spiritual one, a state of being that modernity has made unavailable and that art exists to recover, however briefly, however imperfectly.

The sacred is Tarkovsky’s persistent subject, and this makes him unusual among the great filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century, most of whom had made their peace with secularism and moved on. He had not made his peace with it. He felt the absence of the sacred as an absence — a wound, a deprivation — and his films are the record of a man searching for what has been lost, not in the hope of religious conversion, which he neither sought nor offered, but in the conviction that the search itself is the most important thing a human being, or a filmmaker, can do. The icons at the end of Andrei Rublev are not an argument for Orthodox Christianity. They are an argument for the human impulse that produced them: the impulse to make something beautiful and true in full knowledge that the world will try to destroy it.

What the camera does to water

There is no filmmaker in the history of cinema for whom water is more important than it is for Tarkovsky, and this is worth pausing on because it is one of the clearest illustrations of how his visual language works. Water appears in almost every film he made, in almost every form — rain, rivers, flooded rooms, fog, the surface of a pond — and it is never merely scenic. It is always doing something specific.

In Andrei Rublev, the river that Rublev crosses at the beginning of the film, in winter, on his way from the monastery, establishes immediately the quality of the world he is entering: cold, resistant, beautiful, indifferent to human purposes. In Solaris, the ocean of the alien planet is literally a consciousness, a medium through which the past returns unbidden and unchanged, and the long sequence of waves and currents that Tarkovsky films at the film’s close is among the most hypnotic passages in his work — not space travel but deep time, the depths of the self. In The Mirror, rain falls on a wooden house in a sequence that is at once a specific childhood memory and a universal image of shelter and vulnerability, the human structure holding out against the elements for a while.

Water, in Tarkovsky, is time made visible. It moves, it reflects, it erodes, it preserves — it is the medium through which the past seeps into the present, the substance in which memory is suspended. His camera watches it with an attention that is itself a form of argument: that the things we move past too quickly in ordinary life, the things we do not give time enough to be seen, contain more meaning than the events we record and commemorate. A raindrop hitting the surface of a puddle outside a fifteenth-century Russian monastery is not less significant than the Tartar invasion that will follow. It may, if you watch it long enough, be more significant — because it is still, the invasion is over, and the water is still moving.

The films and the life they ask for

There is a practical question that anyone who wants to engage seriously with Tarkovsky has to answer, and it is an honest question: how do you find the conditions to watch him properly? His films do not work on a laptop while you are doing something else. They do not work on a phone. They barely work on a television in a room where other things are happening. They require darkness and silence and the willingness to surrender your attention completely for the duration, and this is a requirement that modern life is not organised to accommodate.

The answer is that you make the accommodation, because the experience is worth it, and because making the accommodation is itself part of what the films are asking. Tarkovsky’s cinema is, among everything else it is, a practice — a discipline of attention, a training in a different relationship with time and image and feeling. You do not simply watch his films and receive their meaning. You enter them, and the entering changes you, not permanently or dramatically, but in the way that any significant experience changes you: by adding something to your sense of what is possible, by expanding the register of what you are capable of feeling.

This is not an extravagant claim. It is the claim that serious art has always made for itself, and Tarkovsky is one of the handful of filmmakers in the history of the medium who has entirely earned the right to make it. He is the filmmaker who took cinema furthest into the territory that other art forms — poetry, painting, music — had been exploring for centuries: the territory of the spirit, the sacred, the irreducible mystery of consciousness and time and love. He explored it without condescension and without certainty, with the humility of a man who knew he was approaching something larger than himself, and the discipline of a craftsman who understood that the only way to approach it was through the most rigorous possible attention to the physical world — the rain, the water, the fire, the mud, the bell ringing across an empty plain.

Start with Andrei Rublev. Give it the time it asks for. Let the bell ring. Then ask yourself what you thought difficulty meant.

Sources and further reading

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (1986) — his own account of his philosophy of cinema, essential and deeply personal, one of the finest books ever written by a filmmaker about the art of film.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986 (1991) — his journals, which reveal the daily texture of his artistic life and his struggles with the Soviet authorities with remarkable candour.

Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (1994) — the most thorough critical study in English, rigorous and attentive to both form and content.

Mark Le Fanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (1987) — a shorter, more personal account, published by the British Film Institute, that captures the phenomenological quality of the films particularly well.

Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (2008) — an analysis organised around the four elements — earth, water, fire, air — that offers a fresh and illuminating way into the visual language of the films.

For first-time viewers, the suggested order: Ivan’s Childhood (1962) as an introduction — relatively brief, narratively straightforward, and already completely Tarkovskian in its approach to image and time. Then Andrei Rublev (1966). Then Stalker (1979), which is his most concentrated philosophical statement. The Mirror (1975) last — the most personal and the most dreamlike, and the film that rewards most richly when you already know what it feels like to be inside a Tarkovsky film.