A Biography With The Work Left Out

Almost nothing is known about the real Andrei Rublev, so Tarkovsky built the film out of the fifteenth century around him instead: a peasant trying to fly a balloon, a pagan festival by a river, a Tatar raid on Vladimir, a bell being cast by a boy who may be lying about knowing how. Rublev walks through these episodes largely as a witness and spends much of the film under a vow of silence, having decided that a painter who has seen what he has seen has no business making beautiful objects. The film is about whether art is permissible in a violent world, and it answers by refusing to show a single one of his paintings until the last ten minutes, when the picture turns to colour and simply looks at the icons.