![]() But I was hardly alone in my conversion experience: the cult of Tarkovsky had grown to considerable size by the end of the eighties, and has not stopped growing since. In college, I devoured Tarkovsky’s other films in quick succession, convinced that I had come into the possession of a cultural secret. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all.” Ingmar Bergman might have had that capaciousness in mind when he wrote, in his memoirs, “When film is not a document, it is dream. At the same time, the camera roams with a subjective eye, zeroing in on anguished faces and zooming back out to revel in the Romantic sublime. The bell sequence unfolds like a gritty documentary about some heroic Soviet-era project, like the building of a dam. I had the sensation that I was seeing the raw matter of history filtered through an artistic imagination. I was no older than the actor Nikolai Burlyayev had been when he played Boriska, and I identified with this unhinged adolescent who conjures a masterpiece from mud. I first saw it in 1987, twenty-one years after it was made and a year after the director’s untimely death, at the age of fifty-four. So it was for me with Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic film “Andrei Rublev,” which ends with the story of Boriska and the bell. Some art works impress us so deeply on first encounter that they become events in our lives. Their damaged surfaces, seen in extreme closeup, resemble modernist canvases that were painted five centuries later, when other terrors stalked the land. So we will go together: you will cast bells, and I will paint icons.” Suddenly, a black-and-white screen is filled with color, as we see icons that the real-life Rublev painted in the early fifteenth century. When Rublev tries to comfort him, the boy shrieks, “My father, old serpent-he never passed on the secret.” Rublev replies, “And you see how everything turned out-all right, it’s all right. We look down from an increasing remove, as if through the eyes of an angel soaring backward.įrom a high angle, with bells pealing all over, the scene resembles a pageant of Russian glory. Boriska remains slumped while the crowd surges exultantly forward. When a tone finally booms out, a monkish man is looking on in wonder-the icon painter Andrei Rublev. It croaks on its joint, and a gruelling minute passes as the ambassador chats with his translator: “I wouldn’t venture to call that thing a bell.” “Have you heard that the Grand Prince beheaded his brother?” Boriska sinks to the ground. The prince sneers to an Italian ambassador, “Look at what kind of people we have overseeing things here.” A worker begins swinging a massive clapper back and forth, in an ever-widening arc. By the time the prince comes to witness the test, however, the boy is cowering under the scaffold, his confidence gone. Boriska directs the operation by raising his fists and then bringing them abruptly down, like a conductor. The monastery grounds become an industrial camp of ropes, cranks, and pulleys. The bell is cast, and an army of townspeople gather to raise it on a scaffold, for a test. When the furnace fires are set, he grins with savage joy, and bends over the molten metal as though to listen. ![]() ![]() A diffident boy becomes an aesthetic tyrant, rejecting inferior materials and demanding more from the prince’s coffers. At times, though, he exudes a demonic fury. Aware of what might happen if the project fails, Boriska chews his nails, mutters prayers, and sleeps in the casting pit. When Boriska finds the right clay for the bell’s mold, he writhes ecstatically in the mire. Rainstorms create an elemental landscape of earth, water, fog, and mud. Boriska picks a spot for the casting and digs furiously with his hands, pulling up a root from a nearby tree. ![]() The work begins outside the walls of a monastery in Suzdal, northeast of Moscow. When he was dying, he passed it on to me.” Reluctantly, the men take Boriska along with them: if they return empty-handed, they will face the prince’s wrath. As the prince’s men turn to leave, Boriska says, “My father knew the secret of copper for bell-casting. When emissaries representing the Grand Prince of Moscow arrive to commission a new bell, they find that only the founder’s son-a gaunt, sullen teen-ager named Boriska-has survived. It is 1423, in Russia, and the Black Death has laid waste to a village where a master bell-founder and his family reside.
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