The name of the late Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky has practically become synonymous with the rigorous extremes of art-house cinema: Either you find the immersive long takes and enigmatic imagery of films such as the original Solaris and The Mirror transportive—the aesthetic equivalent of a religious experience—or you beg for deliverance. His 1966 epic about the 15th century Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev, however, is the one film even his detractors tend to admire. Tarkovsky depicts the largely imagined life of the painter (played by Anatoli Solonitsyn) through tableaux of suffering, cruelty and spiritual struggle, culminating in one of the most celebrated sequences in all of movies—the casting and raising of an immense bell. The movie gets its first local screening in decades as part of The Belcourt’s two-film Tarkovsky tribute. Next weekend: 1974’s The Mirror.
Sat., Sept. 19; Sun., Sept. 20; Mon., Sept. 21, 2009
