Andrei Rublev depicts the life and times of the great Russian medieval
painter. Tarkovsky presents what little is known of the artist's
development in eight unconnected episodes, flashbacks and imagined
scenes, disturbing their loose chronological sequence. The
director's unorthodox approach serves his underlying theme: the
struggle of the artist to maintain vision and faith in a barbarous world
(here represented by visually stunning Tartar raids and a tyrannical
system of patronage). Epic, but not in a traditional sense, the film
successfully captures the power of art to raise the human condition,
however bleak the circumstances.
