The camera work in this movie is wonderful from start to end. Unfortunately, the beauty of the camera work sometimes gets in the way of the story-telling. In almost every scene, the camera lingers beautifully on scenes, so that I both appreciate the visual art and wish the movie would hurry up and tell the story. All of the acting is very good, but it's rarely demanding because the camera owns the scenes, not the actors.
The story is episodic, with little connection between most of the segments except the recurrence of the title character, a 15th century icon-painter. The first episode, about people flying a hot-air balloon, seems to have no connection to the rest. In another episode, Andrei wanders into the frolicking nudity of a pagan summer festival, where his monastery robes make him obviously out of place.
A few of the episodes shared another connection besides having Andrei present. The connection is a pair of twin brothers, both princes, who hate each other. In one of those, a prince guides a band of Tatar horsemen to Vladimir, a town ruled by his brother. He invites the Tatars to loot it, so that in the process they will kill or terrorize many of the other prince's subjects and ruin one of his towns.
One episode can't properly be described without a spoiler warning. Skip the rest of this paragraph unless you like spoilers. It shows a band of workers who, after building a palace for one of the twin princes, set off to work on their next construction job. But their next employer is the prince's brother, who intends to employ them to build an even grander palace. The prince sends horsemen after them, where they blind the unfortunate workers. OK, no more spoilers.
The best episodes are near the end. The main character in one of them is a woman Andrei had rescued during the attack on Vladimir. The woman was mute and somewhat disturbed, possibly as a result of the attack. Similarly, Andrei was deeply troubled by what he had done to rescue her. When Tatars appeared again, she ran to their leader. Andrei tried to rescue her again, but she resisted. Fortunately, she turned out not to need a rescue that time.
The final episode was the best of all, and features the most challenging and impressive acting performance. The teenage son of a bell-maker leads the casting of a huge church bell, because all the other bell-makers had died of the plague, and he is the only one who can be found who knows the secret of bell-making. It's a big job, requiring construction of a casting pit, a mold, melting furnaces, and a structure to lift the finished bell from the pit. He is very nervous, because he's doing an expensive, difficult, uncertain job without his father's guidance, for an employer who might kill him if he fails.
I saw the director's original 205 minute version, on the Criterion DVD. Soviet censors cut the movie, troubled by the allegorical reference to treatment of artists, including movie-makers. Later distributors cut the movie further, to make it accessible to a broader audience. While I would object to cuts for censorship, I think the movie would tell its story better if it were heavily cut for length. Any editing to improve the story-telling would unfortunately come at the cost of some wonderful cinematography, since every scene in the movie was a visual wonder. For all its beauty, I don't think there was even two hours of story-telling in this movie.
The story is episodic, with little connection between most of the segments except the recurrence of the title character, a 15th century icon-painter. The first episode, about people flying a hot-air balloon, seems to have no connection to the rest. In another episode, Andrei wanders into the frolicking nudity of a pagan summer festival, where his monastery robes make him obviously out of place.
A few of the episodes shared another connection besides having Andrei present. The connection is a pair of twin brothers, both princes, who hate each other. In one of those, a prince guides a band of Tatar horsemen to Vladimir, a town ruled by his brother. He invites the Tatars to loot it, so that in the process they will kill or terrorize many of the other prince's subjects and ruin one of his towns.
One episode can't properly be described without a spoiler warning. Skip the rest of this paragraph unless you like spoilers. It shows a band of workers who, after building a palace for one of the twin princes, set off to work on their next construction job. But their next employer is the prince's brother, who intends to employ them to build an even grander palace. The prince sends horsemen after them, where they blind the unfortunate workers. OK, no more spoilers.
The best episodes are near the end. The main character in one of them is a woman Andrei had rescued during the attack on Vladimir. The woman was mute and somewhat disturbed, possibly as a result of the attack. Similarly, Andrei was deeply troubled by what he had done to rescue her. When Tatars appeared again, she ran to their leader. Andrei tried to rescue her again, but she resisted. Fortunately, she turned out not to need a rescue that time.
The final episode was the best of all, and features the most challenging and impressive acting performance. The teenage son of a bell-maker leads the casting of a huge church bell, because all the other bell-makers had died of the plague, and he is the only one who can be found who knows the secret of bell-making. It's a big job, requiring construction of a casting pit, a mold, melting furnaces, and a structure to lift the finished bell from the pit. He is very nervous, because he's doing an expensive, difficult, uncertain job without his father's guidance, for an employer who might kill him if he fails.
I saw the director's original 205 minute version, on the Criterion DVD. Soviet censors cut the movie, troubled by the allegorical reference to treatment of artists, including movie-makers. Later distributors cut the movie further, to make it accessible to a broader audience. While I would object to cuts for censorship, I think the movie would tell its story better if it were heavily cut for length. Any editing to improve the story-telling would unfortunately come at the cost of some wonderful cinematography, since every scene in the movie was a visual wonder. For all its beauty, I don't think there was even two hours of story-telling in this movie.