Andrei Rublev (1966): The Artist as Metonym (Film Review)

There is perhaps no better portrayal of the artist’s journey, of the artistic struggle, than Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. The claim can be verified by simply watching the film and pointing to the apparent technical mastery of the writing, cinematography, direction, pacing, acting, etc. and so forth. But to do so feels antithetical to the very themes the film imparts, which is that art — the most effective art — transcends beyond the material and through the apparent to an achievement grander than mere craft. (The film more or less chastises those whose view of art succumbs to reduction.)

The most effective art, which Andrei Rublev certainly is, encompasses everything, not simply the apparent.

So when thinking about this film, it’s inevitable to bounce against paradoxical conclusions, for within the film, the titular character also struggles with the paradoxes of the artist’s journey. Like many great pieces of art, this film overhears itself. Being an artistic representation of an artist, it too faces the struggles depicted within its framework. For instance, when reading or listening to what Tarkovsky says of the film, two thematic goals are usually mentioned:

1) The character of Andrei Rublev, as an artist, is contrasted with the other artist characters in the film, whether Kirill, Foma, or Theophanes. Kirill’s focus on fear, Foma’s focus on technical mastery, and Theophanes’s focus on the subjective are all in opposition to Rublev’s idealism and simplicity, his connection with the innocence of mankind.

“Rublev is very complex, he suffers, and therein lies his nobility. He expresses the hope and moral ideal of an entire people, and not only the artist’s subjective reactions to the world around him. This is what was important for us. This is precisely why we contrasted Theophanes the Greek to Rublev, this is precisely why we made Rublev suffer the temptations that weigh down upon his destiny.”[4]

Rublev’s iconographic art is the representation of his unshakeable belief in universal brotherhood. He suffers for this belief, is tested, and, during the final story of the young bell-maker, confirms himself as the artist for the people, as one of the people.

2) The second theme is the inability to pass on experience, to learn from or teach others. Experience, for Tarkovsky, is the foundation for genuine artistic expression. It is through experience that we suffer for our beliefs, and suffering of this sort cannot be taught between pages but only lived.

“We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it. People often say: use your fathers’ experience! Too easy: each of us must get its own. But once we’ve got it, we no longer have time to use it. And the new generations rightly refuse to listen to it: they want to live it, but then they also die. This is the law of life, its real meaning: We cannot impose our experience on other people or force them to feel suggested emotions. Only through personal experience, we understand life.”[1]

Though not explicit there’s an inherent paradox present in these two themes. How is it that the titular character can express the brotherhood of humanity, his ultimate and teleologic ideal, and yet, only arrive at such an achievement, without it having been imparted by those to whom, for whom, and of whom he is speaking in his art? And, speaking past arrival, how can he speak to, for, and of those whom he cannot teach?

The answer I, at first, came to was that his message of universal brotherhood and the method in which it was delivered in his art were so closely intertwined that it mapped onto humanity itself — the message of experiential universal brotherhood is the medium of experiential universal brotherhood; his art is by the people, for the people.

Art can’t teach the feeling at the tip of one’s nose — Rublev’s art fundamentally is that feeling.

And yet more contradictions arose as I considered this: The (in)famous phrase of McLuhan, “The medium is the message” was written as a phonocentric condemnation of iconographic art that McLuhan argues decentralizes the message:

“In visual representation of a person or an object, a single phase or moment or aspect is separated from the multitude of known and felt phases, moments and aspects of the person or object. By contrast, iconographic art uses the eye as we use our hand in seeking to create an inclusive image, made up of many moments, phases, and aspects of the person or thing. Thus the iconic mode is not visual representation, nor the specialization of visual stress as defined by viewing from a single position. The tactual mode of perceiving is sudden but not specialist.”[3]

This mosaic of paradoxes, for McLuhan, decentralizes and detaches the viewer, pulling us away from the linear and logical.

Among many critiques of McLuhan, Umberto Eco noted a definitional one. For McLuhan to arrive at his (ironically, paradoxically) centralizing conclusion that the medium is the message, he states that “just as a metaphor transforms and transmits experience, so do the media.” But Eco counters,

“It is not true that — as McLuhan says — all the media are active metaphors because they have the power to translate experience into new forms. In fact, a medium — the spoken language, for example — translates experience into another form because it represents a code. A metaphor, on the contrary, is the replacement, within a code, of one term with another, a simile established and then covered.”[2]

I then began to wonder if there is perhaps a “smoothing” of the paradoxes in this critique, that perhaps rather than metaphor, Rublev’s message is at one with the medium as metonym.

Metonymy as a tool to draw contiguity between two things changes the meaning of “the medium is the message,” the message now, not a translation of experience into a new form, but a contiguous indexing of experience, which, in Rublev’s case, is metonymically remade again in his iconographic art.

Rublev, through this metalepsis of humanity, becomes the self-begotten man of the people, for the people, bridging the paradoxical gap between them.

Admittedly, I do not know enough about the metaphor-metonymy theory, or even McLuhan or Eco to dive deeper into this idea, but as a surface-level (ironically, paradoxically) analysis of this deep, profound film, I believe it shows a lot of promise.

References

1. “Andrei Tarkovsky: A Poet in the Cinema DVD Extra.” YouTube, uploaded by ghgghg, 23 Sept. 2012, [www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIpa3QDaybQ&t=456s]

2. Eco, Umberto. “Cogito Interruptus.” Travels in Hyperreality, translated by William Weaver, Harcourt, 1986, pp. 203–18.

3. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, 1994.

4. Tarkovsky, Andrei. “The Artist in Ancient Russia and in the New USSR.” Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, edited by John Gianvito, University Press of Mississippi, 2006, pp. 16–31. Interview originally conducted 1969.