Andrei Rublev · reception & legacy
1966 · Andrei Tarkovsky
How Andrei Rublev has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Shelved by Soviet authorities for years after its 1966 completion, it screened at Cannes in 1969 only at a 4am slot after official pressure — and still won a prize; barely released at home until 1971, it's now a fixture near the top of Sight & Sound's greatest-films polls.
What's debated
The perennial fight is whether its three-plus hours are a transcendent experience or an endurance test — plus the still-heated ethical debate over the on-set treatment of animals, especially the horse.
Its footprint
The bell-casting finale is one of cinema's most invoked sequences — shorthand for art-as-faith — and the closing switch from black-and-white to colour images of Rublev's real icons is endlessly screenshotted and referenced.
Where it stands
An unshakeable 'you must have seen this' pillar of the art-house canon — the film cinephiles reach for when arguing cinema can be spiritual experience.