Do nations and cultures have personalities, just as individuals do? If there was a movie made about the personality of the United States, it would likely be a musical about spunk and common sense and working your way through college. We are the only nation ever founded as an idea instead of a tribe, or religion, or geographic region and we treasure the individual. But what kind of movie would be made about the personality of gigantic, brooding Russia?

At the Maine International Film Festival this week, one film spoke to that. We were the first audience in America to see a fully restored director’s cut of the great film "Andre Rublev." The story is about an actual painter of icons and churches in the 15th century. Rublev and his imagined experiences are used as a parable to illustrate larger points of Russian culture and life. It is a great film, which will never be seen at a commercial cinema as it runs three hours, yet it is a triumph of cinematography and storytelling, made by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkofsky.

There are seven episodes, covering the life of the talented monk and his fellow monastics and artisans. As Rublev leaves his monastery, bitterly accusing them of greed and corruption, he is mentored by a great artist. As he wanders, vignettes of medieval Russian society are presented. The size, the scope, the variety, and the beauty of Russia are shown, as well as the eternal classes there of the boyar or aristocrat, the intelligentsia as personified by the monks, and the vast oppressed peasantry, serfs before the term existed. Triumphs of art and daring of spirit are celebrated in each episode.

But in each case, the fatalism of Russia triumphs. The monks are caught in a downpour and take refuge in a large hut where a village is gathered drinking and watching a jester sing obscene and disrespectful songs mocking the boyars, the bosses. Halfway through his routine, horse-riding official thugs enter, knock him out, and toss him across a saddle, with no protest or even real reaction by the villagers that outnumbered the thugs five to one.

After a prince’s mansion is finished and the icons painted, the carvers complained about the quality of the stone and bragged that they were on their way to the prince’s rival, his brother and twin, to build a better house with far better stone that will outshine the one they just finished. As they walked with the icon-painting monks, a party of horsemen overtake them. As the monks hide, the riders seize the workmen and casually cut out their eyes and ride off, so even if they survive their wounds they cannot create better carvings; of course, the most likely outcome is that they will starve in the forest unable to orient themselves or find their way.

A likeable apprentice icon painter escapes when Tartars attack. He slips away from the church as the mounted warriors casually herd the populace into a circle and begin to slay them, working in from the perimeter. But as he runs away from the carnage, on the verge of escape, he is shot in the back with an arrow. Again and again, any rebellion, or spirit, or fortune is inexorably punished by fate.

But can everyone hide? What is the obligation of a person with talent to use a God-given gift in a time or society that is rotten? What is the connection between a creative character's personality and the times through which he lives? This film took several years to make, and was begun in the more socially tolerant Khrushchev era. But when it was released in 1966, the totalitarian Brezhnev era had begun and the film was cut, censored and eventually banned. And in that same year, the first public trials of writers since Stalin were held, and by the 1970s thousands of dissidents were imprisoned in what was called the Gulag Archipelago. The arrow hit the creator in the back.

But Russia will always survive. Only the end of the film is in color. It is a montage of the ancient, but still vibrant, details of several of Andrei Rublev’s actual icons. Not the tsar, not the gulag, not the Soviet, or the current kleptocracy will ever entirely triumph because even as the Russian nation suffers with its culture of clinical depression, it also passively endures.

Cynthia Stead of Dennis may be emailed at cestead@gmail.com.