A triumph of Russian craft

Tarkovsky's classic film still impresses Jonathan Jones
Andrei Rublev
Andrei Rublev: 'Russia's answer to the Italian Renaissance masters' Public domain

Andrei Rublev begins with a man trying to fly in a balloon made from animal skins. This is in Russia six hundred years ago, in a world of Tatar invaders, monks and holy fools. People rush around, preparing the flying-machine, and then it rises up, floating above the earth, in the air, with a view of the ground rolling beneath. But the balloon plummets like a fallen rebel angel, and the last we see of it is a steaming collapsed lung in the filthy margins of a river.

Mud, water, scrub, and monasteries. The landscape of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 film, now to be seen in a new Mosfilm print, about the life of the most famous Russian icon painter is, from the beginning, a singular view of the earth. The shot from the flying pig's bladder is curious. It scrolls the ground past you - a landscape is experienced as if the land had been tilted up so that fields and marshes and bits of hills are seen as a vertical arrangement, a frieze. The flyer falls; from that moment the film is earthbound. That medieval intimacy with landscape persists throughout. No other film is so rooted to the ground. There are scarcely any glimpses of sky in Andrei Rublev; the camera keeps its nose down and, I don't know how, Tarkovsky constantly finds views in which the earth seems to rise up, filling the screen. It is recognisable, this snuffling the landscape. It comes from paintings: from Uccello's Battle of San Romano, or Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, paintings that preserve a medieval view of the world, a peasant experience of landscape, as something that envelops you, in the way that medieval scholars believed the canopy of heaven swaddled the earth.

Andrei Rublev has the spatial qualities of a late medieval fresco, the sense of a world that so absolutely surrounds you, you cannot stand back from it, in a coldly calculating modern way. Instead you have to make your pilgrimage through it, through woods and down rivers, exploring the earth like an insect crawling through a lawn.

Andrei Rublev is not an instantly legible story; there is no synthesis - only details. But this is what it would be like, if it was: it has a central character, the monk and icon painter Andrei Rublev (c. 1370 - 1430), whose masterpieces of religious art include The Saviour and The Trinity, both today in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Icon painting, the archetypal art of eastern, Orthodox Christianity, evolved in Byzantium in the early middle ages and was adopted by Russians along with Byzantine Christian belief. An icon is not a story to make you think of God so much as a direct connection to God: it is not an instrument of worship, it is part of what is worshipped. I've seen someone pray at a Rublev icon in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery; by western European standards, a blasphemy against the secular contemplation expected in a museum. But this sense of art as worship is fundamental to understanding Andrei Rublev.

Rublev can be seen as Russia's answer to the Italian Renaissance masters. In the film's climactic scene, emissaries from Renaissance Italy, at first disdainful of these eastern barbarians, witness the casting of a giant bronze bell, a triumph of Russian craft to compare with Florentine or Venetian ingenuity. It is a patriotic film. Just as Eisenstein asserted the reality of a medieval Russian nation in his 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, about the hero who drove back the Teutonic Knights, Tarkovsky asserts the depth and intensity of Russian culture by telling the life of its first artistic hero. And yet this life is not made modern, romantic, or contemporary. It is a medieval life; most of all it is a spiritual life.

Andrei is a naturally gifted painter. The celebrated artist Theophanes the Greek invites the young man to work with him, even after a less talented rival, Kirill, badmouths Rublev to Theophanes and begs to become the Greek's disciple. Theophanes sends a messenger to the monastery and Kirill proudly prepares to be called to work for Theophanes...but instead the messenger says the great artist wants the young Andrei to work with him. Kirill is crushed; Andrei's odyssey begins. This genius is a humble, modest person. Anatoli Solonitsyn as Andrei is watchful and reserved.

Andrei's life is difficult and dangerous. He witnesses atrocities and cannot just stand by - he kills a man in the heat of battle. But the central dilemma of the film is how he can put his talent to God's service. Is art important at all? Is it mere indulgence?

In the end, he triumphs. Or his art does. He commits himself to paint a great Trinity. The film, which had been in black and white up to now, suddenly bursts into colour, as the camera passionately explores the time-marked surfaces of Rublev's paintings, and the screen fills with the eerily vast face of The Saviour, the warm glowing heaven of The Trinity. It is an ecstatic climax - the first time in the three-hour film that we've actually seen Rublev's paintings, and they justify the wait.

This simplified account of Andrei Rublev makes it sound quite exciting. It even sounds like another epic about the life of a Renaissance artist - The Agony and the Ecstasy, filmed by Carol Reed in 1965, the year before Andre Rublev. The story Tarkovsky tells in Andrei Rublev, boiled down to essentials, is not that different from Reed's epic about Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In both films, a deeply serious artist wrestles with his conscience before triumphantly creating works that justify God's works to man.

The Agony and the Ecstasy is the much-mocked quintessence of Hollywood's hamfistedness when it comes to filming the lives of the great artists. In order to make a coherent epic narrative about a man painting a vault, it sentimentalises characters, crudifies their relationships. Michelangelo even gets a girlfriend. Most of all, art is simplified out of existence: in an antithesis of Andrei Rublev, Reed's film begins with a beautifully photographed documentary on Michelangelo's works, which the movie proceeds to explain away.

If Andrei Rublev was a straightforward story, it might have much the same deadening effect. But the reason this is the best film ever made about the life of an artist is that it does not straighten out the circumnavigatory, unfinished way in which we experience works of art into a simple story. It's best, in fact, to not worry too much about what's going on. Andrei Rublev is filmed in non-linear time, in episodes that are simultaneously dramatic and tantalising. It circles round itself, and it dwells achingly long on incidents whose relevance is mystifying. It wanders, and stagnates. It treats time in the same way it does space: as something that you can't get out of and don't have a decent map of. Instead of trundling along it slows to the pace of memory.

Yet just because it does not obey clock time doesn't mean this film ignores our desire for a crowded, turbulent canvas. Like the paintings of Brueghel that fascinated Tarkovsky - Hunters in the Snow appears in his science fiction film Solaris - it is full of earthy peasants, rolling about the place; it has an abundant humanity only rivalled in modern cinema by Italian, and occasionally Italian-American, directors. That's the value of the landscape Tarkovsky creates: it is alive and makes every frame of the film live. Most of all, and most surprisingly, far from destroying all the pleasures of narrative cinema, Tarkovsky's acknowledgement of the strangeness of time and his tragic sense of life enhances them. Instead of diffusing tension, his essayistic detours intensify your emotional reaction.

This hit me most forcibly in the long climactic detour, almost a film within the film, about the casting of a new bell for the war-damaged monastery of Vladimir. This sequence has a young hero, a teenager who claims that he can cast the bell, having learned a secret technique from his father, a famous bell-founder, before he died. We are suddenly plunged into a drama like that of Michelangelo painting the Sistine ceiling, as the boy takes command of an army of craftsmen and labourers, imposing his authority, searching desperately until he finds exactly the right clay, progressing towards his dream ...

Suddenly, I remembered this was a Tarkovsky film. In the earlier scene of a Tatar raid a young man apparently escaped, only to be shot down after a long, rambling run. A terrible foreboding hit me: this epic of the bell with its empathetic hero was not going to have a happy ending. I was hooked and terrified in a way no one ever has been by Rex Harrison ranting at Charlton Heston that it's time to finish the chapel. Why? Because you know Charlton's a winner. You don't know just how deeply Tarkovsky will disappoint. Andrei's agony is authentic. His ecstasy is far from guaranteed.

· Andrei Rublev, ICA from July 2nd. Box office: 0207-930 3647.