Andrei Tarkovsky: Andrei Rublev

Please join us on Wednesday, March 6 at 7 p.m. for Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966, 205 min) in the first floor corner room of Mid-Manhattan Library.

This film is part of the series Three Auteurs of World Cinema. All screenings are FREE and seating is first-come, first-served. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Andrei Rublev (1966, 205 min) is Andrei Tarkovsky’s second feature length film and was co-written by the director and Andrei Konchalovsky. Its narrative is based loosely on the life of 15th-century Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev who strives to find the appropriate response to the tragedies of his time through art and faith. The film depicts a realistic portrait of medieval Russia, while also prefiguring the tumultuous period to come in the 1970s. Critic J. Hoberman identifies it as “the first (and perhaps only) film produced under the Soviets to treat the artist as a world-historic figure and the rival religion of Christianity as an axiom of Russia’s historical identity...” Due to the film's religious themes and political ambiguity, it was not released domestically in the Soviet Union for years after it was completed, though there was a single screening in Moscow. In 1969, a version of the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI prize. More recently, Criterion Collection restored the film to a 205-minute cut in 1999 using a source smuggled out of the country by American director Martin Scorsese.

Please contact Karen Ginman at karenginman@nypl.org or Thomas Knowlton at thomasknowlton@nypl.org if you have any questions.