icons
I've been watching Andrei Rublev over the past day or two. Just in dribs and drabs, because it is very long, and in any case divided up into chapters. (This is part of a little Tarkovsky season I've arranged for myself, via the good people at Videomatica.)

It would seem that there are people who argue that this is the greatest film ever made. I haven't yet joined that camp. But I must say I liked, in a strange way, the past two episodes.

Assorted stonemasons and icon painters in early fifteenth-century Russia are working on a cathedral for a local prince. He's not particularly happy with the results, but has in any case short-changed them by not ponying up for the best materials. When they're done, the masons and carvers say they're off to do a church for his brother, who's a prince over the way, and who has promised to spare no effort in ensuring that everything is up to scratch. The first prince is less than happy with this, fearing his brother will get one up on him. So he arranges for the craftsmen to be ambushed in the woods as they're heading out of the estate, where the prince's men gouge their eyes out.

As payback, the brother comes back sometime later with a horde of Tartars, who sack the village, kill most of the men and rape most of the women, raze the cathedral, and inflict vile and unspeakable tortures on the prince, not least having him branded with a red hot cross before tying him to a horse set to gallop away out of the cathedral, dragging him along the ground. It is the painting of the "Last Judgment," meawhile, which goes up in flames.

Much Ecclesiastes is quoted. "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity." And so on.

But Medieval Russia was obviously not a happy place.