Michael Powell | Peeping Tom / 1960

within ourselves

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leo Marks (screenwriter), Michael Powell (director) Peeping Tom / 1960

 

Today it is a bit difficult to comprehend the British reaction to director Michael Powell’s 1960 feature film, Peeping Tom, a work that literally ended his career in the United Kingdom. British audiences have often turned against some of their greatest artists, and even today, I would argue, British literature is far less adventurous than literature throughout Europe and in the United States.

     Yet, it is hard to forget that British-born director Alfred Hitchcock had already (even in his early British films) set up the very concerns of his younger friend’s and former assistant’s film. Surely Hitchcock’s American picture of the same year, Psycho, was far more brutally explicit in its “shower” scene than anything one actually sees in Peeping Tom. And by today’s standards, although Peeping Tom is still a very “perverse” film, its murder and sex scenes are completely understated.

 

    One is tempted to suggest that Powell somehow linked his audience with the voyeuristic actions, leading to the “hero’s” murder of several women. Like Powell himself, the central character,  Mark Lewis (the beautiful Karlheinz Böhm, son of Austrian conductor Karl Böhm, the son later working in three Fassbinder films) is a cinematographer, filming not only for a cinema studio, but working privately in filming porno and what he describes as a  “documentary” which reexplores the studies in fear that his psychiatrist father (played, in a cameo role, by Powell himself) had imposed upon his young child by awakening him with lights flashed into his eyes in the middle of the night, throwing lizards upon his bed, and even recording his reactions to his son’s death of his mother.

     The camera in Peeping Tom is in action almost constantly, catching every moment of terror, reaction, and investigation into the events. In Psycho, although the major character (Anthony Perkins) is certainly appealing in the same way as Lewis, he remains an outsider, a kind of freak or, at least, a tortured insane being; the woman he murders, moreover, is already a kind of marked woman: she has stolen money from her employer, while the prostitutes and simple would-be actors of Powell’s tale are relatively innocent of anything but desire. Yet Hitchcock had explored very similar themes already in Rear Window, where the central character, also a photographer, played a voyeur with destructive results to his neighbors. And in that film, the central character’s care-take even observes, at one point when she recognizes his voyeuristic fascination of peering through the neighbor’s windows: ““we’ve become a race of Peeping Toms.” In Vertigo, moreover, Hitchcock had explored a man following a woman with clearly obsessive tendencies, a situation which, once again, resulted in a murder, albeit not of the woman we first perceive her to be.

    Perhaps it is the very genius of Powell’s work that provoked his audience into seeing themselves as not very respectable people: his not so gentle poke in the ribs of conservative British gentlemen stopping into their local tobacconists for copies of the rightist papers while at the same time purchasing home-shot porno which they wrap within the papers themselves. Or Powell’s not so subtle attack on psychiatrists, who go so far as to torture their children in their search for comprehending psychological reactions (indeed, the father-son relationship here calls up the Nazi experiments on Jewish children).

     Maybe Powell’s utter put-down of the whole film-industry in which he was a major figure, mocking the popular medium of the time, whose plots consist of a woman fainting and asking, for a comic effect, for variously colored trucks. When Lewis, filming the always splendid Moira Shearer, kills her and locks her away in the blue trunk, the bogus filmmakers change the star’s request to see similarly “variously colored hats.”

 

   Powell also, unlike Hitchcock, involves a simply curious and pleasant individual, Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) and her often drunk but perceptively canny, blind mother, Mrs. Stephens (Maxine Audley) in his story, portraying them as tenants in Mark’s house. By doing this, Powell certainly arouses his audience’s fear for this intelligent and friendly Helen, and, when Helen’s mother confronts him, fear for her life as well. The very fact that in these cases our murderer resists his murderous impulses, partly by averting their eyes which might demonstrate their fears—the blind mother, obviously, having no vision, and therefore is not useful in Lewis’ tortured experiments—forces us to perceive the figure is not entirely as a fiend, which, given his several murders and his own suicide helps to make the film even more seemingly perverse. That someone may actually love the tortured psychopath Lewis may seem to many as utterly mad. The fact that he is so beautiful and mild-mannered further confronts our very sensibilities that evil should be easily identifiable and clearly marked. Here, the evil is presented as also existing within the society and within ourselves.

     Several critics such as Joe Corr and feminist scholar Carol Clover describe the central character, Mark Lewis as not only forcing us to share his “assaultive” gaze of the female figure, but given his own history of being tortured and filmed by his father, a reactive gaze as well, played out in the manipulative manner of his killing his victims by attaching a mirror to the camera so those at first willing to perform under the camera’s gaze, suddenly observing the knife contained in the camera coming toward, finally witness their own reactions as they struggle with the horror of perceiving their victimization.. Corr describes this most effectively by describing the scene in which Mark kills Vivien

 

“A moment in Peeping Tom that has received little discussion, from defenders or critics, is a moment between Mark and Viv, a stand-in for the star of the film Mark works on at his day job. Alone in an abandoned film studio, as Mark prepares his camera, Viv states that she’s never been behind the camera. Mark allows her behind the studio camera, and as she focuses on him, he films her. Though any audience could have guessed that Viv was doomed the moment she agreed to meet Mark and his camera alone, this is truly the moment where her fate is sealed. As she films Mark, and he films her, Viv steps into Mark’s game, and both of their positions on the binary slips — she is voyeur and object, and so is Mark. It’s a clear cut example of that aforementioned watching, being watched, and watching someone watching you. We see Mark and Viv through the eye of the camera, a shot which can only mean one thing in Peeping Tom — death. Sure enough, both characters are dead by the film’s conclusion.”

     In short, Corr argues, as Clover suggests, in the evidence that the audience is both serving in the relationship of assault and reaction—the reason, after all, why most of us attend any horror film—we are admitting our own sadistic and masochistic tendencies simultaneously, something which surely British audiences of 1960 were not ready to analyze.

     Finally, as critic Brian Kieper observes, in Hitchcock’s horror film, the script calls for the final explanation of why Norman Bates has become mad, in a long and (today) totally absurd gobbledygook of fake Freudian psychology explains how the seemingly gay boy was actually denied female companionship by his manipulative mother, after killing her and becoming his mother to qualm his guilt, playing out his own imagination of her jealousies that her son might abandon her son for another woman.

     Peeping Tom, as Keiper points out, offers no such simplistic explanation for Mark’s crimes. In fact, the writer of the screenplay, Leo Marks was not only highly interested in psychotherapy but was a professional code-breaker who worked for the British government throughout the war and beyond. He had lived as an expert creating and analyzing secret codes. As he wrote of his own script, “I became convinced that all cryptographers are basically voyeurs and I wanted to write a study of one particular voyeur from a little boy to the time that he died. I wanted to show what made him a Peeping Tom and scatter throughout that as many clues, visual clues as I could find in the hope that the audience would want to discover the clear text of this man’s code for themselves.”

      What Keiper hints, although he does not openly argue for it, is that Powell’s screenwriter purposely kept information from his audience, and in a far more complex manner that even many of screenwriters of the day, hyper-coded the film, perhaps with a buried queer story which, if viewers couldn’t precisely “read” it, still felt its existence. Something was not only wrong with Mark Lewis, but as some reviewers and commentators argued, he was “evil,” insinuating that Powell’s film itself was not only perverse but purposely hiding the reasons for the central character’s obsessions. And if there were no “reasons,” the film was moving closer to the territory of pure purposeless pornography.

      Although Keiper does not attempt to resolve such deep coding, he certainly comes close to it in his own quite original assertion that Peeping Tom demands the audience feel a great deal of sympathy for the perverted hero:

 

“Peeping Tom was hardly the first film to make such demands on its audience, Fritz Lang’s monumental film M (1931) comes to mind, but no other film up to that point asks for so much sympathy for its depraved lead. Mark is depicted early on, through a series of home movies in which his father (played by director Michael Powell) torments young Mark (played by Powell’s son Columba) as a victim, a guinea pig in his father’s cruel experiments in fear. As with Psycho, there are hints of incest in Peeping Tom, a sexual desire for the overbearing parent. The fact that it is not only incest but homosexual incest in Peeping Tom, no doubt gave the British critics of the time another reason to bristle. Mark has something of a reverse Oedipus complex where he desires the love and approval of his tormenter father, but intensely hates the woman his father married after his mother’s death. Her greatest crime? She allowed a shot of him and his father to be out of focus, motivating an obsession with perfection that permeates into every facet of his life: his pin-up photography side hustle, his on-set job as a focus puller, and of course his murderous activities.”

 

     Keiper goes on to argue that Mark is forced to continue in his killing because he can never quite get the scene right, just like a director who must continue with endless reshoots because the scene he’s captured remains imperfect. Perhaps only if he can create the perfect scene can he please his father (read studio chieftains) and simultaneously bring his love to focus back upon himself.

     I doubt that most audiences perceived the central character’s incestual love urges concerning his dead father or his resultant urges to destroy the gender that came between them, but certainly audiences in 1960 sensed that there was something else about Mark that was unspoken, and given the British laws of the day, homophobia was probably among the instinctual reasons why this work seemed to be so to British culture, the released film being almost immediately recalled and unshipped to most other countries, including the US. Although Powell continued to direct films in other nations, his career was basically over.

     Looking back, Peeping Tom does not seem so very far from the obsessive figures—the young overwrought nun of Black Narcissus, the endless dancing beauty of The Red Shoes or even the self-assured, possible lesbian figure of I Know Where I’m Going!—who Powell and Pressburger had successfully presented in his other highly theatrical, artificed, hot-house movies. Fortunately, the critical blacklash of 1960 has now been replaced with recognition of just how truly great Peeping Tom is.

      I’d certainly agree with Martin Scorsese’s comments, that Peeping Tom and Fellini’s 81/2 “say about everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two.”*

     And clearly Powell was not the first of film geniuses to be unrecognized and even vilified within his own time—there are dozens of examples—but the very sadness of those reactions, even as temporary as they may be, always brings tears to my eyes. Where might have Powell gone from Peeping Tom? No matter how much you might like all of Hitchcock’s films, one still has to recognize that from Psycho on, even with some few exceptions, his career was also in decline. Perhaps, Powell also had taken his concerns to the end of where he dared not continue. We shall never know.

 

*You can clearly see the effects of Peeping Tom on Scorsese's Taxi Driver, where the mirror becomes the camera for its deranged hero.

 

Los Angeles, July 21, 2015

Reprinted in Nth Position (August 2015), [England], on-line in a different version.

Full version reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2024).

Jacques Demy | Les horizons mort (Dead Horizons) / 1951

narrow my bed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Demy (screenwriter and director) Les horizons mort (Dead Horizons) / 1951

 

Jacques Demy’s student essay for graduation from École Vaugirard was a film titled Les horizons mort (Dead Horizons) from 1951. This film is now available from Criterion and on several internet sites, including Kenneth Goldsmith’s noted UBU Web. Most of these sources describe the short 8-minute work as being “about a young man suffering from a broken heart.”

      Demy’s images in stark black-and-white reveal a young student (played by Demy himself) living in a small garret furnished with an iron bed with a large pillow but few blankets, a broken mirror, and chair, offering a view that looks only into the dormers of the buildings across. A simple unadorned cross hangs upon the wall. Dressed in a white shirt and black pants, the boy certainly seems to be suffering as he looks into the broken mirror, from a small wall water dispenser pours himself out a glass of water, puts it down on an end table, and lies back down upon the bed.

       With the boy we witness a flashback in which he is standing in a field watching from a  distance a man and a woman kissing. Suddenly they stop, the woman striding forcefully toward him. As she nears him she stops, shaking her head emphatically in the negative. Suddenly the man comes forward and slugs the young boy sending him to the ground.     Back in the room, the boy pours a vial of black liquid into the water glass, the camera once again surveying the expressionist-like contents of the room. Wanly, he picks up the glass as if ready to drink what is surely poison. He goes to the mirror and furious with what he sees there sends the fragments crashing to the floor. When he takes up the glass of poisoned water it slips from his hands and crashes to the floor in slivers. Returning morosely to the bed, he is swallowed up by darkness pouring in through the window.

        In the final scene we observe the sun has risen in the small open window as the boy rises, walks over to it, and looks out into the light.

 

      This surely is a fable about a young man suffering—what most people I should imagine might read as a rejection by the woman whom he loved after having found herself a new, rather jealous boyfriend.

       I don’t read it that way, however.  I know nothing about Demy’s early student years, although I do know that as an adult he was a gay man who died, so his wife Agnès Varda finally revealed in her 2008 autobiographical film Les plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès), of AIDS. But I have no clue as to whether or not when he made this film as a 20-year old, he had come to recognize his sexuality.

       Certainly his three major early feature films through which he established his considerable reputation, Lola (1961), La baie des anges (Bay of Angels, 1963) and Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) were heterosexual fables without obvious LGBTQ overtones except for the highly homo-eroticized male leads in each of these works: Marc Michel, Claude Mann, and Nino Castelnuovo—although admitedly the women in all of Demy’s films, and particularly Anouk Aimée, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, the stars of these three films, are equally notable beauties. And certainly by the time of The Umbrellas, Demy had made it clear through his super-saturated images and his narrative of young love lost, along with the fact that it was an all-singing opéra populaire that his vision of heterosexual love was a highly romanticized one bordering on the melodramas of directors such as Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk, both US filmmakers of the 1950s who proffered gay sub-narratives within their otherwise hetero-normative stories.

       By the time he released Les demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967), however, offering dance along with Michel Legrand’s pop score, critics and much of his audience perceived that Demy shared, at least, a gay sensibility toward filmmaking which, as the years went on, became more apparent if not outwardly spoken, so that by the 1980s’ Une chambre en ville critics such as David Melville writing in Film might describe the work as being read “as an essentially homosexual story in heterosexual guise.”

       Melville suggests, moreover, even before his 1962 marriage to Varda there were rumors of Demy’s gay sexuality. In a sense, however, it really doesn’t matter whether or not in 1951 his student film Dead Horizons was a coded coming out movie in the manner of what I have been describing as the A model of US writers of the late 1940s and 1950s. Not all of the numerous “coded” films I write about were conscious decisions on the part of their creators; the subconscious often offers as much to narrative as those stories carefully plotted out; films are described as dreams because in their dominance of image over language they allow us to express what often cannot be spoken.

       Although there have certainly been a substantial number of failed first literary and cinematic loves that have ended in suicide or, at least, suicidal thoughts, usually such infatuations are something from which the young easily recover. And there is absolutely no reason for this girl’s current heartthrob to be jealous enough of this thin, pale kid whom the girl utterly rejects to want to deck him. Instead, the girl, representing all women who soon discover their lover’s sexual shyness often emanates from sexual indecision, results in her male companion registering his homophobic complaint about the situation.

       This boy has come to the realization that he has not just lost a girl, but the entire horizon upon  which heterosexual love is situated, and his suicidal reaction is unfortunately all too common for young men in his situation. As for Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington Willard Maas, and John Schmitz, who represented their characters’ sense of religious guilt in a pièta, an angel, a snow angel, and a crucifix in their early “coming out” stories, so is Demy’s young hero reminded of his transgressions by the cross upon his bedside wall. And just as for those other US filmmakers their young gay men had to come to terms with their sexuality laying in their narrow beds or, as in Maas’ film, by prowling the streets unsuccessfully looking for someone of the same sex to love. Tony Perkins’ ballad from Frank Loesser’s 1960 musical Greenwillow "Never Will I Marry" expressed it quite brilliantly:

 

                          Never, never will I marry

                          Never, never will I wed

                          Born to wander solitary

                          Wide my world, narrow my bed

                          Never never never will I marry

                          Born to wander 'til I'm dead*

 

        So Demy’s young character rises the next morning to look out over the world where he will soon wander. Fortunately, Demy, obviously bisexual, found a life-long companion in Varda. Reportedly when Legrand discovered that Demy was gay, he rejected his former friend and collaborator for some period.

 

*An interesting aside: in order that Perkins could rehearse for this musical, Alfred Hitchcock allowed him to travel from Los Angeles to New York while they filmed Psycho’s shower scene in which he did not actually appear.

 

Los Angeles, May 2, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).

Andrei Tarkovsky | Andrei Rublev / 1966

bell and brush: creating the impossible

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky (screenplay), Andrei Tarkovsky (director) Andrei Rublev / 1966

 

 Like the iconic images of the artist upon which this movie focuses, Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev is less a story or even a series of stories than it is a panorama of stopped moments in time. Like the great films of director Sergei Parajanov, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors two years earlier and Sayat Nova of 1968, Andrei Rublev is less a film about time than it is a series of emblematic images and scenes that in their slow resolution of beauty and horror reveal a passionate and transformative experience that has little do with story or plot. And in that sense, nearly all of Tarkovsky's works from this film forward tell themselves in formal cinematic patterns instead of narrative space. And somewhat like the homosexual filmmaker Parajanov proceeds in his own films, Tarkovsky through the images of the particular film, focuses on Rublev’s search for someone with whom he can live together in order to successfully create the vision that gradually comes to define his life.

     Tarkovsky divides his film into 9 parts:  A "Prologue" and seven moments in time, followed by an Epilogue.

 

                     The Jester, Summer 1400

                     Theophanes the Greek, Summer-Winter-Spring-Summer 1405-1406

                     The Holiday, 1408

                     The Last Judgement, Summer 1408

                     The Raid, Autumn 1408

                     The Silence, Winter 1412

                     The Bell, Spring-Summer-Winter-Spring 1423-1424

 

    Already in the prologue Tarkovsky sets up a kind of abbreviated pattern for the rest of the film. Here Yefim, a creator on the run, is chased by a mob as he daringly jumps into his balloon, a hide-bound medieval version of a hot air balloon. Amazingly, with Yefim hanging by the ropes, the balloon takes him up and away, revealing an entirely new perspective of the universe as the frustrated mob below menacingly lift their fists into space. Yet, as in numerous occasions throughout this film, the miraculous creation is doomed from the start; Yefim and his balloon quickly come crashing to earth like Icarus, sealing, it appears, his doom.

     In "The Jester" section of the film Andrei (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and his fellow monks, Danil (Nikolai Grinko) and Kirill (Ivan Lapikov), leave their Andronikov Monastery on a search of work. Forced by heavy rains to seek shelter in a barn, the three encounter a surly crowd being rudely entertained by a jester who mocks not only the approaching monks but all others of social position and power, including the Boyars, members of a social class similar to England's knights. While Danil and Andrei watch the bawdy show, the self-righteous Kirill, we later discover, secretly sneaks away to report the Jester. Soon after a group of soldiers appear, beating the Jester and arresting him.

     Here we see another kind of creator being punished for his art. Through this enactment, moreover, we begin to perceive the harsh conditions of those who must suffer the powerful and rich. There is clearly little room for even a joyous mockery of values in this unjust society.

     "Theophanes the Greek" explores the life of the prominent master of icons. Visiting Theophanes, Kirill is surprised to find the artist at a complete standstill, all of his apprentices having abandoned him to watch a public torture and execution of a criminal. To his surprise and delight, Theophanes offers him a position to become his assistant in the decoration of the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Moscow. Kirill pretends to resist, but finally accepts the offer if Theophanes will come to the Andronkov Monastery and offer him the position in front of the other monks.

     When the time comes, Theophanes instead sends a messenger, asking Andrei Rublev to be his assistant. Danil is angry and refuses to join his friend in the journey, but later relents and wishes Rublev well. Kirill, furious about the transition of events, not only hurls accusations at Andrei but verbally attacks all his fellow monks, leaving the monastery forever. Andrei has no choice but to take along a slightly oafish boy, Foma, as his assistant. Andrei realizes now that even joy can bring forth anger, jealousy, and loneliness, for it is clear from his conversation with Kirill that in the past the two have been deeply in love, with Andrei admitting that he has seen the world through Kirill's eyes.

     "The Holiday" section reveals another side of the highly Christian Russian world which Andrei inhabits. On a night-time stroll Andrei encounters a community of pagan worshipers celebrating rituals of sensuality and lust. The celebrants run naked through the forest and fornicate openly on the beach.

 

     As a voyeur to the festivities, Andrei is caught by a group of men, tied to a cross, and threatened with downing. A young naked woman comes forward and frees him. As the sun rises a group of soldiers, clearly Christian, begin to attack the pagans with the intent, apparently, of killing them. The young woman escapes by swimming the river where Andrei and his fellow men are gathered in a boat. They force the young Foma to look away as the naked pagans are rounded up.

     Again a force of possible creation has been thwarted. Even a celebration of nature and the sexual body is dangerous in this highly divided and fragile world through which Andrei has silently passed.

     What Andrei has witnessed in the various events of the film so far comes to influence his early statement of values in "The Last Judgment." Here Andrei and Danil have found an excellent job, the decoration of a church in Vladimir, but their work is not progressing, as Andrei, somewhat in doubt, but gradually out of principle, refuses to paint the topic he has been assigned. The horror of the subject appalls him, as he recognizes the theme as being another way that those in power terrify the common folk.

     A young girl, a holy fool, enters the church, peeing at its entrance, desecrating the spot; yet her simplemindedness and innocence allows Andrei to suggest the painting of a feast instead of a punishment. We never see him put a brush to paint, nor paint to wall, for it is not the act that matters but the significance of thought. Once again, creativity has been squelched by those in authority. But at least we now have a hero who may be able to overcome the obstacles he may meet.

    "The Raid," a series of absolutely horrifying images of rape, torture, and murder seem almost to wipe out any possibility of creativity and hope. While the Grand Prince is away in Lithuania, his jealous brother—paralleling Kirill's jealousy of Andrei—has joined forces with the Tartars. Their invasion of Vladimir, replete with cows set afire, falling horses, and dozens of humans speared, knifed, and quartered simply for the sport of it, presents visually the world that Andrei had refused to paint. It is, in short, a hell on earth. As Durochka is taken away by a Russian to be raped, Andrei takes an ax to the perpetrator. In the end of this slaughter only he had the now-mad girl have survived. Having been transformed from a spiritual being into a murderer, Andrei gives up any possibility of creation, abandoning both his art and his voice to the brutal world.

     "The Silence" is just that, a long emptiness that has now settled over the Andronikov Monastery for four years and will continue to define Andre's world for twelve more. It is a cold winter and the monks have little to eat. Old and physically destroyed, Kirill returns, asking to be taken in. He is finally accepted, but only if he will copy the scriptures fifteen times before his death.

     But even Andrei's silence cannot help. He has kept Durochka with him. But when Tartars stop at the monastery for a water break, their leader carries her away to be his eighth wife. The passive monks, including Andrei, can do nothing to help, and the idiot child is delighted by the act; now she shall eat and live—if they let her—an exciting life. For Andrei, however, it represents simply another failure; he cannot even protect the innocent.

    The final set of scenes is perhaps the most profound. Men are seeking a bellmaker for a new cathedral being built by their prince; the boy they find at the noted bellcaster's hut tells them his father has died along with the rest of his family. The only other bellmaker is near death. They turn to go, afraid of the consequences of having been unable to find a craftsman. The young boy, Boriska, however quickly tells them that he can cast a bell, that his father has told him the secret upon his death bed.

 

      The men are doubtful but have little choice, and take him away with them. Now Boriska is caught up something vast; he must find a location, the right clay to use, must dig a pit, put up molds, negotiate with the Prince and other wealthy figures for the correct mix of silver, melt the metals, and pour them into the molds. Nearly night and day, the young worker supervises and works without stop. Will the clay hold, will the bell, if it survives, actually ring or remain mute? Boriska knows that if he fails it will surely mean his death. Just as he quietly observed the actions of the pagans, Andrei silently watches.

     After months of this exhausting work, the furnaces are fueled and released into the mold. When it cools, the clay is chipped away. Now they must haul it, through an intricate series of ropes, across the stream and up into the half-constructed tower. Hundreds of men work against time, as the nobles gather to celebrate the bell's completion, many of them certain that such a clumsy child cannot possibly have accomplished the task. Boriska is so frightened that he can hardly participate yet is ordered to come forward as everyone waits in anticipation.

     The clapper is pulled, pulled in the other direction, returned, and pulled again. Finally, the bell rings out a somewhat deep, sonorous, clang. All are overjoyed. The villagers applaud, the nobles smile and turn away to continue their celebrations in the castle.

 

    Boriska is seen in this long-shot panorama walking alone into the distance. Suddenly he falls into a puddle of muddy water as Andrei passes. We observe the child weeping uncontrollably. Andrei goes to him, holding Boriska's head to his chest. The tears continue. "I lied," admits the child. His father told him nothing, left him in complete ignorance: "the skinflint," cries the young man. The bell has come into existence, clearly, only out of the boy's innate talent and faith. He has created the impossible.

     Breaking his long silence, Andrei invites the boy to join him: "Come with me. You'll cast bells. I'll paint icons." Art may, after all, survive.

     In a final epilogue, Tarkovsky transforms the screen into color and gradually, in an almost abstract tracing of Rublev's images, shows us what resulted from that coupling, an incomparable visual splendor.

     Quietly, and without focusing on the subject, Tarkovsky also makes clear that the great Rublev can only create in an atmosphere of love between two men. It is as if in the long gestation between his break with Kirill and the discovery of the young Boriska, Rublev has been seeking for another human being who like him is willing to miraculously create beauty where before it did not exist. In joining up with the boy, Rublev has rediscovered sound—exemplified by Boriska’s creation of the bell—now binding it to his personal vision expressed in his art, finally joining together the ear, the eye, and the voice that together they make possible. 

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2010) and World Cinema Review (January 2022)