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Tracing the life of a renowned icon painter, the second feature by Andrei Tarkovsky vividly conjures the murky world of medieval Russia. This dreamlike and remarkably tactile film follows Andrei Rublev as he passes through a series of poetically linked scenes—snow falls inside an unfinished church, naked pagans stream through a thicket during a torchlit ritual, a boy oversees the clearing away of muddy earth for the forging of a gigantic bell—gradually emerging as a man struggling mightily to preserve his creative and religious integrity. Appearing here in the director’s preferred 185-minute cut as well as the version that was originally suppressed by Soviet authorities, the masterwork Andrei Rublev is one of Tarkovsky’s most revered films, an arresting meditation on art, faith, and endurance. SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New 2K digital restoration of the director’s preferred 185-minute cut, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack • New 2K digital transfer of the original 205-minute version of the film, The Passion According to Andrei • Steamroller and Violin, Tarkovsky’s 1961 student thesis film • The Three Andreis, a 1966 documentary about the writing of the film’s script • On the Set of “Andrei Rublev,” a 1966 documentary about the making of the film • New interviews with actor Nikolai Burlyaev and cinematographer Vadim Yusov by filmmakers Seán Martin and Louise Milne • New interview with film scholar Robert Bird • Selected-scene commentary from 1998 featuring film scholar Vlada Petric • New video essay by filmmaker Daniel Raim • New English subtitle translation • PLUS: An essay by critic J. Hoberman

Description

A subtly ravishing passage through the halls of time and memory, this sublime reflection on twentieth-century Russian history by Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker) is as much a poem composed in images, or a hypnagogic hallucination, as it is a work of cinema. In a richly textured collage of varying film stocks and newsreel footage, the recollections of a dying poet flash before our eyes, his dreams mingling with scenes of childhood, wartime, and marriage, all imbued with the mystical power of a trance. Largely dismissed by Soviet critics on its release because of its elusive narrative structure, Mirror has since taken its place as one of the director’s most renowned and influential works, a stunning personal statement from an artist transmitting his innermost thoughts and feelings directly from psyche to screen. TWO-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Andrei Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer, a 2019 documentary about the director by his son Andrei A. Tarkovsky The Dream in the Mirror, a new documentary by Louise Milne and Seán Martin New interview with composer Eduard Artemyev Islands: Georgy Rerberg, a 2007 documentary about the cinematographer Archival interviews with Tarkovsky and screenwriter Alexander Misharin New English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by critic Carmen Gray and, for the Blu-ray, the 1968 film proposal and literary script by Tarkovsky and Misharin that they ultimately developed into Mirror