Later canonised (in 1988!), this tells the story of the renowned Russian iconographist and fresco painter. His actual life, as you might expect from the early 15th century, is not well documented so Andrei Tarkovsky has, forgive the pun, a pretty blank canvas on which to draw us a portrait of the trials and tribulations of this inspired, misunderstood, suspected and troubled soul. It has an octuple, episodic, narrative that marries his own development as a man and an artist with the quite literally revolutionary goings on as his country is, frequently quite brutally, coming into some some semb…
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