Of Balloons, Bells and Icons: Andrei Rublev from Above

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrey Rublyov (1966), set in late fifteenth-century Russia, begins with an unknown peasant flying through the air, suspended from a hot air balloon assembled from rags and animal skins. This enigmatic sequence, which serves as a prologue to the film, was described by Tarkovsky both as the factual depiction of a crude, straightforward act that evades all symbolism and as a “symbol of daring,” a parable that would encapsulate the overall structure of the film, representing the spiritual journey of the creative artist forced to undergo extreme suffering and ultimately driven to sacrifice his faith or his life to redeem himself and elevate humanity through art. In between these two readings, however, the balloon flight overture can be seen as a performative exercise in cinematic movement that both anticipates and resists the mystical grounding of the film as a whole. As it physically moves with the camera across space, the balloonist’s gaze from above becomes one with the most elusive element in Tarkovsky’s haptic, immersive cinema: air. In its transcendental immediacy, the flying peasant’s embodied camera eye ultimately disrupts the narrative, poetic and moral logic of Andrei Rublev as a “film of the earth.”.