Originally titled The Passion According to Andrei, Tarkovsky’s second feature remains a wholly original epic, a life of the medieval icon painter encompassing the full horror of history. The culminating vision of Rublev’s Trinity only emerges from the yoke of Tartar occupation, mystic rites, excommunications, and nearly unrelieved suffering. In attempting, as Tarkovsky told an interviewer, “to trace the road Rublev followed during the terrible years [in which] he lived,” the film is besieged with lucid visions of violence and cruelty—a panorama worthy of Brueghel. The Goskino authorities found Tarkovsky’s hallucinatory staging of history sufficiently dangerous to shelve the film for five years.