Tarkovsky's Sublime Terror

Andrei rublev, the masterpiece of the great Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, opens with a failed attempt to conquer God. A man attached to a hot-air balloon floats to the upper domes of an imposing church, the tallest structure that a mob of fifteenth-century monks and peasants will ever see in their lives. As he drifts upward from the scrum, the pilot’s infernal engine brings him to eye-level with the stony visages of Jesus and Mary.