Kill James Bond! - S4E12.5: Andrei Rublev [PREVIEW]

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

This is a preview of a bonus episode! Find the rest on our increasingly reasonably-priced patreon! ----- Neatly positioned between Transporter 1 and 2 in our release schedule here is a movie that frequently sees mention in conversations about the 'greatest movies ever made': Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 biographical historical epic 'Andrei Rublev'.  Andrei Rublev, since canonised by the eastern orthodox church, was an icon painter who lived in the 1400s near Moscow. Little is known of his actual life, so what Tarkovsky gives us is instead a fictionalised biography set against the backdrop of a realistic 15th-century Russia.  ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. As you well know I've been working with a few gazan families to raise money for their daily living costs in the genocide. We're putting all our energy into this one campaign as we have a real chance to get Ahmed and his family out of Gaza. Please, if you can help in any way, be that by donating yourself or sharing the link with friends and family, it will mean the world to me. https://chuffed.org/project/124906-help-ahmed-and-family-evacuate-gaza ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com 

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly, joined as always by my friends Abigail, Thorne, and Devon. Hello! Please f*** the entire Supreme Court. How ya doin'? Please f*** the entire Supreme Court. You know what, I'll do one too, please f*** the entire Supreme Court.

I don't know what those guys are on, yeah. How are we dealing with the horrors of being trans in the United Kingdom, a country where that is now even worse than it previously was, which was already pretty bad. Uhhh, the horrors, the horrors! The horrors, the horrors. I mean, the thing is, I'm tremendously grateful, in a lot of ways, to transphobes for taking away my legal rights, because, in so doing, they've made this episode's movie picks significantly better contextualized. Yes, they've made this episode's movie pics significantly better contextualized.

Yes, they did. Yeah, listeners, for your benefit we're recording this on Sunday the 20th of April, less than a week after the British Supreme Court has removed transgender people from much of the Equality Act, thus removing our legal protection against sex discrimination. And in the same ruling, they have legally defined all trans people as our assigned gender at birth. They have also accidentally defined bisexual people out of existence. Yes. They finally answered that question. What is a woman? What is a woman? We've all wanted to know it. We found out it's exactly and only sex assigned at birth. And that's it.

We've come down hard on an answer there. Yeah, it's whether or not you're able to get pregnant. Intersex people and non-binary people don't exist as well. That's the court's ruling. Me just like disappearing. What? It's all biological sex. A term that they explicitly refuse to define. The thing that is legal to discriminate on the basis of the court declined to define it, it's like, great, thanks guys, thanks. Amazing day.

So obviously these are sort of dark, barbarous, humiliating times, and I thought that my pick for religion season, which I made when things were just shit rather than worse, would be apt for this. And this is Andrei Tarkovsky's movie, Andrei Rublev. And while this is still religion season, and it is a religious movie, it's not, I would say, even primarily a religious movie. No, this is not about the religion in so much. Yeah, it's just like, how do you keep making art in the face of the horrors? Yeah, I mean, so this is a biography, it's an epic film, it's an epic biography, iconic you could say, of a Russian monk and artist of the 15th century called Andrei Rublev,

of whom- Real guy. Yeah, real guy. Of whom almost nothing is known except his work. Like, perfect artistic legacy of like, the movies are the talking, if you want to go and find out about Andrei Rublev, nothing is written about him apart from like... Just look at the pictures. Yeah, look at the pictures. Because he was an icon painter. He was a Russian Orthodox

monk and icon painter, icon's very important in orthodoxy, and you can see some of his surviving icons which are very very beautiful. And Tarkovsky has taken that kind of lack of biography and gone, okay, cool, what if I use this to make a three hour movie about all the stuff that I'm interested in? And he was right to do it. Can you tell us a little bit about Tarkovsky? Because this is my first Tarkovsky. This is mine too, yeah. Really? Okay. Well so Andrei Tarkovsky was a Soviet director and film theorist, and he sort of grew up under Stalinism and worked mostly in the 70s and 80s, and never really had all that easier relationship with the Soviet film establishment, in that he was very very celebrated, you know, internationally,

but was interested in things that were kind of provocative to them. Like, Solaris, for instance, is a really like, disquieting piece of sci-fi. Or like, Stalker, which is an adaptation of Roadside Picnic, prefigures a lot of post-Soviet stuff about collapse and ruin, right? NARESH I understand that this film was censored, wasn't it? ALICE Yes, yes it was. NARESH Yes, it was. ALICE Because the Soviet Union maintained a doctrine

of state atheism, not just to say that the state doesn't take a position on religion, or that the state doesn't engage with it, but to say that the state demands that this god stuff? Bullshit. Not only do we have nothing to do with it, but we will actively work to repress it. And so, by the time that this movie came out, it was sort of like, things were a bit more liberal, but even so, this is an uncomfortable movie for a Soviet censor. And so it ended up being repressed domestically for about a decade, and then I think some version of

it made it out. But internationally it was released, and this is why it has this wide acclaim, because it's a really good movie, but it's a movie that found an audience more readily through lack of censorship outside the Soviet Union. LORRAINE Like The People's Joker. ALICE Yes, exactly. ZACH It's sort of important to place this one in time as well, because this is like a 1966 movie. We've done a lot of 60s movies. This came out in the same year as like Thunderball. This is

what they were making over there. Yeah, I thought it was really weird where Andrei Rubalev went to Japan and shot a guy with a pen. That was really weird. First you train hard and fast to become an icon painter. This is like a woman in a bikini. He just doesn't seem to be doing very much. He's pretty much very cold. It's also, it interesting, because this is a film, and we're gonna have to get into this, because it is an awkward thing about it, that

is a very Russian nationalist film. WILL It is, yes. ALICE And it's a film that, kind of, one of the statements it's trying to make is about a kind of nature of Russian-ness, right? Like a kind of Russian identity. And that's something that, you know, the USSR is, you know, that's complicated by, you know? Yeah, I'll be interested to talk about that when we get to it. The opening line of the film, though, made me laugh out loud because the opening line of the film is, give me a strap. And I'm like, yes, I'm always saying this. I too am always saying this.

Okay. All right. Yeah. For as long as it's still legal, you know, we're all still saying this. Yeah. So like a pretentious video essay, listeners, this film has chapters and we start with a prologue, which has very little to do with the action of the rest of it, but sort of sets the scene. Where there's a hot air balloon that's being inflated outside a church next to a river. What year is this? ZEKE It's somewhere around 1400. ALICE It's some time in the 15th century.

It's an allegory, right? It's like... SONIA Yeah, they're hot air balloons then? ZEKE No. ALICE No. ZEKE Well, no. ZEKE This is a guy independently inventing a hot air balloon and being killed by it, after seeing how beautiful the world is from above.

Yes. Because, uh, this is, you know, much like A Serious Man, which was also gonna be one of my picks when it got around to me, this has a kind of, like, related but allegorical prologue, right? So it's these three guys trying to launch a hot air balloon from a church tower while this mob is like, it's witchcraft because I don't know what it is, kill em. And I just think, y'know, at this point almost anything could be witchcraft, as we know.

Y'know, any number of things. Hot air balloons, women, you know, praying slightly differently, things of this nature. Yeah. There are others. Yeah, there are others. And so, the one guy, Yefim, manages to like hold onto the straps of this hot air balloon, it takes off, and he sees, you know, the world from above, for, you know, what we imagine is like one of the first times of a person doing

this. And we get some really cool aerial camera work as he flies over this boundless grass step, and it's like, sort of like, this god's eye view, which is something that we'll get back to, because it's a real recurring theme. LORRAINE Then he goes Icarus mode, he crashes and dies. ALICE He does, yes. RUSSELL He does, yeah. ALICE Russian Icarus. He sees some beautiful nature, and then you notice that the ground is coming up rather

quickly, and he just runs straight into it, and we assume is killed, if not by the impact, then by the angry mob. RUSSELL Because this is just, like, you understand how a hot air balloon works, there's the fire attached to it, but this is just like, he's sewn a big balloon out of animal hides and held it over a fire for long enough for it to fill with buoyant air, so it's just going down, inevitably. ALICE Yeah. Yeah.

ALICE And, yeah, the hot air balloon, so when you don't give a fuck where you go. And so this is the kind of allegory, right, is any kind of progress, invention, creation, innovation, is sort of like, it's from this country of ignorance, and it flies up, in this case literally from the church, and it gets a better view of everything, and then it comes crashing back down again. And at this point we then get the title card for the first episode which is Bafoon. NARESH Love it. Fantastic. Brilliant. So it's 1400, it's a little bit late for lunch but we could probably sit down anyway. And we are, we're with these monks, these icon painters, we've got three guys, they're travelling on the

road to Moscow. And our three guys are... Everyone has two names because it's Russian. So we've got Kirill or Cyril. We've got Andrey Rubalev himself. And who's the third guy again? Daniel. Daniel. Daniel.

Also appearing in this film, Daniel. Yeah. Yeah, rocks. I wonder if these three monks are going to have like different personalities that are representative of different kinds of relationships to art. I don't know. Maybe, maybe. The thing that immediately stands out to me, though, is that, and this is quite unfortunate, the guy playing Audre Rubilev looks exactly like Logan Paul. He has a very Logan Paul-ish effect. Dead Rigger. It's the little beard. This is Logan Paul. This is the adventures of Logan Paul in medieval Russia, which is extremely funny. He's wearing a little Charizard card around his neck, he's going boxing.

Errr... yeah. Okay, alright, you know the drill, you know the drill. That's as much of this episode as I can let you listen to. If you wanna hear the rest... Palm, silver, cross, patreon.com, kill James Bond, or one word. You know the deal.