If the hypothetical situation occurred and I was asked to select just one movie to be preserved for all time, I would pick Andrei Tarkovsky’s second work, the 1966 biography film Andrei Roublev. Here is a film that achieves the highest goals of which movies are capable, yet, by the very limitations of their form, rarely do.

For all its artistry, Roublev does not feel like the product of artistic intent, but a document of human experience. It depicts life in the medieval era, though never feels like a recreation; Tarkovsky seems to have filmed not actors and sets (most of them outdoors), but the people and places of a previous century. For all the historical realism, however, Roublev is equally concerned with the dreams and meditations of its hero, evoking internal experience as vividly as the natural world.

That the movie manages to remain enigmatic, even when detailing the most tangible and universal concerns, could explain why I approach it with a sense of awe. Tarkovsky, who died in 1987, was the last of what Paul Schrader labeled as the transcendental filmmakers (Yasujiro Ozu, Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson were his first three), and Andrei Roublev is his most transcendental film. In my mind, it is the most transcendental film, period, locating in virtually every image something beyond the grasp of everyday experience.

It is a film that reaches out not only to the divine, but to the other unknowns that are equally significant to life on earth: the causes of epiphany, the explanation for human suffering, the link between day-to-day existence and the whole of human history.

This last concept is central to the movie’s conception. Little was known about Andrei Roublev, a 15th century monk and painter of religious icons who is considered the first major Russian artist, and so Tarkovsky and co-writer Andrei Konchalovsky imagined major episodes of his life in an attempt to explain what brought about his monumental work. In these eight chapters––covering roughly a quarter of a century––the movie traces Roublev’s artistic and spiritual development in relation to the major historical events of his day, the most important being the Tartar raids of Russia.

The writers’ extensive historical research was matched by almost two years of soul-searching, and the finished film feels, as a result, outside of time, otherworldly. Again, each moment seems to have been taken directly from the minutia of 15th century life, yet each moment also possesses a finality––a God’s-eye-view––that one associates more with religious iconography than with movies. According to Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie’s book The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the director selected leading man Anatoly Solzhenitsyn by showing to art historians pictures of everyone who auditioned for the part of Roublev and asking them who looked most like the subject of an icon; the same process was repeated for much of the costume and set design.

Despite the poetic dialogue of the screenplay (as well as Vadim Yusov’s stark, confrontational cinematography), the elevated mysticism of Andrei Roublev can be credited most thoroughly to Tarkovsky’s direction. While his detractors claim that his camera movements are too slow and his imagery too dense, such criticism ignores the filmmaker’s unwavering spirituality – the very impetus that inspired Tarkovsky to make movies in the first place and keep working through the time of his final film The Sacrifice, which he made while dying of brain cancer.

Indeed, Tarkovsky’s camera moves slowly (Johnson and Petrie note that the average shot in Roublev is two to three minutes long, and that the average shots in Tarkovsky’s later films are even longer), but I’d argue that it also moves deliberately; What results from the director’s patience is a trance-like effect from staying with the same images for longer than most audiences are accustomed.

Similarly, if one submits to the director’s imagery, one finds that it isn’t very difficult at all. Tarkovsky worked intuitively (I’m tempted to compare him to a prophet), filming the images that enticed and inspired him, not working according some schematic design. As in the work of Schrader’s transcendental filmmakers, his images are difficult if only because it is hard to describe their significance in words, as symbols. Tarkovsky strove to convey in film what could not be conveyed by any other means, particularly the natural world (water and foliage are major images in his work).

With the Tartar raids––as hypnotic as anything in cinema, yet filmed through an eye of tormented passivity––Andrei Roublev’s central question becomes clear: How and why does one strive for transcendence when the horrors of life on earth threaten to make such a pursuit irrelevant? Tarkovsky offers a definitive answer at the movie’s climax (before showing the real Roublev’s paintings for the first time, in a staggering transition from black-and-white film to color), although an earlier scene suggests a solution that, for me, is even more thrilling.

In the third chapter, titled “The Passion According to Andrei” (Tarkovsky’s original title for the entire film), a young Roublev discusses the martyrdom of Jesus with his artistic mentor, Theophanes the Greek. Theopanes cynically states that if Jesus were resurrected, man would only crucify him again. While Andrei argues for a more compassionate view of mankind, Tarkovsky cuts unexpectedly to a sequence depicting the crucifixion. Instead of staging it in the desert, the scene is depicted in midst of a Russian winter, complete with a Jesus who childishly eats a handful of snow before walking up a hill to his execution.

Though I am not a Christian, there was a time when Tarkovsky’s snow-eating Christ was my most cherished image of all movies. The radical notion of placing Jesus within a Russian setting personalizes religious scripture, imagines Roublev’s daydream from one of the most well-known stories. More importantly, this image allows the audience to picture the eternal in terms of something as transient as a daydream. It made me think of my own childhood, when I’d envision the binding of Isaac taking place in the field next to my grade school; it made me think of Roublev and the spiritual journey that led to the foundations of Russian art; and it made me think of how humanity has changed in the last 2000 years, as well as the ways in which it may never change.