I want to describe the experience of watching Andrei Rublev (1966) for the first time without spoiling anything.

The film is three and a half hours long. It's structured as a series of episodes from the life of a 15th-century Russian icon painter. The episodes are not obviously connected. The pacing is geological.

Somewhere around the two-hour mark — during the sequence that is called 'The Bell' in the chapter breakdown — something happens to how you're watching. The film has outlasted your resistance. You stop looking for narrative cause and effect and start watching the way you watch weather.

The final sequence of the film, which switches from black and white to color, is the most emotionally overwhelming thing I have experienced in a cinema. I don't know how to explain why. The film has spent three hours making you feel the weight of creation and destruction, and the final images are simply the thing that was created, existing, making no argument about its own significance.

I was not prepared for it. I have watched it four times and I am still not prepared.