Amazing cinematography in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev

To best watch Tarkovsky's 1966 Soviet film, Andrei Rublev, it's best to give up any pretense of trying to follow a traditional plot or narration and just focus on what you're seeing on the screen: An amazing and beautiful series of scenes the re-create better than anything I've ever seen (only other possible contender may be Chimes at Midnight) the look and feel of what life must have been like in the 15th century. Loosely, the film follows the eponymous Andrei  - based on a real Russian painter of church icons - as he travels with a few companions - an older mentor, a protege, a woman he at times protects - across a forbidding landscape, bound for one church or another at which he will practice his art. The film is a series of discrete episodes, and the main characters are in some, not in others, and it really doesn't matter: Each scene is discrete and can be taken as such. We see an encounter w/ a jester or comedian (extremely strange) in a hut where many have gathered in shelter from the rain, at attack by Tartar fighters and some Russian allies on a small city - an incredible re-creation of a battle scene, with unfortunately much abuse of animals, a scene in a churchyard (at which time Andrei has taken a vow of silence and is giving up his art), a long sequence about the fabrication of a bell for a church steeple, in which Tarkovsky directs probably thousands of extras, each in period dress and engaged in some aspect of the communal work - like a Bruegel painting, though all in muted gray tones, and at the conclusion an intimate look at Rublev's work (not sure if these are truly his icons or representative other icons of the period), all of which are painted on damaged or rotting wood panels in churches that are in near ruin (some amazing cinematic feats here, which I won't spoil or give away). We can see why the Soviets immediately suppressed this film, not because the religious overtones (easy to dismiss those as ancient relics) but the implication that a group of rebels can attack a city and toppled the government, the depiction of an artist remaining devoted to his craft in the face of official opposition, and the glorification of the individual hero or creator without even a hint of social realism of collective identity (except maybe in the community involvement in construction of the church).