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The Mirror Actors: Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Filipp Yankovsky Director: Andrei Tarkovsky Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Academy Ratio Format: Color, Black & White Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Running Time: 106 minutes Studio: Kino Video Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2000-03-21 Buy from Amazon |
 "Tarkovsky's Masterpiece"Mirror (rus., Zerkalo, 1975), is unquestionably the masterpiece of Andrei Tarkovsky's opus. It is an autobiographical film, with a rather unconventional timeline. Its structure is somewhat convoluted, making it relatively inaccessible on first viewing. Fortunately, the beauty of its images and its lyricism carry you along, and most certainly compel you to a second viewing, and then you are "hooked." At least, this was my experience with this film. Mirror represents the recollections of a dying man, weighing the episodes of his life in his conscience. It is also autobiographical reflection of the author on the final stretch of the race toward the finish line of his life. His thoughts ebb and flow, as he contemplates his life's journey. What kind of mirror is it? It's the author's broken mirror, whose shards have been re-assembled and glued in a random fashion, with each piece reflecting an aspect of his soul. Tarkovsky's mind wanders as he recounts some of the events of his past at least the way he remembers them. The memories are set against a Russian historical backdrop from the early Stalin years to the early 70s. Tarkovsky weaves newsreels, poems, and dramatic scenes to suggest his symbolic inner world; his relationships with his mother, his ex-wife, and his son, and with the world in which he has lived. The film, based on Tarkovsky's own screenplay. Some press interviews and writings of Tarkovsky leave no doubt that all of these events are true recollections concerning his family, his life as he has lived it and felt it. All the episodes are really part of his family history, except for one, and he undertook to literally replicate what was fixed in his memory. The only fictional episode is the illness of the narrator, which is intended to convey the author's spiritual crisis. As such, this fictional contrivance is a foundation for all of the others, utterly true remembrances. The pace of the film is slow. As in most of Tarkovsky's other films, we see long shots, which lead to lengthy contemplations on the viewer's part, requiring the absorption of a considerable amount of fine visual details. This in turn leads the viewer into an emotional involvement with the characters. By using long shots and few cuts in his films, Tarkovsky gives the viewers a sense of time passing, and the relationship of one moment to another, as opposed to the speedy jump-cut, Hollywood style. Tarkovsky developed a theory of cinema that he called "sculpting in time," which was, using the unique characteristic of cinema as a medium, to take one's experience of time and alter it. This film is the best example of the application of his theory. Not only does Tarkovsky "sculpt in time" by manipulating events in an apparent random-time fashion, he also manipulates time within a particular event by using mirrors, which reflects different times, past or future, which are not of that event. There are many such examples throughout the film. The beauty and lyricism of the images are due to Tarkovsky's unmistakable poetic style. The childhood memories, hypnotic in their intensity, are the most visually stunning filmmaking imaginable. These dream-like sequences are also the most enigmatic moments of the film, which most likely accounts for the film's alleged impenetrability. Mirror is about the lives of the most important figures in Tarkovsky's life: his mother and his wife (interestingly, played by the same actress). From Tarkovsky's own admission, his father had no inner influence on him. His mother was the most important person in his life so much so that, for Tarkovsky, there was no question that she had to appear in person in several scenes. Although Tarkovsky never made an explicitly political film, the relationship of the individual to history was central to his world view. In terms of a person's spiritual experience, what happened to that person yesterday may be as significant as what happened to humanity a hundred years ago. From that point of view, the film is about the nature of Russia as a mediator between the East and the West, as portrayed in the scene where Ignat reads Pushkin's letter to Chaadayev (October 19, 1836), and a little later in the film, in the footage of Russian soldiers holding back a demonstration of Chinese Maoists. Mirror is also about the Stalinist purges of the mid-to-late 1930s and World War II. Tarkovsky shows us archive footage of contemporary events with complete detachment in contrast with the extreme intimacy of the memories. It is expressed, for example, by the apparently strange inclusion of the documentary footage of the Soviet army crossing the Sivash marshes. The poem by his father, Arseni Tarkovsky, which accompanies the Sivah crossing, is particularly telling. To summarize this beautiful and unusual film, I will quote the author himself (upon leaving the screening of Mirror), "When I left the cinema I was thinking that here was a film made as a poem, that it was - a cinematic impossibility it would seem - an intimate lyrical monologue." A more complete review of this film appears in [...] "The Great Dream"At the pinnacle of his powers, Tarakovsky made this remarkable auto-biographical work, pushing cinema's powers to replicate dreams in a way that renders Surrealist 'dream' paintings redundant. Bergman, Resnais, and Bunuel had tackled the dreamworld too. But here, the commitment is ravishing. The best way to imbibe its spell is to surrender any urgency to make narrative sense, and allow the images to wash over you. This is true of all Tarakovsky, but moreso here. His familiar images, of rain, sodden earth, wood-floored interiors, sussurating meadows and leaves, red-haired women, and kids with lip herpes, are all displayed. His aural net is on a par with the visuals; the barking dogs, Bach chorales, the squark of a beheaded chicken, sumptuous and thrilling. The prologue has a stuttering boy cured by a hypnotist and announcing (in lieu of Tarakovsky) that he will now speak clear and strong. The Kafkaesque corridors of the printworks, the family home all paint the new language that the director felt film, alone, could offer. As a vehicle for memory, dream, perception and the blurred edges they inhabit, this confessional film is close to describing how consciousness flickers in and out of control and focus. Key images, even those supplied by old newsreels, establish chronolgical footholds. Note the slightly askew sound and image tracking used sparingly, the minutely slowed down feeling of some passages. Tarakovsky's father occasionally reads his poetry over the film, adding tonal tension. In fact he is more present through voiceover than his embodied character in the film. His mother is present, at times tantalizingly so. Yet she remains withdrawn from the son, which may account for the love Tarakovsky subsequently projected with such intense palpability on the textures of the world. Watch this over and again. These textures and vivid images do not dilute. "Perfect except for the translation"I've watched my VHS copy of 'Mirror' around ten times and thought I 'knew' the film well enough. But the DVD is a revelation. The different film stocks and treatments -- washed-out colour, sepia, black & white, newsreel -- and Tarkovsky's pared-down images come through crisper than ever. The sound is the real bonus, though. 'Mirror' mightn't have been recorded in 5:1 surround, but the new audio track reveals a side of the film I didn't even know existed: a deep, almost physiological soundtrack of eerie music and painstakingly placed effects that heightens the oneiric atmosphere by several notches and which was totally lost on VHS. I know there was cross-pollination of ideas between Tarkovsky and Kubrick, and aurally 'Mirror' now appears as a more subtle, subliminal version of '2001'. Unfortunately the closing (opening!) chorus from Bach's St John Passion still sounds distorted; but even that has its charm. So I now have even greater admiration for what was already the finest film ever made about childhood and memory. Tarkovsky plays and plays on a handful of heart-stoppingly beautiful images, the sort we all have from our earliest youth -- luminous, sublime, terrifying, warming, sad -- the ones we can neither let go of nor fathom. The sense of desperately clinging to something that has lost all meaning is also brilliantly transferred into a series of acerbic, yet necessarily (for the time) oblique political comments. It is probably the most aesthetic film I have ever seen, in the sense of pure consciousness delighting in itself. (Do I pass the Tarkovsky-Fan Waffle Test?) The only minor quibble is the new translation, which was done by a Russian, seemingly with a Russian-English dictionary. I'm sure it's faithful to the original, but it is sometimes grammatically obtuse and frequently unidiomatic. I don't know why they couldn't reuse the translation on the VHS version. It may be more serious a problem for those who don't already know 'Mirror', but please don't let it put you off one of the most profound artistic experiences you could have on film or elsewhere. "Poignant autobiographical portrait!"This is probably the most intimate film of Andrei Tarkovsky and somehow this film meant for him the back to his slave roots, but expressed in such original way. In first place, we have the presence of his father the poet Arseni Tarkovsky supporting stunning visual episodes, specially the unforgettable sequence of the Spanish Civil War; second the magnificent camera work , underlining slender passages of his childhood and showing the fantastic landscapes of his homeland; third the allusive first shots of a man who has lost the essential perspectives; fourth the shocking and hallucinating sequence of a boy making piss in a art book, trying to erase the traditionalism understood as the memory's imposing; five the mirror is a journey inside oneself , a lovable cite to Cocteau's Orpheus in search of our forgotten ancestors. Somehow this film anticipates Bergman's fanny and Alexander, but with a very huge difference; Tarkovsky expresses himself poetically, instead of Bergman who subordinates the image as the final product of his will, lacking poetry. ""Mirror"""Mirror" is a film about memory: not only the memory of the individual narrator, but also of the scars that give the Russian twentieth century consciousness its very texture. To tell the story of a nation in terms of the personal is a monumental undertaking, and one that isn't easy to achieve (see Angelopoulos, more of which later). That Tarkovsky manages to weave the personal recollections of a poet with the public memories of Stalinism, World War Two and everything afterwards is a sign of his greatness as a filmmaker. Quite simply, he took filmmaking into new territories, away from the linear, monumental styles of not only Soviet but also much Western cinema. His films are not so much about finding out the end of the road, as realising the shape of the way ahead: a poetic vision, if you will, rather than an imperitive, political one. The film doesn't really have a set structure: actors sometimes play more than one role: so the narrator's mother in the 1930s becomes his wife in his own adult life. Tarkovsky's own mother plays the narrator's mother as the film comes to a close. The shy boy, possibly the son of the narrator, or possibly his reincarnation in a later period, stands for the wartime child. Everything returns, plays itself out again: after all, as the boy on the firing range says, an about face in Russia is a turn of 360 degrees. There is no room for anger in Tarkovsky's worlds, only acceptance. To return to Angelopoulos: yes, much the same as Tarkovsky, insofar as they both try and play out the political/public in terms of the private/personalized display of individuality. But the gulf between the showy, stagey and representative -because his actors represent a skeleton figure, at one remove from the rigours of everyday contextualization and individualization- that is Angelopoulos; and the seamless blend of fully drawn characters with a barbed critique of an entire nation's recent history that is Tarlovsky is really the gulf between common-or-gardens excellence and greatness. Tarkovsky manages the almost impossible: there's no shame in coming second. N.B. For Angelopulos-related films, see the work of Miklos Jancso, especially the "Red And The White", and the prewar output of Mizoguchi. |
