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Andrei Tarkovsky – Zerkalo / Mirror / Le miroir (1975)

Posted By: newland

Date: 27 Feb 2010 16:21:00

Andrei Tarkovsky – Zerkalo / Mirror / Le miroir (1975)

Mirror is Tarkovsky's fourth of seven feature films and proceeds in a non-narrative, stream-of-consciousness form. The director mixes flashbacks, historical footage and original poetry to illustrate the reminiscences of a dying man about his childhood during World War II, adolescence, and a painful divorce in his family. The story interweaves reflections about Russian history and society.
Mirror has relevancy being numerically "central" in Tarkovsky's oeuvre also marking itself as, by the director's own account, 'My most openly autobiographical, daring, and self-revealing film'. Infused with dense, personal references from memory and an inaccessible use of time, space and performances, this is considered the director most artistically bold work being steeped in layered constructions. In examining his entire body of work this tends to be a catalyst of his vision of transcendency.

Note: different rips of Mirror are available on avaxhome, but none of that quality. The russian Lizard DVD beats all the other releases (Artificial Eye / Spectrum / MK2 / Kino).
*edit: the film is now out on bluray, so better rips (720p/1080p) are also available*

Tarkovsky has been boldly moving further and further away from narrative lead cinema and Mirror represents the closest he would ever come to total abandonment of what most people would consider the most important aspect of any film –a coherent story. (…) Mirror’s unstructured and inconsistent movement back and forth through time, with changing perspectives and fantasy sequences, is unlike anything else in cinema. Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad or Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 could not hope to be so audaciously experimental. Mirror flaunts its most original of narrative structures, the film totally abandons logic in favour of chaos and within chaos it finds its own consistency.
I’ve now watched Mirror six times in three years and on my latest viewing I still picked up small visual motifs and clues that I missed the first five times. To my mind there is no other film that can be this rewarding after so many viewings. Mirror is a mysteriously beautiful film that challenges and critiques the workings of the human mind.
Mirror is Tarkovsky’s greatest masterwork, something totally original, deeply moving and inspiring, and from my memory to date –it is the single greatest film ever made.
— Mike Dawson, Left Field Cinema

What is this film about? It is about a Man. No, not the particular man whose voice we hear from behind the screen, played by Innokenty Smoktunovsky. It's a film about you, your father, your grandfather, about someone who will live after you and who is still "you". About a Man who lives on the earth, is a part of the earth and the earth is a part of him, about the fact that a man is answerable for his life both to the past and to the future. You have to watch this film simply, and listen to the music of Bach and the poems of Arseny Tarkovsky; watch it as one watches the stars, or the sea, as one admires a landscape. There is no mathematical logic here, for it cannot explain what man is or what is the meaning of his life.
— Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

In all my films it seemed to me important to try to establish the links which connect people (other than those of the flesh), those links which connect me with humanity, and all of us with everything that surrounds us. I need to have a sense that I myself am in this world as a successor, that there is nothing accidental about my being here. Within each of us there must exist a scale of values. In Mirror I wanted to make people feel that Bach and Pergolesi and Pushkin's letter and the soldiers forcing the Sivash crossing, and also the intimate, domestic events –that all these things are in a sense equally important as human experience. In terms of a person's spiritual experience, what happened to him yesterday may have exactly the same degree of significance as what happened to humanity a thousand years ago…
In all my pictures the theme of roots was always of great importance: links with family house, childhood, country, Earth. I always felt it important to establish that I myself belong to a particular tradition, culture, circle of people or ideas.
Of great significance to me are those traditions in Russian culture which have their beginnings in the work of Dostoievsky. Their development in modern Russia is patently incomplete; in fact they tend to be looked down upon, or even ignored altogether. There are several reasons for this: first their total incompatibility with materialism, and then the fact that the spiritual crisis experienced by all Dostoievsky's characters (which was the inspiration of his work and that of his followers) is also viewed with misgiving. Why is this state of 'spiritual crisis' so feared in contemporary Russia?
I believe that it is always through spiritual crisis that healing occurs. A spiritual crisis is an attempt to find oneself, to acquire new faith. It is the apportioned lot of everyone whose objectives are on the spiritual plane. The soul yearns for harmony, and life is full of discordance. This dichotomy is the stimulus for movement, the source at once of our pain and of our hope: confirmation of our spiritual depths and potential.
— Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

As I began work on Mirror I found myself reflecting more and more that if you are serious about your work, then a film is not merely the next item in your career, it is an action which will affect the whole of your life. For I had made up my mind that in this film, for the first time, I would use the means of cinema to talk of all that was most precious to me, and do so directly, without playing any kind of tricks.
I had the greatest difficulty in explaining to people that there is no hidden, coded meaning in the film, nothing beyond the desire to tell the truth. Often my assurances provoked incredulity and even disappointment. Some people evidently wanted more: they needed arcane symbols, secret meanings. They were not accustomed to the poetics of the cinema image. And I was disappointed in my turn. Such was the reaction of the opposition party in the audience; as for my own colleagues, they launched a bitter attack on me, accusing me of immodesty, of wanting to make a film about myself.
In the end we were saved by one thing only—faith: the belief that since our work was so important to us it could not but become equally important to the audience. The film aimed at reconstructing the lives of people whom I loved dearly and knew well. I wanted to tell the story of the pain suffered by one man because he feels he cannot repay his family for all they have given him. He feels he hasn't loved them enough, and this idea torments him and will not let him be.
Once you start to speak of things that are precious, you are immediately anxious about how people will react to what you have said, and you want to protect these things, to defend them against incomprehension. We were worried about how future audiences would receive the picture, but at the same time we went on believing, with maniac obstinacy, that we would be heard. Our decision was vindicated by later developments; in this respect the letters quoted at the beginning of the book explain something of what happened. I could not have hoped for a higher level of understanding, and such an audience reaction was supremely important to me for my future work.
Mirror was not an attempt to talk about myself, not at all. It was about my feelings towards people dear to me; about my relationship with them; my perpetual pity for them and my own inadequacy—my feeling of duty left unfufilled.
— Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

There was a time, after Mirror –and after years of hard work making films– when I actually considered giving up the whole business… But once I started to get all those letters, I realised that I hadn't the right to do anything so drastic, and that if there were some among the audience who could be so candid and open-hearted, and who really needed my films, then I had to go on working whatever the cost to myself.
If there are cinema-goers for whom it is important and rewarding to enter into dialogue specifically with me, that is the greatest stimulus I can have for my work. If there are some who talk the same language as myself, then why should I neglect their interests for the sake of some other group of people who are alien and remote? They have their own gods and idols and we have nothing in common.
All the artist can offer the audience is to be open and candid in his combat with his material. And the audience will appreciate what our exertions mean. If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money; and instead of training the audience by giving them inspiring works of art, you are merely training the artist to ensure his own income. For their part, the audience will continue, their contentment unalloyed, to feel they are right– seldom a well-founded conviction. The failure to develop the audience's capacity to criticise our own judgements is tantamount to treating them with total indifference.
— Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

IMDB review — DVD source (Lizard) — DVD comparison

The young person's guide to Mirror : Left Field Cinema's podcast

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