BFI Top 50: The Mirror, Released in 1975, Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

What I know going in

I know the film concerns the life of a Russian child as he experiences his life before and after World War II. I have read that the film’s structure attempts to recreate how memory works.

 

Immediate Reaction

Well… I had a lot of trouble deciphering The Mirror, and I am not even talking about interpreting its themes or messages, the film’s basic structure, its narrative, and the character relations eluded me. Before I refresh my mind by reading the plot synopsis, I am going to lay out what I thought happened in the film. As far as I can tell, the film follows three main characters: The Father, The Mother, and The Son. The film does not have a strictly linear plot; instead it shifts between four main points in time. These points are The Father growing up on the farm in the early 1900’s with his brother and mother, The Mother spending time with her children on the same farm and in an apartment in Moscow after divorcing The Father, World War II (which is referenced by the other characters and only seen in newsreels, or scenes staged to look like newsreel footage), and some indeterminate time after the war where The Son remembers his experiences.

 

The film shifts between these different times freely, and it is often hard to distinguish between the times as the film offers no expository dialogue. This difficulty in discernment is further compounded by the fact that the film will often drift into dream imagery (a house rotting apart, a woman dipping her hair, wraithlike, into some water, the same woman levitating) that is eerily beautiful. The only way I was able link these scenes together was by viewing the film as a representation of the continuous free association that the human mind works in. The film keyed me into this thought through the opening sequence of The Son talking to a therapist, and a short scene where someone (The Son I’m presuming) converses and reminisces with a woman on the phone.

Alright, let’s see if the synopsis matches my own…

 

I got the majority of it right, and I correctly guessed the reason for its elliptical structure, but I got a few key details wrong. The newsreel footage in the film comes from the Spanish Civil War, Soviet Republic balloon tests, and the Sino-Soviet border conflict. I thought the majority of it involved a later date in World War II. I also did not understand the sequence at the beginning. The Son (Alexei) is not being interrogated; he is simply watching such a scene on a television. I was confused because Ignat turns the T.V. on and the film immediately cuts to a different scene without first showing on the set. The biggest thing I missed is that the main narrator (if he can be called that) is always Alexei. The film follows his life during the pre and post war period as he remembers both his mother and wife, who are played by the same person.

 

Now that I have clarified the film’s basic elements, I can talk more about my reaction. I think The Mirror is incredibly successful at replicating memory, and it is the closest I have seen a film come to representing how my own mind drifts through thoughts. Unfortunately, that same aspect made the film hard for me to follow. It also made me worry that the images Tarkovsky constructs are only meaningful to him (similar to how our own dreams may be interesting to us, but meaningless to others). Those images are gorgeously composed, the dream sequences in particular are stunning, but did not flow together in any meaningful way for me. It is also very difficult to keep up that kind of movie for 107 minutes. I would have much preferred is The Mirror had been a short film.I have seen a few other films that attempt a similar feat, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Tarkovsky’s own Ivan’s Childhood, and I actually preferred both of those films to this one. The main reason for this is that both of those films set up a strong central narrative and then occasionally shift into dream/memory landscapes.

 

Further thoughts

After reading more analyses of the film, I now see my attempts to suss out the basic narrative of The Mirror as futile. I read a few pieces, by people much smarter than myself, which significantly differed from my own seemingly concrete interpretation of the plot. One idea I particularly liked was that the narrator of the film is relaying his dying thoughts, something I had not even considered. Jeremy Heilman from moviemartyr elegantly puts forth this idea and explains how the form of the film reflects this thought:

 

“Perhaps it’s because of the protagonist’s closeness to death, and his imminent departure from the corporeal world, but the film has an obsession with physical things. The camera stops to notice the wind blowing, a spoon as it teeters then fall from a table, or the condensation from a glass as it evaporates. The film takes everday items and makes them feel surreal. It’s a remarkable achievement in cinematography.”

 

I really like this idea and I had a little “aha!” moment when I stumbled across it. Seeing the film as a representation of a dying man’s recollections helps to explain the drifting feeling it maintains.

 

However, that does not counter my earlier claim that the images the film presents are resonant only for Tarkovsky himself. That claim was rejected in the article “An Attempt at Universal Subjectivity” by David Wishard. In it, he provides a letter that rebukes the claim from various Soviet critics that The Mirror is incomprehensible.

 

"My reason for writing is Mirror, a film I can't even talk about because I am living it. It's a great virtue to be able to listen and understand... That is, after all, a first principle of human relationships: the capacity to understand and forgive people their unintentional faults, their natural failures. If two people have been able to experience the same thing even once, they will be able to understand each other. Even if one lived in the era of the mammoth and the other in the age of electricity." 

 

Guess who wrote that? Hint: it was not a film critic, a scholar, or another director. It was a factory worker from Leningrad, the type of person some people might wrongly expect to have no interest in the type of narratively fuzzy cinema The Mirror traffics in. I believe that testimonial, and the fact that the film was a minor, unexpected hit in Russia, rebukes my own claim about the film’s impact.

 

Unfortunately, I still do not think I can get completely behind the film. Wishard goes on to state that The Mirror’s “images are not meant to tell the audience something specific, but to evoke memory.” Okay, that is great, but what if the film did not do that for me? I can honestly say that outside a mild sense of awe at the beginning, The Mirror did not evoke any memories for and any reflections I have about the film have been a result of reading about it. Is that film’s fault? Have I simply not lived enough to collect the necessary experiences to find engagement in the film? Wishard believes that “Tarkovsky can apprehend anyone’s subjectivity so long as they have an open mind.” Maybe that is what it all boils down to? That my mind simply is not open enough.

 

Why is the film on this list?

The Mirror uses the unique nature of film to perfectly evoke the intertwining of dreams, fantasies, and memories. Regardless of my personal feelings about the film, it fully deserves a spot here for being so stylistically daring.