Andrei Tarkovsky once said, “In all my films, it seemed important to me to remind the audience to the fact that they are not alone, lost in an empty universe, but that they are connected by innumerable threads with their past and present, that through certain mystical ways, every human being realizes the rapport with the world and the life of humanity.” However, in his fourth feature, Mirror (1975), Tarkovsky reaches back, using threads and events from his own existence to craft a film that feels both inscrutable and intensely personal.
Told from the perspective of a dying, largely unseen middle-aged poet, Alexei (voiceover by Innokenty Smoktunovsky), Mirror is made up by a series of recollections and remembrances, memories splintered via scene, newsreel footage and poetic verse, read by the filmmaker’s father, Arseniy. Tarkovsky guides us through Alexei’s childhood – just prior to World War II where he spent his summers at a farmhouse belonging to his grandparents, Alexei’s adolescence where he lives alone with his mother (Margarita Terekhova) and in the present where the dying Alexei contends with his ex-wife (also played by Terekhova) and his young son. The film acts like a memory, flitting between each epoch with wild abandon. Mirror remains dreamlike throughout its runtime, a hallucination of sorts, a reflection of the past onto the present.
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Tarkovsky wisely tapped cinematographer Georgy Rerberg, a favorite of Andrei Konchalovsky, to film Mirror. Even if the film seems ethereal, Rerberg’s camera helps ground it in his beautifully rendered pastoral images of Tarkovsky’s past. The director actually rebuilt his childhood home on the site where it once stood and resowed the field with buckwheat to recapture the essence of his lost youth. The movie served as a conduit of his dreams and his memories. The director claimed that after rebuilding his childhood house, he ceased dreaming about it.
Terekhova and other actors appear in multiple roles, perhaps to blur the lines of the past and the present but maybe also to elucidate on the cyclical nature of time. And though the film is filtered through the male gaze, “female life force is present as something mysterious, silent and embodied,” according to critic Carmen Gray. Terekhova is presented in a variety of tropes from anguished wife/mother to a sexual, self-possessed modern woman who is marrying another man after having left Alexei. Still, women are mysterious to both Alexei and Tarkovsky, and Terekhova amply plays all aspects of her characters.
Tarkovsky has never been considered a forthcoming filmmaker, but Mirror is perhaps his most impenetrable work. Still, he slyly references his other films, the aforementioned connective tissue perhaps. A poster of Andrei Rublev hangs on the wall in Andrei’s apartment. Dostoevsky is namechecked. Even Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow is referenced for a second time in a Tarkovsky film.
The use of newsreel footage also acts as a grounding force as we see images from the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. One can only imagine what sort of effect these events had on a child, much like how the conflict in Ukraine happening now will influence an entire new generation of artists. At one point, the director’s father intones, “There’s no death on the earth. All are immortal. All is immortal.” Is this the sentiment of the collective, the Communist idea that one life is no more important than the whole? Or does Mirror reflect otherwise? That by the very act of creating a film, the memories of one man live on forever, never alone.
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