Mirror (1975)

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Mirror (1975) – A. Tarkovsky

I don’t know how Andrei Tarkovsky composed this film but I’d imagine it went something like this.  First, think back to your childhood. What are some of the most vivid memories that you recall? Recreate them cinematically with actors, sets, props.  Now think about your mother.  What do you recall her experiencing at the time?  Recreate that.  What about your society? Find some historical footage to include.  Finally, think about the present day.  How is your current experience related to those childhood experiences? Focus on your current family relationships.  Film this, with the same actors that you used for the childhood scenes now playing your current nuclear family.  Use different techniques, film stock, colour or black and white. Break the various bits of footage into different scenes and interweave them together.  Add spoken poetry written by your famous poet father over the top.  Make sure to include some stunning visual shots – for example, shots focusing on the four elements (water, fire, earth, air), sometimes all in the same shot, as found in the rest of your oeuvre, to embed life in nature. Include shots recreating famous paintings (such as Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow, 1565) to make explicit the connections between art and life (as poetry also does). Feel free to include personal symbols and hallucinatory flourishes within and between the time points in your story (reality is never concrete).  Use classical music as punctuation or to enhance the sensory content. Keep things elliptical (as our memories and thoughts usually are).  Of course, the result is likely to be deeply personal, possibly hermetic, save for those shared experiences of all Russians in the years during and after WWII or for the more generally shared experience of divorce, estrangement from one’s parents, growing older, remembering and failing to remember, wistfulness, nostalgia, regret, and acceptance.  Obviously, this is a film like no other and another masterwork from Tarkovsky.