Mirror (1975)

Mirror (Russian: Зеркало, tr. Zerkalo; known in the United States as The Mirror ) is a 1975 Russian art film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It is loosely autobiographical, unconventionally structured, and incorporates poems composed and read by the director's father, Arseny Tarkovsky. The film features Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Alla Demidova, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky's wife Larisa Tarkovskaya and his mother Maria Vishnyakova, with a soundtrack by Eduard Artemyev.

Mirror is known for its non-linear structure. It unfolds as an organic flow of memories recalled by a dying poet (based on Tarkovsky's own father Arseny, who in reality would outlive his filmmaker son by three years) of key moments in his life both with respect to his immediate family as well as that of the Russian people as a whole during the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. In an effort to represent these themes visually, the film combines contemporary scenes with childhood memories, dreams, and newsreel footage; its cinematography slips, often unpredictably, between color, black-and-white, and sepia. The film's loose flow of visually oneiric images, combined with its rich - and often symbolic - imagery has been compared with the stream of consciousness technique in Modernist literature. It has also found favor with most Russians for whom it remains their most beloved of Tarkovsky's works.

The main concept of Mirror dates as far back as 1964. Over the years Tarkovsky wrote several screenplay variants, at times working with Aleksandr Misharin. Their mutually developed script initially was not approved by the film committee of Goskino, and it was only after several years of waiting that Tarkovsky would be allowed to realize the project. At various times the script was known under different names, most notably Confession and A White, White Day. The completed film was initially rejected by Goskino, and after some delay was given only limited release in the Soviet Union.

Mirror has grown in reputation over many years and ranked nineteenth in Sight and Sound's 2012 critics' poll of the best films ever made, and ninth in the directors' poll.

Synopsis

Mirror depicts the thoughts, emotions and memories of Alexei, or Alyosha (Ignat Daniltsev), and the world around him as a child, adolescent, and forty-year-old. The adult Alexei is only briefly glimpsed, but is present as a voice-over in some scenes including substantial dialogue. The structure of the film is discontinuous and nonchronological, without a conventional plot, and combines incidents, dreams and memories along with some news-reel footage. The film switches among three different time-frames: prewar (1935), war-time (1940s), and postwar (1960s or '70s).

Actors