Looking Into Tarkovsky's Mirror

Andrei's mother enjoying the view during World War Two.  The actual story starts with this gorgeous shot.

Andrei Tarkovsky begins Mirror with a miracle.  In black and white, a Russian speech therapist converses with a badly stuttering late-teen boy.  She is dressed in official healthcare attire, all in white.  She is very demanding and has the boy perform various non-verbal tasks related to balance and focus.  Suddenly, she commands him to say “loudly and clearly, 'I can speak'.”  The boy does so flawlessly.

This is not an rehearsed scene.  It is an unedited shot by Tarkovsky himself documenting this Russian technique to treat stuttering as it happened.  Then we get a hard cut to the the opening credits and rest of the film, which is completely disassociated from this introductory scene.  He did this before with the wonderful (and miraculous for the time) hot air balloon flight scene that begins Andrei Rublev.  Though a joy to watch, the air balloon has nothing to do with the story of the movie.  One could question why it is there at all.

These scientific miracles are odd choices for an opening scene because they are disjointed from the rest of their respective films. The miracle is only threaded into its fabric by the fact that a young boy named Ignat happens to turn on an old-fashioned television set.  Ignat is the son of Andrei, who is the main character of the film.  Ignat is a “present” character in Mirror (1975).  The film is about Andrei, who is in “present” and “past” and “dream” - the three levels where the film unfolds.  (Watch it here.)

A neighbor's shed burned in the rain about in that same time.

A black cat obliviously laps spilt milk while one of the boys pours sugar on the top of its head.  Part of sequence of shots as Tarkovsky's father reads one of his poems.

A dream sequence.  This shot begins as a repeat of an earlier shot (which was in color) of the boy (Andrei) waking up and starting to get out of bed.  In this second occurrence the shot is extended as he gets completely out of bed and walks toward a larger room.  He pauses and stares.  Suddenly, a wad of cloth is tossed from left to right across the top of the opening (the blur in the upper right corner of the frame).  Strange. 

Andrei's mother in a haunting dream sequence shot.  She has just washed her hair and is now dripping as the entire room drips water.  This is all shot in slow motion.

Yet another haunting shot.  A different dream (or maybe a memory) of Trakovsky's mother in a mirror as her hand wipes her reflection.

The actor who portrays Ignat also portrays his father at the same age as a child.  The film switches back and forth, the past reflecting the present (like a mirror) through the use of the same actors among other things.  Past people reflected in present people.  Only the change of setting and clothing styles allows you to tell the difference between Ignat and the young Andrei.  

It is the same with Andrei's ex-wife and his mother.  Both are portrayed by the same actress.  If the woman is talking with Andrei, who has a lot of lines off-camera (he is the unseen main character, after all), then she is his ex-wife, Ignat's mother.  If the woman is in the country smoking a cigarette and wearing a oversized sweater then she is his mother when he was Ignat's age.  Naturally, this is a very clever dynamic within this mysterious film.

Adult Andrei is never seen in the film (except we see his hand and arm at the very end).  He only interacts off-screen with Ignat, his ex-wife, and his mother.  You only hear his voice as they interact with him.  Paradoxically, the film revolves around a main character who is reduced to supporting status.  The film features Ignat, the ex-wife, the mother and the young Andrei.  They are its visual focus while adult Andrei gives us his perspective through the three levels of the film.  The dreams, for example, are not young Andrei's, they are adult Andrei's, they are the nostalgia of an older man.

In a marvelous moment in the film, Andrei has a telephone conversation with his (older) mother as the camera simply dolly's through the gorgeous bluish simplicity of Andrei's flat, lights out, lit by sunlight through various windows of partially closed curtains.  You never see either the character during the phone conversation.  It is a brilliant aesthetic moment in a film with many of them.

Tarkovsky casts his own mother and father into the film.  Tarkovsky uses his mother in two scenes, one very haunting.  His father was a famous Russian poet so he includes three readings, roughly splitting the film into thirds, of his father's poetry in his father's voice as some montage sequences play out visually.  The story itself is largely about a man who's ex-wife reminds him of his mother.

This is Tarkovsky's most intimate film.  It is inspired by his own memories as a child and yet it is also about the act of memory, the feeling of it, the strange beauty of it.  Despite troubling things, there are no nightmares in Mirror.  This is a deeply human affirmational film.  Yet, its narrative is illusive.  People could talk for hours about what the film is “about.”  What “happens.”  But, that is interesting but it is also not important.  What is important is to see the film from the perspective I have just articulated.  It is an aesthetic experience.

To talk about the film you have to talk about mental space.  About one-third of the film is happening in the “present.”  This is where most of the dialog occurs.  Whether something happens in the “past” or in a “dream” is sometimes difficult to distinguish.  The dream scenes are mostly from childhood and are usually shot in black and white.  The past is usually (not always) shot in color as are all the present scenes.  Since there are overlapping actors it is sometimes a challenge to understand which character you are seeing until the scene unfolds a little more.  Is it Andrei as a boy or is it Ignat?  Is it Andrei's ex-wife or his mother when he was a child?

This, of course, is intentional, like everything else I've mentioned.  Mirror is about the act of reflection itself.  Reflection as memory, as dream of the past, as identity. The way the present mirrors the past and the way dream mirrors the past.  Most importantly, it is about how the present mirrors itself, it is self-reflective.

Mirrors throughout the film are looked into.  These are not mirrors in passing or mirrors in the background as with most films.  They are mirrors looked in to by various actors.  This emphasizes the reflection aspect of them.  Characters are always looking at themselves in the mirrors.  Andrei's ex-wife looks at herself as she and Andrei have a post-divorce discussion about Ignat.  Andrei as a young teen gazes at himself in the cabin's mirror.  

Tarkovsky's mother looks at herself in a old, foggy mirror.  The old woman walks up to it but Tarkovsky shows us only the mirror's oval surface, the reflection of his elderly mother.  Then she brings her hand up to the mirror to wipe it a bit.  But the old mirror remains smokey.  This is the most haunting moment in the film for me.  A powerful shot.

I have no idea why Tarkovsky chose not to show Andrei in Mirror.  Perhaps he is the absence of reflection, or rather he reflects upon his past and his dreams and the identity of his ex-wife and mother, but it is the act of reflecting that is important, not his physical existence.  There is good cause for the character to feel this way.  He is dying.

A fantastic, beautiful soft blue shot of an empty chair at a open window.  This opens an extended dolly through Andrei's flat as he and his mother converse on the telephone. 

Andrei's ex-wife is played by the same actress who plays his mother in the first shot in this post.  Here she is looking at herself in a wall mirror as she talks to him.  He remains unseen, of course, all his lines are uttered off-camera.

Another beautiful shot of a cup of hot tea and a few cookies on a wooden table.  This is part of a strange scene where Ignat reads from a book to an older woman who is not actually in his flat.  Strange.

Tarkovsky's mother in her second shot.  She rang the door bell but says she has the wrong apartment when Ignat opens the door.  It is this strange occurrence that takes him away from the older woman in the other room.  When he returns all traces of her are gone...

...except for the heat vapor from the older woman's hot tea cup.  Nevermind that the cup and saucer above would never have left such a heavy vapor spot, that is not the point.  The point is this trace remains, but fleeting.  The older woman was here.  Tarkovsky stays on this shot until the vapor spot slowly dissipates like a memory.

Mirror is about a dying man reflecting upon his past and his dreams of the past.  He also reflects upon how his ex-wife reminds him of his own mother.  His son is a reflection of himself as a boy during World War Two.  The film is an essay upon the many different kinds of human reflection, mental and physical.  It is Tarkovsky's attempt to capture the aesthetic of reflection, the act of it, the feeling of it.

Largely he succeeds and the film won a Cannes File Festival prize in 1975.  Few people had ever seen a film like it up to that time.  Bergman achieved something like it with Persona (1966), but this went beyond that with the way Mirror become a reflection of itself.  It becomes the emotion of reflection unlike any film before it.  Tarkovsky truly made a unique cinematic experience.

Yet, the film can be disorienting and slow.  It is boring at times.  This, combined with the use of overlapping actors,  struck me as confusing the first time I watched it.  I had difficulty orienting myself to it. I could definitely relate to it on an emotional and intuitive level but the film seemed excessively random to me even after I figured out what was “happening.”

Even after, an hour in, I figured out what was happening (sort of), I did not know why a lot of things were happening.  I still take particular issue the extended scene of Andrei's ex-wife having a proofreading scare as a book was published.  Or all the historical footage liberally thrown into the middle of the film.  I get it that part of Mirror is the per-war and post-war periods mirroring each other, but Tarkovsky's choice of conveying the importance of the war to this mirroring seems anchorless to me.  These irritants are accentuated by the pretentious pacing of the film, not a good combination for me.  This is a weakness in the film.

But if the viewer goes too far down the perspective of the “whys”, they could miss the far more beautiful and meaningful visual articulations about the human act and impact of reflection, the mirroring together of our lives as we all live them out.  Mirror does not really have the hardness of history.  It is a soft film about human connections moment to moment and through time.  I think the elements of history within the film are a poor choice of imagery to create the aesthetic experience.

Nevertheless, Mirror is an exquisite film, a highly successful exploration of a new style of film-making.  Chances are you've never seen anything quite like it.  The interiors are mostly abandoned rooms lit with natural window light.  Light illuminates the interior experience not from within but from outside, as if upon reflection. 

Some of the historical footage in the middle of the film.  This is a wild looking sight.  Early footage of a Soviet high altitude air balloon experiment.

Soviet troops crossing a shallow river during World War Two.

A bird lands on Andrei's head.  Strange.

A stunningly composed shot of young Andrei at the cabin through a doorway looking outside with the sun low in the sky. 

There is a mind-blowing scene featuring the wind near the beginning of the film.  The genuine opening shot (coming after the opening credits) is a gorgeous one of Andrei's young mother sitting on a wooden fence, gazing out in a large open field surrounded by trees.  She is smoking a cigarette and enjoying the view.  A traveling doctor happens upon her and asks for directions.  She gives him a cigarette.  He sits on the fence with her and it collapses.  He explodes in laughter and then strangely pontificates to her how plants can comprehend things.  People, on the other hand, are busy rushing about and understand nothing.  

He walks back toward the path through the field when, seemingly upon cue, a strong gust of wind sweeps across the field blowing everything in a wave that the camera captures coming toward the man, then engulfing him and the tall grass around him, passing him and through the camera.  This incredible shot is repeated a few moments later.  The slow scene has not had any wind at all up to that moment.  It is as if Tarkovsky could control the air.  I was astonished the first time I saw it.  Such a simple thing, shown so compellingly.

The repeated shot of the wind is from a slightly different take.  This happens a several times throughout Mirror.  Tarkovsky repeats almost the same shot but with subtle differences.  He does it with a shot of the wind blowing objects off a table in slow motion in a dream sequence.  Though repeated close to each other, they are each slightly different, not the exact same take.  This repeating pattern of similarities is one of its many ingenious features.

Another dream sequence begins with a gust of wind through a field.  The camera pans in slow motion to a table with various objects being blown off it.

A boy (Andrei's brother?) runs into the cabin in a gust of wind.

Andrei's mother and a dog in the dream sequence.

Young Andrei gazes at himself in the cabin mirror.

A surreal shot of Andrei's ex-wife levitating.  A dove flies as Andrei remembers (dreams?) telling her he loved her.

Andrei with his mother in a wonderfully extended dolly shot.

And we repeat the previous dream image that started the long sequence.  This is slightly different from the first shot.

Mirror is simple and compelling.  Not much happens but it is about everything; memories, dreams, being in the present moment.  Our humanity is an entanglement across time, the past, the present, our intimate aspirations, our ultimate acceptance.  In the end, we finally see Andrei's arm and hand as he lies in a hospital bed.  As he often does, Trakovsky turns to metaphor.  

There is a small bird lying beside Andrei's right arm in his hospital bed.  He takes it in his hand and tosses it gently upwards, letting it fly away.  Does this signify Andrei's death?  Perhaps it is only his letting go of the entanglement of his life.  Its meaning is ambiguous.  It is also unimportant because seeing it happen affects us more than any possible rational explanation.

Despite my small misgivings,  Mirror reminds me of how I initially reacted to The Tree of Life a decade ago.  I was profoundly moved and wanted more of that film.  I thought it was brilliant.  Mirror is the blueprint for Malick's great film.  I will definitely watch Mirror again some day soon.  Trakovsky died in 1986 but I am only now discovering his brilliance.  Mirror may be "great" but it is not his best film, I prefer Stalker.  But it is a film everyone should watch. I'd give it a 9.  

You have to get comfortable with the soft slowness of the film, not unlike my struggle to settle-in with Proust when beginning his great novel with page after page of a man trying to fall asleep.  If you get past that, there is a richness beyond your imagination in Proust.  Mirror is not that way in degree but it is that way in kind.  It is an aesthetic experience about what it is to have a lifetime on this earth, to dream, to remember, to explore the interior of your emotions.  And how everything really is all connected, somehow.  We have but to place ourselves in a calm reverie.  Become the reflection that each human life truly is.  Feel time and let go.

Interiors are lite by the exterior light throughout the film.  This makes for some wonderful color and light cinematography.

The only time we see the older Andrei in the film is when he takes and releases a small bird in his hospital bed near the end.

The warm nostalgic final shot.  A dolly sideways through the silhouetted trees as Andrei's mother and the two boys venture out into the open field near sunset.