The Mirror (1975)

All of Tarkovsky's film have a personal feel. The Mirror is personal in a different way perhaps, in its being partly autobiographical. But this autobiographical dimension of the film is not, at least not for me, interesting in the sense of factual correspondence. It is Tarkovsky's striking attention to details that we can understanding from the point of view of personal history. In the film, archive footage create a historical backdrop but it is never clear in what way we are to see the connection between the more personal story and the events of the news clips (a war-like situation at the USSR/Chinese border). But to continue along the same line of reasoning the relation between childhood memories and the contemporary story (a dying man) is never spelled out. Memory is not separate from imagination: as much as memory is thinking back and recalling an image of something it is also to suddenly come to think of something and to imagine what something was like. The flashbacks we see are not restricted to the man's memories. The line between personal and collective memory is blurry here. Everything exists on the same level here, the childhood images, the newsreel images and the story about a father who quarrels with his wife. In the film, the wife looks exactly like the mother which we see in the childhood memories. Memories of his own childhood is sometimes depicted as stories about his own son. It is a film defined by association, feeling rather than reasoning. This does not upset me in the least.

The Mirror is a strikingly beautiful film that contain many typically 'Tarkovskian' scenes (rain, fire, earth). Some scenes makes me think that Lynch must have admired this film. In one especially unnerving scene (very beautifully filmed), the boy is home alone in the big apartment. Suddenly, he sees two elderly women sitting at a table. The woman starts talking to him, instructing him to read from a book. He reads a letter from Puschkin. There is a knock on the door and the boy walks off to open. When he returns the women are gone, only a condensation mark from a cup of tea is a trace of their presence. It is all very eerie, otherworldly even, in the same way Lynch conjures up a glimpse of fear/the uncanny  in the midst of everyday life (remember Dr Freud on the Unheimlich!). For a Tarkovsky film, there are un unusual abundance of 'realistic' scenes in the film - but as I said the 'realism' quickly mutes into something else. This is one reason why The Mirror is a magical experience, a film to watch over and over again - lots of details are of the kind that one easily misses them the first time around. Another thing that hast to be mentioned here is the sound. Tarkovsky uses a big scale of sounds: the wind, water - but also noise and very striking music.