El espejo

Film is a unique medium in that it communicates to us through our two most important senses, sight and sound. By these mechanisms, we experience much of the world around us, and by their reflections, we hold our memories of those experiences. Film is then in a special position to present the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of a character or characters by a creator talented enough to convey them. This can, of course, come in the form of a thrilling action movie with scenes and dialog that stick with us long after we see them, and in its purest form, it can come as an expression of the inner workings of someone's mind.

The Mirror, the fourth feature film of the Russian master auteur Andrei Tarkovsky, is a semi-autobiographical film presented as the memories and dreams of Aleksei, a dying poet. In no particular order, we see scenes from his early and late childhood, as well as more recent events in his adulthood. The unconventional, stream-of- consciousness structure of the film presents these scenes as one might recall them in real life, connected by moods and moments that prompt recollection of others.

Many of his earliest memories have little bits of dialog, giving a general sense of what is happening since the specifics have been long forgotten; memories of his adult life with his son and ex-wife contain more complete conversations.

At several parts in the film, Aleksei's memories are also paralleled by reflections on Russian history and society, as we are shown footage of soldiers in World War II and hear an excerpt from a letter written by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, among other moments. Audio is also played over some scenes of Tarkovsky's own father, Arseny Tarkovsky, reading his poems. The camera moves deliberately through all these scenes as an observer; the long takes, as well as the movie's manipulation of time and sound, are key to accomplishing the intended effect.

Tarkovsky himself maintained that he structured The Mirror as one would a piece of music, focusing on the material's form rather than on its logic. More Ligeti than Mozart, though, this film is challenging and eschews anything resembling a standard structure or plot.

I often comment on the score of a film – especially a great one – and how it contributes to the overall viewing experience. The problem with The Mirror in this regard is that the formal score is so sparse that it hardly stands out as a strong or weak aspect of the film. Passages from J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion play through a few key scenes, and electronic ambient music plays over others. Instead, the deliberate soundscape of the film itself becomes a sort of score in its own right, such as a strong wind blowing over a field or the oppressive noise of a printing press.

Visually, the film is rife with haunting, surreal imagery. In a black-and-white dream, Aleksei's mother stands in a large, empty room, shaking water off of her arms and the hair covering her face, before the room dissolves around her in a dampened cascade of rain and wet plaster. In another, the same woman levitates several feet above a bed until a white bird flies over her. In one of the film's more well- known scenes, the family's barn burns as Aleksei's family and neighbors watch, their small figures helplessly standing at a distance as the structure simply burns.

Watching The Mirror is artistic bliss. The depth of many of Tarkovsky's shots is enrapturing; the texture of the world around the characters is palpable. You feel the cold, hard wood of the floors and walls of Aleksei's childhood home and the cold of a Russian winter. The film reaches a certain part of your mind and supplants a man's consciousness into your own, leaving you in something of a trance.

I can never fully explain this movie, and in that knowledge comes some of my enjoyment and appreciation of it. Each idea and realization I make about particular aspects of the film is nothing compared to the work as a whole. The Mirror is ultimately a film that is meant to be experienced rather than to be fully understood or explained. The human mind is itself nebulous, and how appropriate it is that a film meant to visually portray one should be as such.

I just finished watching it. It's been several years since I saw it last time. I worried that I may not like it as much as I used to...

I should not have worried - I love it even more now if that is at all possible. I've seen it at different times of my life - first, as a college student many years ago in Moscow; I keep returning to it all my life.

When Tarkovsky's Zerkalo (The Mirror) was first released, it divided the audience completely. I remember how my friends were passionately discussing it. One girl was complaining that she did not understand anything; the movie was confusing for her, dark, disturbing, the children characters - sad, pale, poorly dressed. I remember her asking, "Why did they show a boy in the opening scene that had an awful stutter, and they never showed that boy again? What did it mean when the dying man in bed was setting a bird free? How did he get the bird on the first place?" Another friend of mine, a guy, tried to explain the things to her. He suggested that she thought about the times Zerkalo was showing, he tried to explain to her Tarkovsky's symbolism where the bird could be representing life and soul of the main character and the boy with the stutter could mean that it was most difficult for people to communicate and understand each other.

I only listened to their argument and did not participate because I had not seen the film yet. When it finally happened, Andrei Arsenievich Tarkovsky was presented at the screening and he talked to the audience before the show. I remember him repeating over and over that there were no tricks, no puzzles, and no tongue-in-cheeks in the film; that every symbol, image, dialog, and sound was there because they belonged there. He asked us if we had questions. Someone from the audience suggested that we saw the film first, and then, asked questions. Tarkovsky replied that from his experience, not many viewers would sit through the film and who ever would, usually leave in silence, not asking anything. And then he told us a story. After Zerkalo was completed, it was first shown to the group of the famous critics. After watching it, critics started to argue about it, trying to find the hidden meaning and make sense of what they just saw. It went on and on until the cleaning lady who came to the screening room and had been waiting for the end of discussion to do her job, asked them for how long they would stay? Someone said to her that they were discussing a very complicated film, and they needed time to understand it. Cleaning lady asked, "What is that you do not understand in this film? I saw it also, and I understood everything." Critics were silenced for a moment, and then, one of them asked the woman to share her thoughts on Zerkalo. She answered, "It is about a man who had caused too much pain to the ones whom he loved and who loved him. Now he is dying and he is trying to ask them for forgiveness but he does not know how." After the pause Tarkovsky said that he had nothing else to add about his film to what the cleaning lady had to say.

I never understood complains that Zerkalo is a very confusing, difficult, and dark film. No, it is clear and deep as a mirror. Tarkovsky said so himself, and I believe him. Every time you look at the mirror, it will show you new depth and reflections. Past, presence, future, memory, love, guilt, forgiveness, beauty, sadness, nostalgia, and sacrifice - the mirror reflects it all -just watch closely. This is the film about his family, his country, and his times. Childhood memory and the memory of the past generations glued together. The film is a look back in time and sad realization that children reflect destiny of fathers, as in a mirror. Destinies reflected one in another.

Zerkalo is not just good cinema, it is pure cinema. Like architecture is music in stone, Zerkalo is poetry on screen.

I found this film quite difficult to get into since I'm more used to conventional plot driven narratives, a concept that was anathema to Tarkovsky. Certainly the Soviet authorities did their best to limit the venues where this film could be seen, condemning it's personal nature as decadent, self-indulgent and against the formal traditions of Soviet cinema, a cinema which Tarkovsky himself did not have a good word for. Russians who did see it sent many letters to the director saying how much it affected them and mirrored their own childhood experiences. Tarkovsky himself had difficulty in 'finding' his film during production, and originally worried that it would not work. Many critics questioned whether the images were symbolic in some way, but Tarkovsky dismissed symbolism as decadent. He sited Japanese writers of the middle ages rejecting such things. He had no time for surrealism either, pointing out that Dali himself had rejected the concept as facile. And yet the pull of dreams are un-mistakable in this work. Tarkovsky stated that the artist himself does not necessarily know the meaning of an image but is compelled to express his vision.

Despite some of the problems in viewing this film there are plenty of moving and mysterious moments, not least the wistful and melancholic look on the face of the mother as she lays in the grass, contemplating her children's future.

If you have experienced Mirror, and by experience I mean much more than just having watched it (the experience may take multiple viewings to achieve) then you will realise the futility of describing or reviewing this film much in the same way as the inadequacy of a second hand account of a mystical experience.

Tarkovsky was a mystic: although his religious beliefs are well known there is much less acknowledgement of his conception of God. For Tarkovsky God was everywhere and in everything, his (its) presence is felt in the rustling of leaves in the breeze, the burning of wood, the rain falling (and falling, and falling) on damp fields. Humans exist as a sea of melancholy within the infinite beauty and wonder of nature.

Mirror is the closest art has ever been to portraying the mystical experience of one spiritually sensitive individual. The second hand experience can never be as profound as that from your own being. But an odd and sad experience comes from watching Mirror, the belief that your own interpretation of the world will never be so deeply poetic or deep as Tarkovsky's, and the world you see on the cinema screen seems more vivid and alive than real life ever will.

To many Mirror is possibly Tarkovsky's most inhibitive and uninviting work, be as it may not a story in the traditional sense but rather an assemblage of images, scenes, and thoughts which at first sight seem to have very little in common and just drift back and forth with no obvious literal explanation. It's only after repeated viewings and the realisation of what it actually was that Tarkovsky tried to achieve that it dawns that this is more than just a bunch of random scenes, but a timeless and highly important masterpiece which defies explanation. But I'll try anyway.

I personally hold Tarkovsky in very high esteem. There are many directors I would regard as good or very good (for instance Kubrick, Kieslowski, Ozu, or Miyazaki), but there are only two directors I regard as absolute geniuses: Akira Kurosawa and, yep, Andrei Tarkovsky. Interestingly this is for two solely different reasons - whereas I admire Kurosawa for the manner in which he managed to perfect the art of cinematic storytelling, Tarkovsky deserves praise for wanting to shake cinema out of its complacent acceptance that films should simply tell a story and little else. Mirror is further proof that Tarkovsky's body of work (which is limited in quantity - a mere eight films - but rich in scope) establishes that the Hollywood mode of narrative is not the only way in which film can create an emotional response from an audience. Of course Tarkovsky is not alone in having done so (Marker and Greenaway immediately spring to mind), but what distinguishes him from other "art house" directors is that he has managed to take this style of film making and drive it to a stage that can be described as almost perfect.

I personally interpret Mirror as a man's life flashing before his eyes before he dies; his relationship with his wife and mother (both played by the same person, in an ingenious move on Tarkovsky's behalf), his children, his friends, the history of his home land, his own childhood. However, Mirror is deliberately structured in such a way that it can, and will, be interpreted differently by different people depending on how they inscribe their own personal thoughts and feelings into the narrative. This is where Tarkovsky's genius comes to fore - to create a film which does not dictate to an audience how to feel by manipulating them via music or mise-en-scene, but to make it the other way around. In the case of Mirror, we, the audience, dictate the emotional response created by the images on screen and, that, ultimately is that makes it such a wonderful work and a true rarity. This is possibly another way the title of the film can be interpreted, in that it illustrates a wholly reflective style of cinema.

Those not accustomed to a slightly more disjunctive cinematic style are likely to dismiss Mirror as boring or dull because it may not necessarily correspond to their expectations of film. However, it is still something I would regard as required viewing for everyone since it shows that cinema can be beautiful without necessarily following the rules Hollywood has imposed on the rest of the film making community, and that ultimately rules are there to be broken. A masterpiece, no less.