Tarkovsky Season: Mirror (Dir Andrei Tarkovsky, 1h47m, 1975)

Even for a director whose work often borders on the abstract, the painterly and the slow-moving, Mirror feels like an outlier, a dreamlike drifting visual tone-poem through the life of a man from his childhood in World War II, from his distant mother to the devastating burning of their house and her experiences in a publisher in Moscow, to the man's experiences as a child, to his adulthood and strained relationship with his mother, before his death in his early 40s. It is also, unquestionably, both Tarkovsky's most auto-biographical, based heavily on his own childhood and life post-war, as well as that of his mother, and with appearances by both his father, whose poetry runs through the film, and his mother in a cameo.

It is also, undeniably, his most experimental film, a film more driven by tone than by narrative, that moves between childhood, youth and adulthood experiences, between the narrative and the thematic, between prose and poetry in perhaps the closest Tarkovsky ever gets to pure art cinema, and where the influence of Bergmann and the most experimental fringes of Western European Cinema, as more notable in Tarkovsky's work, as much as the influence of post-modernist literature and poetry. Whilst it may not cast quite the spell that his longer denser films have, it is nonetheless a dreamlike exploration of childhood as only Tarkovsky can make.

But behind this slightest of his films, behind this film that utterly shatters the thinning barrier between the dreaming and waking worlds already thinning in Solaris, Mirror is perhaps his most controversial film, although the film has long been perhaps his most beloved in his native Russia. I've already discussed part of the controversy in the years prior to Solaris, but, with the script finally approved by the new head of the film committee, so Tarkovsky set about making the film. Where it clearly differs from the rest of his filmography is in the film's constant evolution, rewrites continuing till mid 1974, and going through several titles. Filming came to a head with Yusov, Tarkovsky's cinematographer, quitting due to the director wanting to include an interview shot with his mother with hidden cameras, and the problems would only continue once the film was completed.

Mirror, certainly, is not an easy film to talk about-whilst it clearly has a narrative-one cannot describe the film as pure surrealism, as, whilst the film is punctuated with several moments of dreamlike imagery, from the burning of the barn to the collapse of a ceiling as Maria (Margarita Terekhova) washes in the collapse of a ceiling, it clearly has a story. Where it clearly differs from the rest of Tarkovsky's films is in its stream of conscience style, whilst, whilst long-adopted in literature since the late 19th century and mastered by Proust, Joyce and Elliot in the 1920s, its appearance in cinema comes far later. Surrealist films touch upon it, most notably Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943), which escalates its surrealist imagery over a circular pattern of objects, and Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963), that spirals through motorcycle culture, the occult, and Nazism in a paean to motorbike culture, but it is arguably not until Persona (1966), by Tarkovsky's great hero, Bergmann, that stream of consciousness reaches artistic cinema.

Indeed, Persona explores, on grand scale, the concept of female sexuality, of art and the theatre, and even vampirism, on much the same cinematic terms as Mirror explores childhood, the maternal, during and after wartime. Equally, the unmistakable fingerprints of Fellini's 8 1/2(1963) can be seen in the meta-textual approach to creativity, and the escape into dreams. Whilst this may have been more approachable for western audiences, to Russian ones, this sudden arrival of this strange sensibility in Russian cinema, which, even at its most experimental, follows narrative, must have been a stunning culture shock.

Certainly, to the film committee, the Goskino, the film was utterly incomprehensible, infuriating Tarkovsky, and making him consider, for the first time, making a film outside of the Soviet Union, though the film was approved without cuts in the autumn of 1974. Compared to the mainstream arrival of Solaris as a veritable blockbuster in the Soviet Union, Mirror was barely released, 73 copies released across the USSR, released only to workers club and third class cinemas, with audiences walking out, whilst its Western release, with the USSR banning the film from Cannes, equally muted.

All of this takes nothing away from the film; Mirror is unquestionably beautiful, a film that moves effortlessly between time periods and film stocks, multiple roles played by the same actors blurring memory and present, the stunning visual imagery of the burning barn, that feels like prelude to the great inferno at the end of Tarkovsky's final film, The Sacrifice, shot in almost dreamlike fashion, not to mention the surreal sequences both involving Terekhova, in her dual role as the protagonist's mother and wife, on the flood that, in coarse black and white, shows chunks of ceiling falling in, and her hovering mysteriously above their bed. These are images that his films will return to later in the equally oblique and impenetrable Nostalghia

Yet, it is also, unquestionably the most autobiographical film Tarkovsky ever made, from its focus on Tarkovsky's childhood given cinematic gravitas, the memories of a mother from a child's perspective, to a scene of the protagonist, Alexei, only seen from the perspective of the camera, and voiced by Innokenty Smoktunovsky, that has only taken on greater gravitas as one of the final sequences bleakly preludes Tarkovsky's own death in 1986, of Alexei dying from a mysterious malady. We feel the presence of both of Tarkovsky's parents, not only in roles-his mother appears as an older Maria, whilst his father appears as a narrator, and poet-but throughout the film's structure, his poetry not only naming the film, but permeating the entire sense of the film, the link between these vignettes into the life of Tarkovsky and Alexei that most personal of figures to Tarkovsky.

Around the film's central figure of Maria (or possibly Natalia; the film masterfully blurs the two, the maternal and the wife played by the same actress)-indeed, Alexei feels like an observer in his own history, particularly in one dreamlike drift through what we must assume is Alexei's apartment, complete with Andrei Rublev poster-we have a series of moments in which the creative is explored, the printing press sequences, in which Maria panics about mistakes matched a few minute later by an argument between Natalia and Alexei. Indeed, there is something at once surreal and disquieting, the idea of memories blurring with present people, inherent in these repeated roles. A nanny, played by Tamara Ogorodnikova, is previously seen as a mysterious woman who appears to the young Alexei, commands him to read Pushkin, and when queried on who she is, promptly disappears, whilst Anatoly Solonitsyn appears not only as a doctor, who appears early in the film to Maria, but also as a passing pedestrian.

What is Mirror about? One could easily describe it as a film, albeit it in more oblique terms than Ivan's Childhood, about war, the period only brought to life with archive footage that intersperses throughout the film, which gives it an even more experimental quality, whilst much of Alexei's childhood is punctuated with target practice, with much of the middle of the film involved with a sequence at the range in which the fractured childhood of those having at once to evacuate and take up arms is explored in broad, but nonetheless affecting terms. Elsewhere, this evacuation, this sense of being away from the cities, in the denseness of nature, in this curiously alien world is best seen in the opening of the film, with Solonitsyn's doctor speaking to Maria, whilst the dreamlike quality of the film is otherwise seen in the strange, unnatural, and disturbing burning of the barn.

Elsewhere, one could describe it as a film about adulthood, about family; this relationship between three generations of the same family before, during and after the war, is seen through dreams, through enigmatic conversations, this rhythmic repetition of the same struggles with the same people as different people, the same faces repeating, events flowing back and forth across time and space across the film, grouped conceptually rather than in a logical sense of order, in which the dreamlike becomes real, and the real dreamlike. Music, once again Bach, fills the soundtrack, but here it adds to the film, washing across it, rather than demarking the earthy from the celestial, an odyssey inward, not outward. It is, in short, an exploration of the very nature of family, of memory, of the role of time, a blurred time at that, in our lives.

But one could argue, at its broadest, it is a film about Russia. For all that the Communist Party and its apparatus threw at this film, for the scarce handful of screenings in tiny cinemas and the hustle and bustle of workers clubs, for how obtuse and strange and utterly un-Soviet this film is, more akin to the experimental fringes of 1960s European cinema and beyond, this film is beloved in Tarkovsky's native Russia, even more than the critically lauded Solaris and Stalker. It is a film, for all its dreamlike story-telling, for all its cinematic obliqueness, about growing up in the shadow of war, of absent fathers and working mothers, about lives in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, damaged or made fragile, told in liminal, strange brushstrokes.

It is Tarkovsky, for all his cinematic sensibility, for all his long takes, for all his slow-drifting films, where tone and dream are king, baring his soul. It is a cinematic dream, in which, for the only time in his career, Andrei takes us inside his dreams, of childhood and the creative process, the first and only time the mask of artist slips to reveal the son of Russia, in his most personal and evocative film.

Rating: Highly Recommended