Mirror (Zerkalo)
Twenty-seven Propositions about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror
1.
Mirror is a 1975 Russian film, produced under the auspices of Mosfilm, and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The film is an autobiographical account of the filmmaker’s childhood and, further, documents two generations of marital strife and its effect on the children of those unhappy marriages.
2.
Mirror was regarded with great suspicion by Soviet authorities. It was criticized as too self-absorbed, too bourgeois and “elitist” and too lacking in social import. However, because the film is very difficult and its meanings highly uncertain, the picture was not suppressed by Russian authorities, although it was buried in low-rent cinemas. Mirror (Zerkalo) was released in the West (at least Europe) to some moderate acclaim. Mosfilm printed only 72 copies of the movie, almost all of which were lost before the picture attained its present fame. Tarkovsky and his co-writer Alexander Misharin were each paid 625 rubles for their work on the film or, about $21,150 (1975 exchange rate: 1 ruble = $34.05 dollars). In Moscow, the film was shown in only three inauspicious suburban theaters far from the center of the city.
3.
All of Tarkovsky’s other films made in the Soviet Union were suppressed. The directors first picture Ivan’s Childhood was made on a small budget in 1962 – due to budgetary limitations Tarkovsky used much newsreel footage in the movie about the Great Patriotic War with the Germans. (This is a practice that we can see that he deploys in Mirror.) Tarkovsky was 30 and had just graduated from Soviet film school. Ivan’s Childhood was intended as an exercise in patriotism, featuring the heroics of a young boy who assists the Russian army in the war against the Germans (and, ultimately, falls prey to the enemy). Half of the budget was spent when Tarkovsky was recruited to save the floundering production. He stipulated that he would make the movie but only if he could re-shoot everything and cast all actors with performers of his own selection. The resulting film was released to great acclaim, but was, later, said to be “pacifist.” Soviet Russia endorsed “just wars” and, therefore, censors were concerned with Tarkovsky’s portrayal of the Great War to save the Motherland as horrific and destructive – the film’s subject, after all, is the ruination of a little boy. Accordingly, after being briefly shown, the movie was shelved. (It’s interesting that when I screened the film to an audience that included a Russian who had been raised in the latter part of the Soviet era, that man, a Hormel research technician, had nothing but contempt for the picture. He said it was “typical” of propaganda films that everyone was required to watch in High School, lauding the courage of Russian fighters in World War Two. The scientist thought the film pretentious and absurd.)
In 1966, Tarkovsky finished the big-budget epic Andrei Rublev, undoubtedly one of the greatest films ever made. The picture ostensibly concerns the life of a 13th century icon painter during the Tatar invasions, but it is also a paean to natural forces and a demonstration that human cruelty and folly is insufficient to destroy true artists who prevail against all odds. The movie is full of baffling interludes (it features a spectacular balloon ride and naked witches as well as fearsomely violent sequences) and its meaning remains disputed. Soviet censors had a bad feeling about the movie – it was crypto-Orthodox and includes an astonishing crucifixion sequence staged in a vast snowy landscape, an image like something out of Brueghel. When in doubt, suppress: the movie was censored and not shown for more than 5 ½ years.
Tarkovsky’s third film is Solaris (1972), again ostensibly insulated from criticism because an adaptation (in the freest possible way) of Stanilaus Lem’s science fiction novel of that name. In fact, the movie is a spooky ghost story and a warning about what happens when human beings separate themselves from nature. Tarkovsky said the film expressed “shame at what we have done to nature – it is shame that will save humanity.” The movie was an international success but deemed too problematic for local consumption – in Russia, the movie was suppressed.
Mirror (1975) is thought to be “key” to the imagery in Tarkovsky’s other, longer films. It is generally regarded as densely autobiographical. Although not suppressed, the film was shown only in third-tier cinemas and worker’s clubs (“Kino clubs”) and Tarkovsky was denied any profits from the film; rather, he was paid a small salary for his work on the picture.
Stalker (1979) is another science fiction film, although this generic description doesn’t come close to explaining the wonderful and utterly bizarre aspects of this movie. Stalker concerns a restricted zone where aliens have warped time and space. The restricted zone contains an inner chamber, hidden in a lush landscape replete with overgrown ruins. The chamber is simultaneously bliss-bestowing and horrifying – in the chamber, human wishes are all fulfilled. Stalker is Tarkovsky’s most famous movie and an astounding accomplishment. It seems to be about the Gulag and its inhabitants and represents a profound meditation on human freedom. After the catastrophe at Chernobyl, the literal-minded took the picture as an eerie premonition of the nuclear melt-down in the Ukraine and the creation of “restricted area” around the damaged reactor. Of course, Soviet authorities didn’t know what to make of the movie and it was suppressed. Tarkovsky vehemently denied that there was any political content to the film.
Tarkovsky set about making a historical film about Peter the Great, The First Day. The movie had a big budget and prestige stars. But Tarkovsky was involved in a “bait and switch” scheme – the script that he submitted for approval to GosFilm, the producers, omitted several scenes highly critical of the Soviet Union’s official policies as to religion, that is, State-sponsored atheism. When it came time to shoot these scenes, about half-way through the production, the authorities stepped in and shut-down the production, presumably at great cost to GosFilm. In the course of making Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky had become a Believer and was not willing to compromise his religious principles.
Tarkovsky defected to the West when visiting Italy in 1979. (He was in Rome visiting his good friend, the screenwriter Tonino Guerro.) In Italy and exile, Tarkovsky made Nostalgia, released in 1985. The movie features Ingmar Bergman’s star, Erland Josephson, and concerns a lonely Russian exile who yearns for his homeland. The movie is famous for its majestic last shot, a Russian dacha in an idyllic meadow and forest, that is revealed by a crane shot to be enclosed within a huge ruined cathedral. The movie was awarded the Grand Prize at Cannes notwithstanding very aggressive lobbying against the picture by Mosfilm and the Soviet authorities.
Although he was only 54, Tarkovsky, a chain smoker, was dying of cancer. Despite his illness, Tarkovsky went to Ingmar Bergman’s island retreat at Faro and lobbied the director for financing through the Swedish, Italian, and German film industries to produce his last film, The Sacrifice, released in 1986. The Sacrifice concerns a house-party in on Gotland, an island near Faro where Bergman lived at the time. During this birthday party, the hero (again Erland Josephson) admits that he has no relationship with God. The world, then, seems to end. During the nightmarish twilight after the apocalypse, the protagonist prays that he will sacrifice the thing that he loves most (his mentally retarded son, “little man” if the world is restored. The apocalypse fades away and the protagonist, reneging on his deal, burns down his cottage on the edge of the sea in a spectacular sequence shot that lasts for eleven minutes and that the film critic Andrew Sarris declared the “greatest sequence in the history of cinema”. Sven Nykwist, Bergman’s famous cameraman had to shoot this lengthy bravura sequence twice – the first time the camera jammed and the shot was ruined although the cottage and, all of its set decorations, obediently burned to the ground. The cottage had to be rebuilt and the shot was repeated, this time with two cameras filming on parallel tracks. In the end, Little Man goes to the tree that he planted with father and asks Maria, said to be a “witch in the best possible sense,” speaking to her his only words in the film): “In the beginning was the Word. Why is that Papa?” The tree featured in the film’s last frames is a typical Tarkovsky tree – that is, fragile and spindly, but, perhaps, ultimately resilient. Several images of trees of this sort are visible in Mirror. (Tarkovsky derived the image of the slender, half-lifeless tree with tentative buds, from Leonardo da Vinci’s “Adoration of the Magi”, shown in Mirror as well.)
Tarkovsky died of lung cancer in Paris in 1986. His son, also named Andrei, was allowed to leave the Soviet Union to attend at his bedside. Conspiracy theorists believe that the KGB poisoned Tarkovsky with nuclear isotopes – this is based on the fact that Tarkovsky’s wife, Larisa and his favored actor during the Soviet era, Anatoly Solonitsyn all perished from exact same form of cancer. KGB records disclosed after the fall of the Soviet Union, in fact, show that an order was issued to assassinate Tarkovsky and his treating doctors in Paris were convinced that the cancer was not the result of natural causes – that is, Tarkovsky and his wife’s chain-smoking. The death of Solonitsyn, who played Andrei Rublev and the cameo role of the doctor in Mirror suggest an alternative possibility: Tarkovsky, Larisa and the actor were exposed to some kind of toxic chemicals during the production of Stalker, some of which was shot in very palpably dusty fertilizer factory.
Tarkovsky’s funeral was at the Alexander Nevsky Russian Orthodox Church in Paris and he is buried in the Russian cemetery at St. Genevieve de Boise, also in Paris.
4.
When Mirror was released, audiences were baffled. Tarkovsky recalled many audience members walking out during the rather unimpressive Moscow premiere. Soviet ideology views cinema as a “mass art”. Mirror, of course, with its discontinuous and daunting narrative was anything but audience friendly. Nonetheless, as time passed, most viewers recognized that there was something profound and exciting about the film. Tarkovsky recounts a showing in which film students commandeered the room where the movie had been screened for several hours to debate the meaning of the picture. Finally, Tarkovsky says, an elderly charwoman appeared, annoyed that she hadn’t yet been able to clean the auditorium. Gruffly, she ordered the students to leave. “I don’t know what the fuss is all about,” the cleaning woman said. “The movie is simple as can be. A man is dying and he seeks to atone for all of the harm that he has done in his life.” Tarkovsky observes that this summary is, indeed, accurate to the picture. But, then, he confounds the anecdote by adding mysteriously that: “Of course, when she described the movie, she had not yet seen it.”
5.
Of all Tarkovsky’s films, Mirror is now the most beloved in Russia. The picture is presently very popular in the country and has repeatedly been voted the best Russian film of all time. Tarkovsky recounted that he received hundreds of letters telling him that the movie spoke directly to the experiences of its viewers, including people of very humble and uneducated background. It has been described as the film that most accurately depicts Russian life in the period of the Great War and after.
6.
The film poses a host of interpretative difficulties and has resisted explication in many respects. One problem is that the movie’s frame, the death of Alexei (also called Alyosha) in the film, isn’t revealed and, then, only obliquely until late in the picture. We don’t know that the movie is death-bed memories, including dreams and hallucinations until the shot near Mirror’s end in which briefly see Alexei in bed. He holds a small bird in his hand. In a gesture that seems to indirectly signify his death, the sick man releases the bird into the air. It’s only at that point, and only if the viewer grasps the meaning of the scene, that we learn that the narration in the film is that of the dying man.
Other difficulties arise from the Russian practice of providing the same character with several different, although related, names. For instance, Alexei’s mother, probably the major character in the film, is variously called “Maria” (“Marya”), “Maryusa”, and “Masha”. Sometimes, it’s not clear except from script references who the characters are supposed to be: for instance, we’re told that Alexei’s mother dates events from 1935 when “Liza died” – Liza, according to the script, is the woman who savagely denounces Maria as spoiled and unable to maintain a relationship with a man in the printing shop sequence. We don’t know what happened to “Liza” or why she died, apparently shortly after her scolding Maria. (There is some suggestion that Maria is a kind of witch – Tarkovsky’s films have several female characters in them who are witches, including the Icelandic sorceress in The Sacrifice who is consulted about saving the world after the apocalypse. In any event, perhaps, Maria has put some kind of curse on Liza, possibly when we see her luxuriating in the shower.)
7.
Here are some of the questions that film raises: (1) Is the doctor who flirts with Maria in the opening scene, the wife of the woman that Maria and Alyosha (young Alexei) visit in a late scene in the movie? (2) What is the purpose for Maria and Alyosha’s visit to the doctor’s wife? Where is Alyosha’s little sister? (3) How does the documentary footage of the hypnotherapist curing the young man’s stutter relate to the rest of the film? (4) Who is the severe dark-haired woman who makes young Alyosha read the text of the 1836 letter from Pushkin to Chaadayev on the destiny of Russia? (5) Where does she go? Is she a witch? (6) Who is the lady who comes to the wrong address during the scene with the older dark-haired woman who demands that Alyosha read the Pushkin letter? (7) What is going on in the scenes with Spanish refugees, apparently exiled from Franco’s Fascist Spain? How are they related to the other characters? (8) What was the obscene typo that Maria thought she had let be printed in the print-shop scene? (9) What is the source of the book about Leonardo da Vinci that we see perused in the film? This book later makes an important appearance in The Sacrifice. (10) Who is having visions of nuclear apocalypse when Alyosha is filmed on the wintry sledding hill? (11) Why does the bird land on his head in this scene? Is the same bird that we see the dying man holding later in the film? (12) What sins has Alexei committed for which he must atone? We don’t really see him do anything reprehensible in the film. (In fact, we scarcely see him at all, although his voice comments on the action) (13) How do the poems fit into the film? They are read by Tarkovsky’s father who composed them and who was a notable poet and still alive, of course, when Mirror was made. And so on...
8.
The situation explored by the film is two generations of marital dysfunction. The picture is contemporaneous to films by French New Wave directors, particularly Godard and Truffaut, that dramatize difficulties between married couples. Similarly, the picture was made at about the same time that Bergman produced his famous Swedish TV series Scenes from a Marriage – in fact, some of the scenes of marital squabbling could come directly out of one of Bergman’s domestic tragedies.
Maria has been married to Alexei’s father (unnamed) and has two children with him, Alyosha (little Alexei) and a younger sister who is called “Marina”. (Marina is the name of Tarkovsky’s actual sister, now an important commentator on the film.) By 1935,Alexei’s father has vanished, although he comes to visit his children unpredictably and at long intervals. Maria works as a proofreader in a big disorderly print shot. Sometimes, she quarrels with Alexei’s father about child custody. (Tarkovsky’s own father was mostly absent from his life; Tarkovsky’s mother worked as a proofreader in a print shop). At one point, we see Alexei’s father in a homecoming scene wearing a uniform and, apparently, a soldier returned from the front during the Great War.
The marital discord in the generation of Maria and her absent husband is mirrored (one of the meanings of the film’s title) in the second generation. Alexei, now grown, is divorced from his wife, Natalia. (Natalia locates Alexei’s failure as a husband in his estranged relationship with his mother.) Alexei and Natalia have a son, Ignat, who is apparently a disappointment to his father. Alexei describes the boy as half-witted, although Natalia sees the child as a sort of prophet, a proto-Moses. Like his father, Alexei quarrels with Natalia about child custody and, although he doesn’t seem to like Ignat, asks his ex-wife to surrender the boy to him. Ignat is the first character we see in Mirror – he turns on the TV to the documentary showing the cure of the stutterer.
Rendering this account of two-generations of marital dysfunction confusing is the fact that the same actress (Margarita Terekhova) plays both the parts of Natalia and Maria – that is, both the role of Alexei’s wife in the contemporary sequence and the role of his mother in the scenes pre-war and at the rural dacha (apparently owned by Alexei’s grandfather). Similarly confusing is the fact that both Alyosha (the young Alexei) and Ignat are played by the same actor, a young man also named Ignat in real life. The distinction between real-life and the film is further blurred by Tarkovsky’s decision to cast his actual mother in that role in the contemporary scenes set in the ‘70's. This doubling of roles, of course, is also an aspect of “mirroring” integral to film’s meanings.
9.
Arseny Tarkovsky, the film maker’s poet father, was born in 1907. (In the film, Maria says that she was born in 1908 – therefore, she is 27 when we see her sitting on the fence in the first scene.) Arseny Tarkovsky was a gifted Russian poet and translator (he was fluent in Georgian, Turkmen, Arabic, and Armenian.) Arseny was of Polish extraction and born in Kherson in eastern Ukraine, a place that has been much in the news recently.
When he was 14, Arseny and a couple of school-chums wrote a satirical poem about Lenin – the little verse featured an acrostic on Lenin’s name. The three friends were arrested, sent to a concentration camp, and the other two boys were executed by firing squad. Arseny managed to escape. He fought with distinction in World War Two and was badly wounded – over a period of several years, he lost one of legs to seriatim amputations caused by gas gangrene.
Arseny’s voice-over performs poems selected for the film. The poems were not written for the movie but had been previously published. Arseny was handsome with Byronic good looks – the actor that we see briefly acting in the role of Alexei’s father was cast to closely resemble him. Arseny Tarkovsky outlived his son – he died in Moscow in 1989, having also outlived the Soviet Union that came into existence when he was about ten years old.
10.
The best advice as to interpreting Mirror is to regard the entire film as a dream. This is counter-intuitive because many aspects of the film, particularly those set in the seventies, seem fairly realistic. Furthermore, Tarkovsky creates spectacular dream sequences that are quite obviously oneiric – for instance, the spooky footage of the wraith-like Maria washing her hair and, then, making strangely boneless and disembodied motions with her spread arms; this scary footage is followed by the spectacular dream-image of plaster falling from inundated ceilings in the family apartment in Moscow, a visionary correlate for the collapse of Alexei’s marriage and his household. Most viewers, on first screening Mirror, recognize sequences of this type as depicting dreams, but, then, construe other parts of the movie as taking place in something like real life. But this is an error. As Dorothy says when awaking at the end of The Wizard of Oz, “it (is) all a dream.”
If we adopt the hypothesis that everything in Mirror is dream-content, then, oddities in the narrative (of which there are legion) become more clear. I will provide two noteworthy examples.
Maria, as an old lady, calls her son Alexei to tell him that Liza has died – apparently on the morning of the call at 7:00 am. (You will note my earlier misprision of this aspect of the film in the section numbered (6) above – in that part of this essay, I incorrectly claim that Liza died in 1935; however, on another, later viewing, I see that I misinterpreted the subtitles – actually, Liza, who worked as a fellow proof-reader with Maria, has apparently died in the seventies at the time that Alexei’s fatal illness begins: he says that he has a sore throat and hasn’t talked to anyone for three days when his mother calls him.) Maria’s announcement that Liza, the co-worker has died and her identification of the address of the print-shop triggers a flashback. The flashback is shot in black-and-white and, on first viewing, seems to be a realistic depiction of the episode involving the ostensible proof-reading error. But look more closely: in fact, the scene is an extended “anxiety” dream. Maria is late to work. We see her running through a torrential rainstorm. Rain and running water often signifies dream-visions in Tarkovsky’s work. Also notice that the footage contains motion that is slightly slowed, particularly shots of Maria running – this is a reflection of the standard dream logic of having to get some place but encountering obstacles that make it seem that the dreamer is moving in slow motion. It is apparently Maria’s day off-work so she really doesn’t have to be at the print-shop at any specific time – but she is worried that she let some sort of typographic error pass into publication, possibly with the dire consequence that an inoffensive passage has been rendered somehow obscene. (This is clearly dream-anxiety. But it also “mirrors” the plight of Tarkovsky’s father who published an acrostic poem on Lenin’s name, a juvenile satire that almost cost him his life.) Once, Maria reaches the huge print shop look carefully at the set design – the place is immense and ramshackle: the halls are full of weird trash including colossal rolls of paper. Everything is too big. The print machines rattle and snap in a menacing way and seem like instruments of destruction. Gradually, the viewer concludes that this infernal print shop probably is a dream-vision, in fact, an image for the totalitarian repression in the Stalin era – note, the grinning face of Stalin prominently displayed on one of the print-shop walls. The printing enterprise has morphed, as it were, into a strange emblem for the GULAG or Stalin’s concentration camps, a huge prison in which people can be sent to their deaths for innocuous typographical errors. Compounding the oddity of the scene is Liza’s savage attack on Maria, completely unmotivated and unjust, but, seemingly, representing Alexei’s repressed feelings for his mother and his allegiance with his poet father. This verbal denunciation is rendered even more peculiar by being framed in terms of a female character, Stavrogin’s wife, in Dostoevsky’s The Devils – would anyone really talk this way? (In the dream-work, the dreamer will often put denunciations and accusations that he or she is afraid to make in the mouth of another character.) In a bizarre turn of events, Maria, then, locks herself in a room with a shower and bathes, thus, immersing herself in the torrential dream-fluids that we see pouring out of the skies in the initial images of the young woman hurrying to work. A characteristic of dreams is that they seem to be real to the dreamer. Here Tarkovsky tricks the viewer, as it were, into construing a dream as, in fact, an instance of realism. When Liza walks away, skipping oddly, she quotes the first lines of Dante’s Inferno – the print scene, with its intimations of the Gulag, is also infernal, a sort of Hell.
Similarly, a number of weird aspects vex interpretation of an important scene late in the movie when Maria and Alyosha (the young Alexei) go to see the doctor’s wife. As I have noted, Alexei’s little sister is not in the scene, leading to practical questions as to where she is located and who is caring for the child. Furthermore, like the obscene typo that is whispered but never disclosed, there is something concealed about the visit to the doctor’s wife – the women are discussing a “little lady secret”, obviously something gynecological. Most interpretations of the scene treat the sequence as realistic – some critics say that Maria has walked three-and-a-half hours with small son to acquire “toiletries” from the doctor’s wife. In other words, many critics make the sequence about an expedition to obtain the 1935 equivalent of tampons. But this can’t be accurate and, certainly, doesn’t explain the extremely strange ambience in the sequence. It seems unlikely that the resourceful Maria would hike four or five hours to acquire sanitary napkins. So far as I know, no one accepts my hypothesis on this subject but I think I am right. Maria has gone to the doctor’s wife to discuss the possibility of an abortion. Maria is pregnant with Marina, Alexei’s little sister – she’s not visible in the scene because she is in utero. Of course, we have previously seen Alexei with his sister in 1935 so, of course, we know the girl had been born at that time. But the sequence is constructed accordingly to dream-logic. Alexei suspects his mother of having sought an abortion with respect to her pregnancy with Marina and constructs the dream according to that surmise. This hypothesis is supported by several factors. First, Russian women in the thirties, liberated feminist “comrades,” were accustomed to using abortion as a birth control method. Although one would not walk for 10 miles to procure tampons or sanitary napkins, a woman might well make that expedition to discuss an abortion as to an unwanted pregnancy. Maria’s pregnancy is projected onto the doctor’s wife. Furthermore, we learn that the doctor’s wife thought she was having a girl when she delivered her first child, but that it was a little boy – that is, the angelic sleepy figure that we see in the film. My guess is that, when Maria sees the sleeping boy who smiles at her, she abandons her plan to abort her own pregnancy. Certainly, there is something dark and bloody about the sequence. The scene climaxes with the beheading of the cockerel, clearly an allegorical representation of castration as a consequence to the man who has caused an unwanted pregnancy. The killing of the cockerel is supposed to be accomplished by Alyosha, but his mother spares him that trauma – it would, in fact, be the trauma of murdering his own much-beloved father. Like many first-born siblings, Alyosha probably resents his little sister’s competition with him for the affections of his mother – hence, the dream vision includes wish-fulfillment: the little sister is nowhere visible. Furthermore, the episode reveals a secret about his mother (“a little lady secret”) that can’t be dicussed and that is repressed within the mysterious dream-imagery. The incredible portrait-like image of Maria by the firelight in which she appears as a terrifying glowing apparition, entirely beautiful, frightening, and inscrutable confirms my impression that the scene is a dream-vision with life or death consequences. (In this image, Tarkovsky shoots Maria so that she resembles Leonardo da Vinci’s supremely enigmatic portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in the National Gallery in Washington, a portrait that we see in the film.)
The sequence involving the visit to the doctor’s wife is obviously crucial to the film. In fact, this sequence was independently written and published as a short story, “A White White Day.” (There is an excellent thriller made in Iceland that uses Tarkovsky’s working title for the movie for its own name.) I’ve read the Tarkovsky novella and it doesn’t clarify anything about what is going on with doctor’s wife. If anything, the prose version of the scene is even more enigmatic. The text tells us that Maria doesn’t transact business with the doctor’s wife because, paradoxically, “her price was too low”. This comment might make sense with respect to an abortion – you probably don’t want to undergo a cut-rate, bargain abortion. It doesn’t make any sense with respect to procuring a box of tampons.
This method of construing apparently documentary or realistic imagery in the film as all oneiric, I think, clarifies many aspects of Mirror that would remain otherwise baffling.
11.
Tarkovsky was, to quote the famous SNL sketch with Dan Akroyd, “one wild and crazy guy.” There’s an interesting interview with the director that was broadcast on Paris TV in 1975. The interview is not helpful with respect to Tarkovsky’s comments on film – the man spoke in abstract platitudes and bloviating aphorisms that are, bluntly stated, gibberish. (I don’t condemn him for this habit – the gibberish platitudes about high spiritual purpose and the destiny of man are protective coloration. He lived in a world in which one Russian filmmaker interviewed on the Criterion DVD disk notes that the KGB often amputated hands and feet for disloyalty or failures to produced promised films on time.) The brief TV interview is primarily fascinating for Tarkovsky’s outfit. He looks very natty, dressed in a gangster-style pinstripe suit, possibly maroon in color and wearing a shirt that seems to be decorated in Peter Max colors with a garish tie. When asked about the state of the Soviet film industry, Tarkovsky obediently says that everything is going well in Russia and the industry is doing just fine.
Tarkovsky was slightly built. People who met him remarked that the director of the titanic Andrei Rublev was a little man with nervous features and blue-collar stevedore’s mustache. He always looked small and frail, but, of course, had an iron constitution – he started filming every morning at 6 am, worked until darkness on the set and, then, rewrote dialogue for the upcoming day’s shooting, often laboring with colleagues (and drinking vodka) until four in the morning.
12.
Here is an interesting and reasonably coherent statement about making films from Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time:
“(Describing Lumiere’s actualites)...for the first time in the history of the arts, in the history of culture, man found the means to take an impression of time. And, simultaneously, the possibility of reproducing that time on screen as often as he wanted, to repeat it, and go back to it. He acquired a matrix for actual time. Once seen and recorded, time could be preserved in metal boxes for a long period (theoretically for ever)...Time, printed in its factual forms and manifestations, such is the supreme idea of cinema as an art.”
Thus, Mirror is a record of the period in Soviet history between 1935 and 1975 containing newsreel footage that shows the past “printed in its factual forms and manifestations.” But Tarkovsky’s objective are even more ambitious – he aims to provide not only the “factual forms and manifestations” of the past, but their dream-image, that is, the manifestation of these actualites as mirrored in a dream in which past time is “imprinted.”
In this context, it’s worth thinking for a moment about Roland Barthes’ important essay on photography, Camera Lucida. For his subject, Barthes considers photographs of his recently deceased mother. Barthes relates photographs to mortuary practices; the photograph, he says, always expressed the idea of “This-has-been” – that is, this picture reflects to us the light (“as from a distant star”) that once suffused someone that is now gone, dead or departed. A photograph implies an argument as to the mortality of all beings portrayed within its frame and, therefore, measures the passage of time that is the instrument of our own gradual (or sudden) disappearance from the scene. (Tarkovsky seems to make a similar point in Mirror, fundamentally a movie about his mother or, rather, the dream imago of his mother.)
Photographs embody both studium, Barthes claims, and punctum. The studium is the occasion for which the photographic image was taken – that is, to document someone’s appearance on a birthday or as a souvenir of a trip or vacation or as a forensic account of the way something looked at a certain time and place. A punctum is something that wounds or pricks or lacerates us in a picture. It’s an element of the image that goes beyond the studium to evince the mortal individuality in the photograph, the factor transforms the generalized purpose for which a picture (or film footage) was made into an account of individual moment or being. The punctum in Barthes’ understanding marks the threshold between studium, which speaks in a sober tone: This-has-been, and instant of memento mori: This too shall die.
In Mirror, footage of a balloon ascent, children being escorted onto refugee trains in Madrid, a dying bull or the brutal slog across Lake Sivash in Crimea during World War II represent instances of studium – that is, documentary records of actual events transcribed for the purpose of showing how those “factual forms and manifestations” actually looked. The documentary film is ineluctable, forensic evidence of “this-has-been”. But as dream-images, part of the oneiric imagery in the film, the footage also takes on a mortuary manifestation – these are individuals recorded in an instant of ephemeral, never-to-be repeated light who are mortal and doomed to pass away from the radiance of the day in which their images were made.
13.
The history of how Mirror came to be made is complicated.
As early as 1964, Tarkovsky contemplated making a film about his mother. In its original manifestation, the film’s scenario was called “Confession”. According to that outline, the picture would consist of brief vignettes showing events in his mother’s life intercut with interview sequences showing Tarkovsky’s mother responding to a series of probing questions: What is your favorite animal? Why? Name a time when you were terrified? And so on.
Tarkovsky submitted the proposed scenario for “Confession” to a man named Romanov, the government censor and chief producer at Mosfilm. At time, Tarkovsky was internationally famous for Ivan’s Childhood but under a cloud of suspicion in the Soviet Union for the alleged defeatist “pacifism” in that war film. Romanov took one look at “Confession” and said: “This will get made over my dead body.”
Tarkovsky had made friends with a half-German playwright, Alexander Misharin. With Misharin, he retired to the Soviet writer’s retreat at Repino. (Repino is a resort and arts community 19 miles west of St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland.) During a two-week period, Misharin and Tarkovsky wrote the revised script for A White White Day, the new title for the movie. Each man wrote one of the 28 episodes in the film in the morning. In the afternoon, the men exchanged the work and edited one another. Misharin went to his death without designating who wrote what episode – teasingly, he indicated that whenever someone approached him and said “this episode in Mirror was obviously written by Tarkovsky,” the interlocutor was almost always wrong. During the composition of Mirror, the two men had a big jug of vodka. Tarkovsky marked the level of booze in the bottle with a pen to insure that neither of them was nipping at the vodka during the creative process. After two weeks, the film’s script was complete and, then, Tarkovsky and Misharin polished off the bottle.
The revised script was brought to Romanov for his review. His response was: “This film gets made over my dead body.”
At that point, Tarkovsky was being wooed by Hollywood. A film treatment of a picture called The Flight of Mr. MacKinley, based on a Soviet-era science fiction novel, was pending in Los Angeles and Tarkovsky had been invited to come to the United States to make the movie. (Mr. MacKinley was a bit like Woody Allen’s Sleeper – a petite bourgeois in a Western country, possibly the US, escapes his humdrum existence by being cryogenically frozen for 250 years.) Tarkovsky was also in the throes of directing Andrei Rublev while working on “A White, White Day”. Ultimately, Tarkovsky rejected the offers from Hollywood to direct Mr. MacKinley’s Flight (as it is sometimes called) in Los Angeles. With Andrei Rublev finished, and released to great international acclaim, Tarkovsky was offered to adapt Stanislaus Lem’s Solaris, a prestige picture with a big budget. Tarkovsky, despairing of approval to make the film about his mother, accepted the assignment. Soviet prestige pictures had virtually unlimited resources. One of Tarkovsky’s collaborators, a sound engineer on several of his films, remarks in an interview that on Solaris, the director decided he needed a complex, ominous orchestral effect – “the sound required over a hundred instruments in the orchestra”. Tarkovsky submitted the request in the evening and, the next morning, the huge orchestra had been assembled to record, the effect, really just a dissonant drone comprising only a few bars of sound. In other words, working on big-budget Soviet movie involved access to vast resources without concern for cost or, even, practical considerations as to the time involved in creating effects with those resources. Therefore, Tarkovsky (who couldn’t be offered this sort of creative freedom in LA) was happy to work on Solaris. Misharin felt betrayed by Tarkovsky’s apparent decision to abandon their joint project and he was so angry with his friend that the two men didn’t speak for several years.
Finally, Romanov retired from the helm of Mosfilm. Tarkovsky wrote another scenario incorporating the script that he and Misharin had devised at Repino. (In the Soviet film industry, the director was responsible for creating a prose short story or novella as to the subject of his proposed movie.) The new director of Mosfilm, a man named Yermash, reluctantly and with a high degree of skepticism gave Tarkovsky the “go-ahead” to begin shooting the movie. Ultimately, the film had expanded to 34 episodes, all of which were filmed.
Once the individual sequences were completed, Tarkovsky discovered that there was no obvious way to combine the short segments into a coherent whole. With Misharin, he acquired a simple pedagogical instrument from a primary school, a satchel that could be suspended on a wall presenting 33 pouches, one for each letter in the Cyrillac alphabet. (These bags are used for sorting games intended to teach children the 21 consonants, ten vowels and two signs that comprise written Russian.) Tarkovsky created a card for each of the 34 segments and, then, began to devise a system in which the film fragments could be arranged to form a intelligible whole. Nothing worked. Tarkovsky and Mishiran despaired of ever finding the right combination of sequences necessary to complete the movie. Nineteen different combinations were imagined and carefully considered, but none of them made any emotional or narrative sense. Then, on the 20th iteration, everything miraculously fell into place. Several interviews exist as to this process and everyone, including Misharin, attests to the fact that when the solution presented itself it was marvelously and inexplicably satisfying, something like a benevolent “act of God.” Misharin said that “within 90 seconds it all came together.”
Others were less convinced. Yermash, the producer at MosFilm, viewed the finished picture with profound skepticism. He told Tarkovsky and Misharin: “We have complete freedom of expression in this country of course...but not to that extent.” And, so, he released the film, deeming it too puzzling and obscure to make much of an adverse impression on audiences but, clearly, prone to subversive interpretation. The movie was buried and received only the most muted of premieres.
To Russians of Tarkovsky’s age, the film came to represent something akin to one of Proust’s madeleines, the little wafer cookie that magically summons the past in the novel In Search of Lost Time. People from all over Russia who had seen the movie wrote to Tarkovsky and said that the film had miraculously brought to mind the sights and smells and feelings of their childhood. Tarkovsky’s archive contains hundreds of letters to this effect. Middle-aged Russians in 1975 wrote rapturous letters telling Tarkovsky that when they watched the film they could smell the sunflowers in the fields, the warm rot in the woods, the scent of forest-gathered morel mushrooms sauteeing in cream and butter, the precise odor of the kerosene used to light the vacation dachas. (The big clear tear-drop-shaped vessels visible in several scenes are vessels in which kerosene was stored.) And, accordingly, the film gradually achieved its rank as the most beloved of all Soviet Russian films.
14.
Tarkovsky’s set-design on Mirror was meticulous to the point of being obsessive. Many of the details on which the director insisted are not visible to the viewer. For instance, one visitor to the dacha set discovered that he had to tread carefully because Tarkovsky had hidden dozens of antique mirrors in the undergrowth and weeds in the woods. These mirror-surfaces aren’t visible in the film but Tarkovsky thought that they added eerie highlights to the forest and created a dream-like atmosphere. (Some of these mirrors are visible in a great dream-array in the scene with Alexei’s doctor). The visitor to the set noticed that the entire forest had been manipulated – the trunks of trees had been coated with soot to make them appear black; tree limbs intended to have prominence in the shots were gilded with bronze. Interviews record that bushels of nettles had to be uprooted and carried off the set to create the precise framing desired by Tarkovsky in the extended shot showing Maria smoking on the fence.
There is a famous sculpture of a woman-donor in the Naumberg Church of St. Peter and St.Paul. The sculpture stands more than 20 feet above the floor in a niche in the west choir of the church. The Romanesque statue depicts the Marchioness Uta. Many people think that the sculpted woman is the most beautiful statue in the world. But woman’s transcendently beautiful face can’t really be seen from the vantage of visitors to the Church. She is too high above the ground, her features are too small, and Uta stands in the shadows. (You can see a detail close-up of Uta’s face in Andre Malraux’s The Voices of Silence, published in 1951– the photographic close-up’s vantage, of course, is something that you can’t duplicate in an actual visit to the Naumberg Church.) Who was supposed to see Uta’s spectacularly beautiful face? With respect to medieval cathedrals, replete with these kinds of “invisible” details, the pat answer is that these features were made for the eye of God. (I suspect the truth is much more complex.)
There’s a famous story about Tarkovsky on location in Gotland Island filming The Sacrifice. Tarkovsky was sick, indeed, dying. But he insisted that every telephone pole visible in a landscape shot be painted black on all sides. He persisted in requiring this bit of set decoration for telephone poles that were several thousands of feet away from the camera lens. “No one will be able to even see these utility poles,” one of the crew members grumbled. But, it didn’t matter: Tarkovsky insisted that the poles be entirely painted black, even those beyond the range of the camera’s eye.
Tarkovsky was a “believer” and, perhaps, had the utility poles blackened for the “eye of God.” Who knows? There is a scene in a late Bergman film in which a character peruses a score by Bach that is prominently marked Soli deo gloria (“For the glory of God alone”). Bergman remarked that the greatest art was made solely for the glory of God. But, of course, he didn’t believe in God.
15.
Tarkovsky reconstructed the dacha from dozens of photographs that his mother had kept showing the cottage. (When the movie was made, the dacha, built by Tarkovsky’s grandfather, had long since decayed into nothing.) When his mother toured the set, she said that she felt an eerie sense that time had stopped and that the dacha was more real than real – reconstructed down to its tiniest detail.
Tarkovsky’s mother appears in the film’s final sequence and, periodically, throughout the movie. In the scene in which the strange, dark-haired woman demands that Ignat read Pushkin’s letter to Chaadyev from 1836, the boy stands in front of a photograph of Tarkovsky’s mother. When there is a knock at a door, Tarkovsky’s mother appears when the door is opened but says that she has come to the wrong address. Characteristically, the woman at the door both is and is not Tarkovsky’s mother – this reflects dream-logic in which a figure may have the features of one person but the name of another. (The scene of Tarkovsky’s mother at the door of the “wrong address”, mirrors a mysterious image in the film in which a door that has been locked suddenly opens of its own accord revealing the director’s mother as a young woman sorting potatoes on the dacha floor accompanied by a small dog who emerges first from the shadowy interior – forty years later, Margarita Terekhova, who played Maria, said that everyone on the set “loved” the dog and she was happy that the animal “was immortalized” in Mirror.”
After making Solaris, Tarkovsky was reluctant to direct Mirror. Misharin was frustrated with Tarkovsky’s inexplicable but stubborn reticence with respect to the filming the script. He called Tarkovsky and asked to see him. It was early morning and Tarkovsky was lounging around in his bathrobe. Misharin asked Tarkovsky to read a short chapter from Vassily Grossman’s novel Everything Flows, a book about the Gulag and the Ukrainian famine. The chapter that Tarkovsky was supposed to read aloud involves the destruction of a beautiful young woman in a concentration camp. Tarkovsky was overcome and began to weep, although he haltingly completed the recitation.
“I’ll make the movie,” Tarkovsky said.
Tarkovsky described Mirror as “reaching out to lives leaving us – our mothers.” The film was intended, in part, as a tribute to the hardships that his mother endured. “She kept us alive when so many others perished,” he said. “I don’t know how she did it.”
Germany is a “fatherland.” Russia is a “mother.”
15.
Arseny Tarkovsky reads four poems in the film. Similarly, there are four newsreels interpolated into the movie: the balloon ascent, the footage from the war in Spain and the harrowing scenes of children being evacuated from Madrid, the soldiers slogging through the mud, and the “future memories” of atomic holocaust and Chinese revolutionaries waving Mao’s “little red book” in the air. The poems and the actualites of the news reels are correlated structurally in mysterious ways – they are elements of another “reality” interposed as it were among the delirium of dream comprising the rest of the movie.
In the balloon ascent, we see that the huge billowing forms are labeled CCCP – that is, named as the Soviet Union. The balloon ascent, it seems, represents the aspirations of the revolutionary State and its precarious nature. In an interview, Tarkovsky’s sister noted that the men shown in the documentary footage featuring the balloons were all killed a crash that occurred two years later.
The images of the Chinese Communists and the personality cult associated with Mao refer to the so-called Sino-Soviet conflict. This was a brief border war that nearly spiraled into nuclear armageddon. (It’s the Chinese - Russian equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis.) The Soviet’s laid claim to Zhenbao (“Great Treasure) Island, called Damasky Island by the Russians. The island is a forested tract of land that lies at the edge of the Ussuri River, a large river that forms part of the border with China. Several islands in the river were claimed as sovereign territory by both nations. In early March 1969, the Chinese attacked Zhenbao Island, killed a Russian garrison there, and claimed ownership of the small body of land. The Russians counterattacked with tanks and re-captured the island. All told the Russians lost 68 dead in the fighting; the Chinese admitted to 58 casualties. The fighting triggered violence all along the border between the Soviet Union and China – in the documentary footage, we see Soviet troops holding back enraged Chinese waving Mao’s little red book in the air. (The footage is intercut with an episode in which we see Alyosha on a snowy hilltop, a vantage that provides an aerial perspective on small figures in the white landscape, an image shot to replicate the high-angle snowy landscape in Brueghel’s famous painting of “The Hunter’s Return” in his series of four pictures depicting the seasons. Birds sweep through the air above the hunters who are atop a hill overlooking a village with frozen ponds densely populated by little figures skating and trudging about. One of the birds in Brueghel’s picture flies out of that canvas and lands on Alyosha’s head.) References to the Sino-Soviet conflict, which ended when Ho Chi Minh fortuitously died and Russian envoys met with their Chinese counterparts at his funeral, rhyme with the Pushkin-Chaadayev letter in which the writer claims that the Russians have saved Europe from the Tatar (Mongolian) hordes – in the documentary excerpt, we see Russian troops literally “holding back” a Chinese mob. Ultimately, the Soviet Union backed-down and surrendered Zhenbao Island to China.
Yermash, the MosFilm producer, didn’t like the pictures of the soldiers hopelessly staggering through mud. He demanded that these images, which he construed as “defeatist” or “pacifist,” be deleted. Tarkovsky said that this documentary footage was the “very nerve” of the picture and he refused its excision from the finished film. Tarkovsky was so relentless in his defense of these images that the authorities backed down and let the pictures remain in the film.
The images of the troops slogging through a vast muddy expanse of water shows a Soviet counter-offensive to recapture Crimea that had been seized in 1941 by the Germans. To mount their attack, the Russian troops forded several miles across Lake Sivash, a big saline lagoon that (mostly) cuts off Crimea from the mainland. (The lagoon has been contested in the current fighting in Ukraine and figured in a large way in the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014). Syalt Sivash, as it is called in Ukrainian, has now been impounded by a dam and is polluted to the point of being toxic today. Tarkovsky said that the archival footage of the 1944 Soviet advance across Syalt Sivash was filmed by a very gifted army cameraman who was killed two hours after the scenes were shot. Curiously, Tarkovsky said in interviews that he interpreted the imagery of the men hiking though the barren, muddy slush, as images of “immortality” – the pictures, Tarkovsky said, show that men might perish and die, but that they remain “immortal”.
In one of his books, the Czech novelist, Milan Kundera comments on Marxist historiography as being the account of “a grand procession toward justice.” Kundera says that the “grand procession” is really just a trudge knee-deep in human gore with stragglers falling behind and dying in the effluvia. Yermash was astute to see that Tarkovsky’s use of the footage implies Kundera’s sentiments about Marxist progress.
16.
Marina, Tarkovsky’s sister, recalled being evacuated from Moscow in 1943 to resort village, Yuryevets, on the Volga. It was winter-time and very cold. Young Andrei was required to attend military training. The instructor was a shell-shocked combat veteran just returned from the Front. Marina and Andrei interacted with equally traumatized children sent south after the 900 day siege of Leningrad. Many of those children were emaciated from starvation to the point of being skeletal and most of them were orphans. Of course, these aspects of Tarkovsky’s own biography are reflected in Mirror in the sequence with the red-haired girl, on the firing range, and the imbroglio with the defused hand-grenade. (The red-haired girl appears again briefly near the end of the movie when Tarkovsky’s camera tours the grey-silver interior of the dacha where lace draperies are fluttering in the breeze.)
17.
One of the most famous images in Mirror (and one that is often imitated) is the sequence showing Maria levitated above her bed, an elaborate and baroque swirl of drapery dangling down from her body. (Paul Schrader duplicates this image with his lovers in First Reformed and Tarkovsky himself repeats the motif in several later films.)
Yermash was adamant that this image be excised from the film. Most likely, Yermash properly suggested that the image of the floating woman had too much in common with baroque and gothic representations of saints and their miracles. Tarkovsky was equally adamant that the picture remain in the film and defied Yermash’s order to edit the sequence out of the film. Yermash capitulated in the end, but told everyone that, in his opinion, Tarkovsky was “not well” and that he was having some kind of “nervous crisis.”
The picture of the floating mother appears in the context of the only shot in Mirror in which we see the dying Alexei – he looks into the camera lens. Tarkovsky did not intend that this dream image be interpreted or decoded. “It is not a symbol,” Tarkovsky declared, “because it is not a problem to be solved and not anything that can be decoded.” Instead, the image is designed to be literally “iconic”. “Icons are never signed,” Tarkovsky said. “An icon is a meditation on the Absolute,” the film-maker explained. Symbols are limited and must be decoded to have meaning. Nothing in Mirror is symbolic.”
18.
Tarkovsky’s religious beliefs are obliquely expressed in the final sequence – along the way, Tarkovsky’s mother leads the two children past a large, flimsy-looking cross in the meadow. Two figures seem to be standing near the cross.
Tarkovsky said:
“A true poet can not but be a believer. Culture can not exist without religion. Religion is inextricably tied to the fate of culture... Art is a mirror. In creating art, we mimic our Creator – we participate in the divine. Art is prayer. A human being’s duty is to serve. The only proper principle for our relationship with others is to serve them...”
19.
Everyone who knew Georgy (“Gogo”) Rerberg revered him as a genius. Rerberg was also a highly temperamental alcoholic. But Rerberg was also a master cameraman. He worked with Andrei Konchalovsky on several of that director’s early films. Konchalovsky said that Rerberg was capable of achieving effects that no one else could accomplish as if by a kind of “sorcery”. He was also well-nigh impossible to work with, often delaying production when he went on benders.
Tarkovsky hired Rerberg to shoot Mirror. The director had a tendency to micro-manage photography on his films – he was said to “hover” and wouldn’t authorize any film stock to be exposed until he had looked through the viewfinder and approved the shot. Rerberg was so creative and accomplished that Tarkovsky delegated the photography to him entirely. Many of the shots made inside the Dacha set were done with Tarkovsky uncharacteristically waiting outside, nervously pacing and chain-smoking, while Rerberg took the pictures. (The dacha, because conceived naturalistically, didn’t have the take-away walls and ceilings typical of most sets used in film-making. It was, in fact, a fully functional and complete, if cramped, cottage devised to perfectly reproduce the summer home owned by Tarkovsky’s grandfather.)
One of the difficulties of working with Gogo Rerberg was that, if he didn’t think a scene was properly designed or plausible, he shot the sequence in an intentionally haphazard manner. Rerberg didn’t like the episode in the movie involving the Spanish refugees and, accordingly, his camera-work with respect to that aspect of Mirror is pedestrian.
Tarkovsky was completely satisfied with Rerberg’s exquisite photography in Mirror and, so, enthusiastically hired him to shoot Stalker. Troubles immediately arose. Rerberg didn’t understand the scenario and didn’t like it. He felt that the movie was a travesty to the original conception of the plot provided in the Strugasky novel Roadside Picnic. There were clashes on the set and Rerberg ignored “chain of command”, complaining about the film’s deficits as he perceived them directly to the Strugasky brothers. Then, he simply ceased reporting for work. Tarkovsky fired Rerberg and replaced him. A thousand feet of footage completed at great expense was returned from the laboratory out-of-focus. It isn’t obvious whether Rerberg sabotaged the footage, whether the film-stock was defective, or whether the laboratory erred in developing the imagery. Only two shots made by Rerberg remain in the finished cut of Stalker. One of them shows a heavily polluted lake, the surface of the water covered with a nasty-looking cream-colored froth. Rerberg succumbed to the Stalker curse – he was dead a few years later, although due to the complications of alcoholism. One of the film-makers with whom Rerberg worked after Tarkovsky said: “It was impossible to work with him. He made every picture a living hell. But he was an exalted spirit who showed us how dazzlingly beautiful the world was.”
20.
Mirror proposes that the life of Tarkovsky’s mother epitomizes Russian history between 1935 and 1970. If we understand Maria’s struggles and, ultimate, triumph, we have come close to understanding the struggles and triumph of the Russian people during that period. Maria is presented as representative of the Russians as a whole. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s wartime epic, The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp (1943), although a very different movie in form and tone reflects the same approach to history and parallels Mirror in some respects. Clive (Roger Livesy), the titular character, is an obstinate, honorable British military officer. The picture details Clive’s relationship with a similarly stubborn and noble German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). Deborah Kerr plays Clive’s love-interest, cast as three different women who encounter the hero at different times in his life. (As in Tarkovsky’s film, one actress performs in several roles, suggesting her archetypal role in the film, “the eternal feminine, ewig Weibliche” in the movie.) Powell and Presssburger’s film is far more prosaic than Tarkovsky’s picture, but it also explores aspects of what “it means to be British” with elliptical symbolic imagery – for instance, at the end of the film, the cisterns of the deep are opened and Clive’s house in London, damaged in the Blitz, is strangely flooded. As with Tarkovsky’s movie, The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp (actually made in war time) was regarded with great suspicion by military authorities and not released until after the War in 1945.
There is a risk attendant upon treating a central character as representative of a generation. The danger is that the representative figure will seem remote, a cipher portraying larger forces, and without dimension as a character. To some degree, this flaw exists in Tarkovsky’s film and, indeed, some critics have argued that the portrayal of the director’s mother as an archetype is sexist and, even, reactionary. Maria is a mystery to us. She doesn’t have anything like a recognizable “psychology”. Rather, she is portrayed as a remote enigma, a force of nature. And, the film posits that there is an ongoing and eternal war between the sexes – women are antagonists to men. Powell avoided this problem in his film by treating the events portrayed, even when violent or tragic, as fundamentally comical. Livesy plays Clive as a variant on Shakespeare’s bumbling fat knight, Falstaff. Tarkovsky’s esthetics are anything but comedic and Mirror is a solemn (perhaps, too solemn) film. Maria, imagined as representing all Russian women between 1935 and 1970 (the year of the Sino-Soviet conflict) comes perilously close to representing no actual woman at all.
21.
Andrei Tarkovsky was born in a small village, Zavrazhye (pop. 14 in 2010). His parents lived mostly in Moscow, but, as a child, he spent his summers at a family cabin or dacha near the city of Yuryevets (pop. 16,000 in 2010). Yuryevets is at the confluence of the Volga and Unzha rivers in eastern Russia. As depicted in Mirror, Tarkovsky, with his sister, Marina, were evacuated to that city during the war years. It was during military training in Yuryevets that Tarkovsky encountered the emaciated orphans who had survived the Leningrad siege and the shell-shocked shooting instructor.
Tarkovsky was a poor student and a trouble-maker. However, he was intelligent and studied Arabic at Moscow’s Oriental Institute. Later, he worked in mining and joined a year long expedition into the taiga in central Siberia, a part of the world that was largely unexplored in the early 1950's. The expedition was seeking non-ferrous metals. During this year in the wilderness, Tarkovsky had plenty of time to think about things and decided to become a film-maker. When he returned from the taiga, Tarkovsky was admitted to the Moscow Academy of Cinematography (VDIK), the state-sponsored film school, where he excelled.
Tarkovsky’s poet father was, indeed, estranged from the filmmaker’s mother and only rarely present in his life. Arseny Tarkovsky received the Red Star for his injuries sustained in the Great War (he ultimately lost his leg). In the reunion scene in Mirror, the viewer will notice that the poet father wears the Red Star.
21.
Between November 1947 and Spring 1948, Tarkovsky was hospitalized with tuberculosis (he was then 15 or 16). This hospitalization figures in an oblique way in Mirror. The film’s narrator, Alexei, is hospitalized and, apparently, dying from some mysterious, possibly psychosomatic, ailment. The narrator’s illness inflects the film: at least, three times, doctors appear (or fail to appear) in the movie. In the initial scene introducing, Maria, the stranger says that he is a doctor and, in fact, carrying a valise containing his instruments. This scene seems superficially “realistic” – but, in fact, it contains “dream” motifs. The doctor’s valise is locked and the physician can’t open the bag to access the tools of his trade. He asks Maria for a nail to pry open the lock, but she says that she doesn’t have anything of that nature. Later, Maria goes to a doctor’s house only to encounter his wife – the doctor said to be “a forensic doctor”, that is, a coroner, is not at home. Finally, we see a doctor seemingly at Alexei’s bedside, although the scene contains various elements that can’t be realistically explained – there are black-clothed women present who seem to be in mourning (one of them may be the mysterious woman who ordered Ignat to read Pushkin’s letter) and the doctor is surrounded by mirrors. In all cases, the doctor is ineffectual – nothing can be done, apparently, to save the dying narrator. The first doctor can’t access his instruments; the second physician is a coroner (he specializes in those already dead) and absent; the third doctor has no plausible hypothesis as to what is wrong with Alexei.
22.
Tarkovsky misleads the viewer into thinking that Mirror is realistic by incorporating documentary footage into the film. This is most notable in the preliminary (or introductory) sequence. We see Ignat turning on the TV. On the television, a documentary is broadcast – a severe woman hypnotizes a young Ukrainian (from Kharkov) and cures his stutter. This sequence seems austerely realistic but, in fact, its very strange. The female speech-therapist barks orders at the young man and, then, hypnotizes him. She seems to transfer the affliction from his tongue to his hands which become paralyzed. When the stutter has made the young man’s hands immobile and rigid, the woman ends the hypnotic trance and orders the boy the speak – there is an aspect of Biblical miracle about the scene. The young man seems to be free from his stutter. His tongue has been liberated or made free – but, perhaps, at the cost of paralysis to his hands. (This opening sequence, a sort of prelude to the film, reminds me of Bunuel’s first scene in L’Age d’Or, a surrealist movie that begins apparently realistically with a brief documentary on the habits of scorpions.)
Poetry is the liberation of the tongue, or language made free. In the poem recited shortly thereafter the poet says that love frees us to speak truthfully. Poetry makes meaning by establishing associations. Similarly, Tarkovsky’s film is associative. In the opening sequence, the film suggests that unimpeded speech is inconsistent with the work of the hands. But the hand, radiating fire, is a central motif in the movie. Perhaps, the equation asserted by the movie is that the poet’s hand (or the radiant hand of the artist) is the equivalent of speech. Twice, we see a shot framed so that fire seems to burn on someone’s hand. In a poem, the poet’s father says that the fingers are the five radiant beams emanating from the hand. The last image in the book depicting Leonardo da Vinci’s art is a double–page reproduction depicting various hands, some of them folded in prayer. In the death-bed scene, Alexei reaches forward to cup in his hand an apparently dead or paralyzed sparrow. After holding the sparrow in his life-giving hand, the bird comes to life and flutters away.
The conflict between estranged parents as to child-custody becomes literal in harrowing scenes in which refugee children in the Spanish Civil War are evacuated and must leave their parents. This sequence segues into the very spooky imagery of the balloon ascent with men dangling from vast shrouded forms, gloomy apparitions that soar upward with their pilots hanging below like insects. (I believe that the imagery suggests the ascent, as it were, of the Soviet Union, a precarious enterprise that drags men skyward.) The folded drapery of the big balloons is equated to the tissue paper covering the plates the book about da Vinci. The person flipping through the book doesn’t smooth down the tissue paper, an omission that creates a palpable sense of anxiety in the viewers. The translucent tissue paper, bunched up like drapery in a renaissance engraving, later recurs in the film as the strange wavering curtains of lace in the dacha.
The powerful women in Mirror threaten their men. We see a bull slaughtered in a Spanish bullfight. Later, a rooster seems to be thrown against a window, breaking out the mirror-like glass from its frame. Of course, the doctor’s wife, nauseous because of pregnancy, demands that Maria behead the cockerel. (She first asserts that Alyosha should perform this act.) Maria, a city girl, botches the slaughter of the cock and we hear it crying out as the camera focuses on her face on which there is a faint smile under deeply hooded eyes – the shot is anything but reassuring. Maria’s coworker bizarrely claims that the woman is like Maria Timofeyevna in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, someone who will ruin her husband and drive him away and make her children miserable. Female power is both beneficent and destructive. In fact, Maria (and her counterpart Natalia) seem nested in houses that have been burned into charcoal, plaster falling from the ceiling and lagoons of water everywhere with small fires burning on window-sills. These fires represent both the destructive power of passion and the gift of prophecy: Moses, we are reminded, received visions from a burning bush and Ignat seems to have pyromaniac tendencies: he lights a fire in the courtyard for which Alexei says he will be “fined”; Natalia says that Ignat will receive the word of God from the fire. (The name Ignat suggest “ignis” or “flame”). Tarkovsky was profoundly superstitious: he believed in ghosts, telekinesis, prophetic dreams, and telepathy. In Mirror, the women (and Ignat) are fire-starters – their passions ignite blazes around them. Telekinesis figures in objects that inexplicably move and fall to the ground. Twice we see a goblet, seemingly moving on its own accord and falling to the ground or into high weeds where a table with white table-cloth as been set. The notion of things falling is central to the film’s imagery: Maria and the enigmatic doctor fall from the rustic fence rail (the fall induces a kind of vision in the doctor); during the passage across Lake Sivash, the sequence begins with a naked man bearing a heavy weight (probably an ammunition box) falling into the water. When the dummy grenade is pitched at the shell-shocked drill instructor, everyone falls to the ground.
Other visual motifs rhyme with one another. The red-haired girl in the episode involving military training is desired by both Alyosha and the shell-shocked veteran: she has a cold sore prominently displayed on her lip. Later, we see Alyosha with a similar sore on his lip. On several occasions, we see spilt milk dripping from the edge of a table; the doctor’s wife is seen throwing out a basin full of milk; she says that milking the cow has made her nauseous (because of her pregnancy). Throughout the picture, we see scraggly-looking houseplants and similarly distressed-looking saplings outdoors. (These struggling trees all originate in a painting by Leonardo da Vinci – this painting, and the scrawny tree represented in it, is a leit motif in all of Tarkovsky’s films: we see the tree or a variant of it on the beach in Ivan’s Childhood and 26 years later the tree reappears as planted by the hero (and his son “little Man”) in The Sacrifice. Some references are intertextual – the tightly woven bun worn by Maria seems derived from the similar hairstyle displayed by Kim Novak in Vertigo, a tight spiral of braids that suggests inexplicable menace and enigma. Similarly, as we have seen, the aerial perspective on the snowy banks of the river (presumably the Volga at Yuryevets) quotes Brueghel’s “Hunters in the Snow.”
Tarkovsky said that film was a very new art, less than a hundred years old, and, for movies to attain the gravitas of high culture, cinema should cite masterpieces such as those created by Leonardo da Vinci (and Brueghel) and the music of masters such as Bach, Purcell, and Pergolesi. Music used in the film includes fragments of the Stabat Mater by Pergolesi, selections from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (“Und sieh der Vorhang im Tempel – “and behold the curtain in the temple was riven” )and St. John Passion (“Herr, unser Herrscher dessen Ruhm in aller Landen herrlich ist” – Lord, our Savior, whose fame is splendid in all lands”), as well as the recitative in Purcell’s The Indian Queen (“They tell us your mighty powers”).
23.
Mirror is bracketed by the stammering boy’s tongue being liberated in the first scene and Alyosha’s wordless cry at the very end of the movie, a sort of “barbaric yawp” of the kind described by Walt Whitman as the primordial source of poetry. In the opening scene, the viewer can see the sound-boom’s shadow above the young man on the white wall. In the final scene, a set of tracks on which the camera moves is briefly visible. Some people identify these traces of the film-making process as “goofs” (see IMDF for instance). Tarkovsky was meticulous to the point of obsession and I don’t think believe that images of the film’s production are accidental – in fact, I think Tarkovsky “signs” the film with these two book-ended images and that the shadow of the sound-boom is intended to “rhyme” with the briefly visible rails for the tracking camera in the last shot.
24.
What is the crime for which the narrator, Alexei is atoning by his death? The Russians view suffering as redemptive – this is the great theme embodied by writers as temperamentally different as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Solzhynitsyn. The narrator says that he just wanted to be happy and that he desired that his happiness be that of a child at the start of his life, with all possibilities still before him. We don’t have much evidence that Alexei has done anything wrong – certainly, his marriage failed but this seems to have been largely genetic, a product, perhaps, of his upbringing in a household dominated by his mother. It seems to me that Alexei’s only sin, but one that is significant to Russians, is the vain desire to be happy in the midst of chaos and carnage.
25.
Here is a quotation from Tarkovsky about freedom:
“Inner freedom can not be taken away from a human being...Rights can always be taken away, but not freedom. The Russians are the most free because they live in an unfree country. Those who live in so-called free societies are the most unfree.”
26.
No one can say that watching Tarkovsky’s films is easy work. In Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s excellent 2002 Distant (Uzek), an intellectual in Istanbul, Mahmut, hosts his cousin from the country. Mahmut is an intellectual who urges his country cousin to acquaint himself with the works of Tarkovsky. But, as soon as his cousin falls asleep, Mahmut takes the Tarkovsky DVD out of the player and amuses himself watching pornography.
27.
Tarkovsky said that he often dreamed about dacha where he spent his summers before the War. He was also troubled by dreams in which his mother appeared and belabored him about his failures. In his dreams about the summer-house, Tarkovsky felt as if he were searching for something that existed in the dacha but couldn’t be found.
After Mirror was made, Tarkovsky told people that he never dreamed about the cottage again and that he felt that reconciliation with his parents was possible. Both Tarkovsky’s mother and father were hurt by the film and told their son that they thought it was unfair. But Arseny Tarkovsky, the director’s poet father, said that the movie “showed that (his son) had the true spirit of film-poet.”
July 23, 2022
