THE MIRROR (Zerkalo)
USSR | 1974 | Andrei Tarkovsky
35mm PRINT!
Pacific Cinematheque
Saturday, November 21, 2009 - 7:15pm
Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 9:35pm
Thursday, November 26, 2009 - 7:15pm
Cinematheque: Andrei Tarkovsky’s visually sumptuous fourth feature is the great director’s most personal and poetic (and Proustian) film. The Mirror offers an idiosyncratic history of twentieth-century Russia, in the form of a poet’s fragmented reflections on three generations of his family. The poems used in the film were written and read by the Tarkovsky’s own father (the poet Arseny Tarkovsky); Tarkovsky’s mother appears in a small role as the protagonist’s elderly mother. In a dual role, actress Margarita Terekhova is both the protagonist’s wife and his mother as a younger woman. “The Mirror is Tarkovsky’s central film, and his most personal one, although it might be better described as a transpersonal autobiography. Dreams and memories of an individual protagonist (who is never seen on screen) blend with dreams and memories of the culture. The generations of one family mingle. The Mirror achieves something which is uniquely possible in cinema but which no other film has even attempted: it expresses the continuity of consciousness across time, in a flow of images of the most profound beauty” (Amnon Buchbinder). Colour and B&W, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 106 mins.
"Profoundly intimate . . . one of the rare completely achieved films of autobiography." Mark Le Fanu
"Perhaps Tarkovsky’s greatest work." Film Society of Lincoln Center
"An essential film, an extraordinarily beautiful movie." Village Voice
THE MIRROR is available on DVD at Videomatica
"Film Acting" asked me for my response to the film. Here are some jotted impressions.... THE MIRROR was as challenging as Tarkovsky always is: THE SACRIFICE is his only film I engaged with effortlessly, in every other case I've had to battle to keep attention. Worth it. Loved specific images / scenes for their visual power: the sequence shot leading into the burning barn, the mother running down the road toward the building, the hair in the water / falling plaster, b&w boy going into house, etc. Evoked my own childhood with the disconnected, can't-make- sense-of-what's-going-on-with-the-adults quality. Dawned on me how different each of Tarko's films is: of course there are connections in terms of not pandering / explaining, he loves his slow tracking shots, slow pace, discontinuity and juxtaposition, etc, but subject / approach varies so widely from film to film. I ordered myself a copy of the DVD, want to spend more time with this one.
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