Mirror

I thought I had seen Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Perhaps I have, years ago or perhaps it’s a conjuring of my imagination. By this – possibly first – viewing I’m struck by how unassimilable Tarkovsky’s film is, how much it resists easy analysis. The film might be (poorly) described as a series of visions: the child standing above a snowbound landscape as a bird alights on this hat; the burning cabin, the woman floating above the bed, the rain pouring inside the dark room and so on. Each scene bleeds into the next. Each may relate to one or more others, or it may not. Is that Tarkovsky narrating, never seen? Which of the boys is he? Which his mother, which his wife? Visions, uncertainty, a steadfast refusal to be defined because, surely, our lives refuse to make easy sense. How patronising to think that, ultimately, they might? How courageous to commit so determinedly to such a poetic envisioning without the simplicity of narrative. The following question is asked of Tarkovsky: “What is the subject of Mirror, its idea, moral plot, development, denouement?” To which the great director answers:

“The writer of that question clearly considers that all those things are essential in any work of art. In reality the concept of things that ‘have to be’ is incompatible with art. A work of art, of whatever art form, is constructed only according to its won principles, and is based on its own, inner, dynamic stereotype.”

(Full interview here.) What other films demand and allow themselves to be watched again and again with the possible exception of those made by Alain Resnais? Answers welcome.

As an aside, I was rather horrified to find that the dvd wasn’t letterboxed. This article describes the problem.