The Mirror

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).