March 9, 1985. Stockholm. The one important thing is to find time within time…[1]

In his book Sculpting in Time, published a short breadth from his passing in 1986, Andrei Tarkovsky wrote that a spiritual crisis is an attempt to find oneself. To find suggests location and movement and while each of his films examine relationships between identify, memory, and the ontology of time – none is more so singularly investigative of this interior crisis than in Mirror (1975). Tracing and marking the movement of personal memory in sequences of recollection, invention, and confession, he exposes the shape of consciousness in an autobiographical film form, offering a reflection of loss and passage with elusive, elegiac consonance. Now at its fiftieth anniversary, Tarkovsky’s seminal film is one that conjures the object of memory and the act of remembering in a spiritually nonsecular incantation: a film memoir.

In July of 1974, Mirror was rejected by Filip Yermash, President of Goskino, the USSR State Committee for Cinematography in the Soviet Union. Written, filmed, and edited as an evocation of remembering, Mirror was considered incomprehensible in its final form.[2] Tarkovsky wrote several variations of the script as early as a decade prior, beginning with an attempt at a short memoir of childhood inspired by his father’s poem “A White, White Day” (sometimes referred to as “A Bright, Bright Day”), later revised for the screen with Alexander Misharin and renamed Confession, which was initially rejected as a proposal then finally approved for production by the Goskino film committee.[3] Other working titles, Martyrology, Redemption, and Why are you standing so far away?, reveal Tarkovsky wrestling with the polarities of conception and completion, where the rigor and intricacies of form take shape to offer meaning. Tarkovsky scholar Natasha Synessios describes his methods for making the film as a journey through

fragments of stories, dialogue, images, eras and experience … picked up and developed, then abandoned, only to be reinvented in a different form, or with a shift in emphasis and meaning. Endless cuts were called for, changes made, episodes reshuffled, and although Tarkovsky’s editor, Ludmilla Feiginova, remembered the film coming together quite easily, Tarkovsky’s work diaries substantiate his account of a film which refused to cohere and fell apart along the way.[4]

Vadim Yusov, Tarkovsky’s cinematographer and collaborator with whom he had shot all his films up until Mirror, declined to work on the project for its autobiographical fixations and lyrical tendencies in approaching memory. Georgy Rerberg would take his place in production. Winding between remembrances and reimaginations, Tarkovsky constructed nearly twenty reworkings in sequence arrangement and editing to convey, quite simply, an artist looking back on his life. Even a decade after the film’s completion, he made alterations to the script before its publication, as if wanting to immortalize the intricacies of his living memory – still moving – in an extension of thought. He ultimately chose the title, “Mirror,” for aesthetic reasons, how it would look on screen — Зеркало — or Zerkalo, Romanized. His selection reveals intention and meaning in reflective association. The final film was eventually allowed in the fall of 1974 but did not have a traditional premiere (three theaters in Moscow, none of them central), and Goskino blocked its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival. Relegated to a third-category release (then later, second category) with only seventy-three prints of the film made, its distribution would be left to minor cinemas and clubs without financial returns to Tarkovsky, a stigma that would invite criticism of wasting of public funds, and possibly influence the future of his film production in his homeland.[5] Vladimir Y. Baskakov, first deputy chairman of the State Committee for Cinematography and an advocate for Lenin’s proletariat axiom of a cinema for the masses rather than the individual, insisted that film festivals too should be serious ideological confrontations between bourgeois and communist views of art rather than explorations of artistic subjectivities.[6] His position as festival director and jury member of the Moscow Film Festival throughout much of Tarkovsky’s career arguably left a discouraging cast over Tarkovsky’s reception and feature film releases, even singling out Mirror’s political failings — that is, its meditation on the nature of time and memory rather than a nationalist’s consecration of Mother Russia.[7] When Mirror was scheduled to show in North America at the sixth annual Telluride Film Festival, the film print was delayed at customs, believed to be in part due to ballet star Rudolf Nureyev’s controversial and sensational defection to the West (Tarkovsky himself would defect in 1984).[8] More famously, Tarkovsky’s epic Andrei Rublev did not receive a wide release for several years in its director-preferred, 183-minute version, with the film committee board labeling it antihistorical (antipatriotic) and far too preoccupied with the self as a subject. Tarkovsky was one of many Soviet film directors who did not have rights to their films and were paid as employees by government-owned studios, making salaries less than that of a factory worker (despite this, Tarkovsky viewed the role of a factory worker as a serviceable position, like the filmmaker’s role in a socialist society – citizens making materially valuable things, masters in their own right.) In a 2004 interview, co-screenwriter Alexander Misharin said he and Tarkovsky were paid nominally for their work on Mirror, despite seeking out the aid of Boris Pankin, chairman of the Copyright Agency, who reminded them that profits belonged to the state.[9] As film production was politically enmeshed, Tarkovsky’s film career, certainly with Mirror, was often defined by a contention between his artistic commitment to individual memory and a national memory from a collective entity — the aegis of a one-party state’s preservationist ideologies.

International film history has invited a more considered view. Half a century later, Mirror’s imprint lasts not only with “Tarkovsky-marked” kindred spirits but as inspiration to a global body of filmmakers, artists, writers, and scholars who have sought to unravel its latent and temporal correlations. A Janus Films digital restoration in cooperation with Mosfilm Studios and release by the Criterion Collection in 2021 further marks its veneration and retrospective evaluation as twentieth-century film art. Mirror is absorbing as an artist’s film for its self-examination and mnemonic cinematic coding; Tarkovsky uncovers peripheries of cinema logic by activating lived memory as a reservoir for conversing with the past — threading literature, poetry, prose, painting, musical composition and archival documentary footage of historical events, and harmonizing representations of three generations in the making. The film resonates beyond theatrical presentation, outside of the darkened space of a room, through decades, as a piece of music or a literary work can be absorbed over time, lingering and pooling with a viewer at varied distances and intervals; it’s range of cinematic punctuation and rhythm sustains a lifetime in duration, cycling back and coursing – rather than vanishing after its pure running time. In film form and production history, Mirror bares an artist immersed in the movement of memory, illuminating the representational systems that give shape and meaning to remembering.

November 18, 1985. Stockholm. I am ill. Bronchitis, and sometimes monstrous at the back of my head and in my muscles, which are pressing onto the nerves and giving me an awful pain in the neck and shoulders. Cold and cough. And the film has to be synchronized. And time is going.[10]

Tarkovsky invoked the image of a mosaic, though his illustrations for the measuring and marking of cinematic time more closely correspond to dimensional metaphors than those of surfaces, as he would define with Sculpting in Time. Title translations into English, German, Italian and Chinese further emphasize movement and shape in the sculpting, capturing, sealing, and engraving of time, highlighting his deep engagement with temporality and memory work in cinema. More so than his other films, Mirror manifests a great stride of intention introduced in the book’s opening paragraphs, in his desire to understand the self through exploration and doubt, reaching for new ways of seeing and knowing; he theorized cinema as not only the greatest art form to pursue this goal but the one most intrinsically and consummately wed to memory, believing “if the external, emotional structure of a film is based on the author’s memory, when the impressions of his personal life have been transmuted into screen images, then the film will have the power to move those who see it.”[11]

Tarkovsky’s film-theoretical preoccupations are intrinsically philosophical. Paul Ricœur emphasizes the self in memory, writing that in remembering something, one remembers oneself; memory assures the temporal continuity of the person, allowing movement and while memories are organized into levels of meaning, as Ricœur described, “like archipelagos, sometimes separated by gulfs,” they also move continuously.[12] If memory moves, as Ricœur suggests, the way to articulate that movement is primarily through the shape of narrative, providing terra firma to an otherwise drifting continuum of memory in time’s flow.[13] Tarkovsky’s theory of emotional structure relates to poetics in aesthetic organization, resembling philosophical inquiries that align with inherently circular aporias – particularly those that, despite their separation by gaps, intervals or “gulfs,” revolve with beginning-middle-end structures. While Ricœur sought to emphasize the phenomenology of time, Tarkovsky’s artistic investigation of the self in narrative circuities and contradictions survive through their fictionalization. Even more so, fiction tends to respond by imaginative variations on time, which is the strength of Mirror in its subjective, emotional structure. Virginia Woolf even wrote about these kinds of gulfs in describing distance and the unwritable in her own work. These gaps – meaning, spaces “on the far side of a gulf” must exist to be able to express the conscious and the unconscious in some kind of navigable route; the distance between here and there – and reaching for form itself is what defines its shape, and “only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable.”[14] That distance is what necessitates and formulates a structure, circular or not.

Looking at the formulation of Mirror’s film diegesis this way (narrative-as-remembering), the film is carried through the vessel of character Alexei (as a child, adolescent and off-screen adult), who serves as a vehicular avatar for Tarkovsky as he navigates temporal and spatial shifts. The articulation of that narrative is conveyed through the fragmentation, ellipses, and sensations of what it looks, sounds, and feels like to remember, so Tarkovsky’s voice as an artist is more so dialogic in this sense, locating and placing the self in its sheer movement – and that movement (the movement in remembering) is what gives Mirror shape and form. Its curves and contours are liminal, ethereal and in flux: in joining character identities (Margarita Terekhova performs the roles of both Alexei’s mother Maria/Masha/Maroussia and wife Natalia, while Ignat Daniltsev doubles as adolescent Alexei and Ignat, Alexei’s son); in the chromatic transference of color to black-and-white film stocks as an expression of emotive tonalities rather than explicit temporal or locational indications; and a reliance on personal specificities that necessitate biographical pretense to elucidate meaning, where fibers of reimagination are elaborately laced with intricate veracity to memory’s recollection – down to rebuilding a replica of a childhood home to film scenes in and planting buckwheat in the yard ahead of shooting schedule to recreate the blossoming snow-covered field as Tarkovsky remembered it.[15] The linkages between image (immediacy, representation) and memory (recollection of something past) can be understood as a continuum between two poles rather than distinct and opposing possibilities, substantiating Tarkovsky’s artistic motives in the legitimization of his own continuity through the film’s very own movement, which cycles between both poles in a kind of slow-flow whirlpool.[16] While the narrative premise for Mirror is a dying poet and “the story of his thoughts, memories, and dreams,” Tarkovsky also wrote that cinema itself is an “expression of the author’s thoughts and feelings.”[17] Merging screen presence with screen author, Mirror is a thesis film for Tarkovsky. He enfolds continuity within the self’s inner movement through a Proustian diegesis, one that coaxes the prismatic but phantom residues for self-reflection – the moments, prints, traces, and remnants of the metaphysical, the elemental, the atmospheric. For Tarkovsky, remembering is locating, and finding is a matter of marking time at the illusory measure of consciousness’ meter.

December 5, 1985. Paris. Severe pains. Yesterday (every Wednesday) I was given chemotherapy (for the third time). I feel terrible. [18]

Scholar Mary Ann Doane eloquently summarizes how film “provides an abstract space inhabited by a virtual body and invites a form of figurative inhabitation by the spectator. The rules of continuity editing dictate that this space must appear navigable and inhabitable, its directions securely orienting a spectator.”[19] Continuity is secured through these rules; otherwise, it is another approach altogether, fulfilling the expectations of a viewer in another way. Indicating, perhaps, a more interpretive presentation of continuity, Tarkovsky wrote, “A true artistic image gives the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings.”[20] Moving away from the constructs of the classical laws he studied at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (previously VGIK, the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography during Tarkovsky’s lifetime), he deviates from Kuleshov and Eisenstein, orienting the spectator through a narrative tension, what he claimed gave movement to the medium — a voltage of cohesion through a circulatory system in the pursuit of an inner temporality made through its own film rhythms and time-pressure.[21] The course of time (not necessarily its duration) is expressed as a rhythm, where editing is not through montage but in “joining” together the rhythm that already exists within the frame and accentuating it into a continuity of its own accord, its own inner logic. In the tradition of inwardness via Ricœur – ego sum qui memini, ego animus – Tarkovsky’s adherence to the phenomenology of individual memory reaches to articulate temporality from within the self and thus, in Mirror, within the film frame in a wholly subjective manner.[22] This subjectivity is mimetic of experiential temporality in its most natural life-narrative way, proving the film’s resolute connection with viewers who identify with the film’s time sense, regardless of estrangements in autobiography. Despite Mirror’s early criticism that dismissed it as an elitist, private pursuit in conveying temporality, Tarkovsky reminds us of his social ambitions, writing, “Poetic reasoning is closer to the laws by which thought develops” and that “film material can be joined together in another way” that allows the viewer to be “a participant in the process.”[23] In the opening pages of his book he pores over personal letters from those who responded positively to Mirror as confirmation of the film’s artistic success, a celebration that “if the vision of the world that has gone into the film turns out to be one that other people recognize as a part of themselves that up till now has never been given expression, what better motivation could there be for one’s work.”[24]

The most recognizable version of this time sense is his use of the long take, which only became more pronounced in his production methods as his filmography progressed following Mirror. In Stalker (1979), he pursued the illusion of continuity further, unspooling movement as if thread through a single take, despite its myriad of cuts (one hundred forty-two shots in 163 minutes, whereas Mirror has about two hundred in 106 minutes). The illusion of temporality is central not only to Tarkovsky’s approach, of course, but to the mechanics of cinema altogether. The single, unbroken shot produces the effect of temporal continuity, of “real time,” in resisting the cut and persisting toward a lived experience of time as it occurs, recalling Andre Bazin’s “continuum of reality.”[25] Tarkovsky’s long takes, particularly in Mirror, are typified by the careful choreography of tracking and dollying movements motivated by objects (lamps, lights, tables) or portals through space (doorframes, hallways, thresholds); if these takes include actors at all, he is often tracking their escape from, rather than their entrance into, the frame. Scholar András Bálint Kovács describes these as long traveling shots that “take place mainly in interiors or large apartments or houses with several rooms, creating the impression of someone invisible traversing these rooms.”[26] Emphasizing presence through absence, the effect allows the viewer’s virtual body to move through spatialized time.

December 10, 1985. Stockholm. The doctor told me that on Friday 13th (a great day to choose) I have to go and see the lung specialist.[27]

As a leading authority on Tarkovsky’s oeuvre, Robert Bird deftly observed that he strove to make films without tense.[28] Tarkovsky gave few indications of time separation or ruptures in narrative sequencing. Flashbacks, dreams, or visions were rarely designated or defined in a typified manner, particularly so in Mirror. He also strove to extend this lack of tense within an art historical context, to suture representational systems that conceptualize and communicate temporality, believing “the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present.”[29] In Mirror, he activates Alexander Pushkin’s letter to Pyotr Chaadayev, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Ginevra de’ Benci” (portrait of a young lady with juniper), and musical compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, and Henry Purcell — citations he deemed “timeless” references linked to a universality in art and literature’s stream. Tarkovsky’s integration of archival documentary footage weaves fluidly between his filmed fictional sequences, threading the Spanish Civil War, Roman Karman documentary newsreels, bullfights and Soviet aviation from the 1930s, the crossing of Lake Sivash during the Perekop-Chongar Operation of the Russian Civil War, footage from Aleksandr Ivanovich Medvedkin’s Letter to a Chinese Friend (1969) and Night over China (1971).[30] He trails the Soviet soldier and civilians in global contexts, carefully selecting faces that portray suffering or displacement, inherited imagery that serves as emotional reflections of Tarkovsky’s childhood. He works as an artist-archivist in this way, placing his scripted, filmed images in context with those before him, locating himself within history in his relationship to the movement of memory; and with these images, he points at other movements — political chronologies that impel generational shifts, emigrations, exiles, displaying the increments and indices of major and minor evolutions — in a revivification of the past. “In all my pictures the theme of roots was always of great importance: links with family house, childhood, country, Earth. I always felt it important to establish that I myself belong to a particular tradition, culture, circle of people or ideas.”[31]

Of course, ultimately, a longing to hold the present despite its passage summons Freudian concerns. To conceptualize time is a desire to apprehend it – to sustain, keep, or hold it – even return to it. For Tarkovsky, the aim of conceptualizing temporality in the movement of memory through the film form was paramount. Believing film to be the highest art form, the one most capable of seizing memory, he saw his practice, in the pursuit of art, as a preparation for finality – by committing memory to film’s lasting visage. He often spoke and wrote about the source of memory as childhood, where one forms their first impressions of the world, where one yearns to return, and where “home” is. His thematic fixations with returning to the source, remembering, going back, both in memory and physically (to his homeland) is reminiscent of Derrida’s mal d’archive in the desire to reach for the past as though an illness. “With authors who wrote prose based on childhood memories, like Tolstoy, Garshin and many others…its always an attempt to atone for the past, always a form of repentance.”[32] Tarkovsky’s attempts at retrieval are most biographically visible in the loss of home and familial disruption after his defection, and his mining for memories through the making of Mirror, submarine searches that parallel Freud’s networking in uncovered memories. Nostalgia is a pain associated with home, for the incurable, the out of reach – but remembering is not only a matter of nostalgia for Tarkovsky. Despite the inaccessible, he imagined cinema as an archival, artistic practice of preparation, ghostly echoed when he even wrote of his “awareness of your own dependence on your past, like an illness that grows ever harder to bear.”[33] Particularly in Mirror, the process of remembering for Tarkovsky is a means of forming a representational document to account for his life.

December 15, 1986. Paris. If it weren’t for the pain in my arms and back, there might be some question of the chemotherapy having helped. But now I have no strength for anything – that is the problem.[34]

In December of 1985 Tarkovsky knew he had cancer. Lung cancer is what international obituaries would publish. A right bronchial tube would initialize the diagnosis, though his diaries detail treatment for what had metastasized to the spine and head. His last film, The Sacrifice, pathologizes his protagonist’s fate – a man who is cured through a mystical impasse – an impossibility in the material world. He completed the film from a hospital bed. He was equally willing to explore material limits and the unknown through spiritual dogma and religious divinity, as he was the supernatural; his films sampled levitation, witchcraft, telekinesis, zero-gravity drifts, and mysterious wafts of wind, suggestions of the spectral and haunted. The dying poet in Mirror (as well as the original portrayal of Alexander fighting fatal illness in The Sacrifice) seems an appropriate prophetic characterization in premeditating Tarkovsky’s own ailment, though the inspiration for Mirror and his oeuvre was indeed preexisting. The desire to return and hold time, to grasp temporality through remembering, was a drive that compelled his work into existence early on. This toll of mortality was not lost on Robert Bird in his elegy to Tarkovsky, a meditation on scholarship, artistry, and illness in his posthumously published 2020 essay “The Omens: Tarkovsky, Sacrifice, Cancer.” Finding himself reflecting on his own diagnosis, Bird wrote in eerie kismet with Tarkovsky’s lyricism, which paralleled his own contention with meaning in memory and loss, reflecting that despite the devasting inevitability that grave illness brings, victims of cancer “cannot be fit within the systems of morality, history, religion, or even tragedy. For them the only possible meaning of cancer is the painfully heightened sensation of the world in every moment of its passage.” In the face of passage, Mirror is Tarkovsky’s record, an artist’s inscription – not as reverie, but as document.