Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky assembled newsreel footage, poems written by his father, and episodes inspired from his own childhood in the production of The Mirror, his most personal and, in the sense that there is little semblance of the conventions of traditional plot structure, least accessible film. Suggesting a stream-of-consciousness, he converges planes of reality to capture the temporal memory of a narrator nearing his death. The shaping of these moments is not constricted to what was experienced directly by the narrator, however – as children run to examine a burning barn, for example, Tarkovsky holds the camera on a bottle falling off of a table. There is no way that the narrator could have seen the bottle fall, of course, but memory is not merely the evocation of what one has seen, but of what one has lived in. Tarkovsky’s settings, most specifically the natural ones, seem to carry visceral memories like these in their very roots. In Stalker, for example, the guide often refers to his previous experiences within the Zone, making the audience not only consider the present, but imagine what has occurred within the space in the past. It is not mere nostalgia, rather a suggestion of spiritual transcendence. The Mirror, then, in examining a multitude of histories that resonate to the narrator simultaneously, is the director’s purest expression of memory.
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