Part of what makes a Tarkovsky film so atmospheric is his unique approach to sound design. The most famous Soviet film-maker since Sergei M. Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky (the son of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky) studied music and Arabic in Moscow before enrolling in the Soviet film school V.G.I.K. It is a movie of fierce self-reflexive intensity – something like Rimbaud in his poem of childhood ‘Les poètes de sept ans’. The past and present are bound up tightly together in the last shot of the film: Maria is there, and Maria as an old woman with Maria’s two children (the old woman doubles as a grandmother). All the characters share that plight―they are tongue-tied, they stutter; overwhelmed by emotion they speak in quotes, obliquely; disheartened, they take flight. Book of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror. It was released in the Soviet Union in early 1975 at a third (then second) distribution category. An iconographic and text archive related to communication, technology and art. A cinematic iconoclast of sorts due to his distaste for symbolism, Tarkovsky stated that The Mirrorcontained “no hidden coded meaning in the film…” It was “nothing beyond the desire to tell the truth…” about his life. Yet, through sheer will, talent, faith and the miraculous transformation of art, the film achieve what Tarkovsky always strove for: “In one form or another all my films have made the point that people are not alone and abandonned in an empty universe, but are linked by countless threads with the past and the future; that as each person lives his life he forges a bond with the whole world, indeed with the whole history of mankind.” (Mirror. The movie, as Alexander Misharin noted, had too many scenes and too many themes, and they couldn’t be arranged by editor Lyudmilla Feiginova into a form that satisfied everyone. The Mirror is the closest thing in cinema to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud or C.P. Structurally, there are two moments in the past that are explored in The Mirror: 1935-36, 1942-43, and the present (c. 1974). James Macgillivray is from Toronto. Instead, Tarkovsky proposed a film version of Polish author Stanislaw Lem ’s philosophical 1961 sci-fi novel, Solaris, reasoning that a futuristic thriller set on board a remote space station would prove populist enough even for the censorious commissars of Soviet cinema. There is so much going on, so much that is startling. It is marvellously self-reflexive, yet avoids all the traps of inwardly-looking art. For Oliver Assayas, The Mirror was about film perception, a film which went beyond cinema, into “issues of memory and remembrance, and the relationship between memory and perception”. The movie principally takes place in these three time zones (discounting the newsreels), and in, primarily, two locations: a modern day apartment in Moscow, where the narrator lives (but is not seen); and the dacha (house) in the country, where the narrator lived as a boy with his mother, while his father was away at war or in the services. (see Mirror script in Russian) Notes The latest -- Utopia! The Bright, Bright Day screenplay had opened with a scene in a cemetery, and a funeral. Though unashamedly introspective, The Mirror virtually achieves a universal transcendence. Walking through The Mirror’s dacha, during The Lost Lessons of Andrei Tarkovsky, @EQZE Posted on February 17, 2018 February 17, 2018 by Ruxandra I share here some of the beautiful images captured during the 1st conference dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky’s lost lessons, by Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in Donostia/ San Sebastian. “You and I could never communicate” in ‘Mirror’ by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975, at 33mins. The 1975 film had a number of titles. En sorte que, loin de se situer par rapport à une époque dont ses œuvres refléteraient la sensibilité commune – en particulier musicale –, Olivier Assayas a eu très tôt et très clairement conscience de faire des films contre sa génération plus qu’avec elle. Tarkovsky's films include Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979). ☛ Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975. Cinema works at the point of viewing in a continuous present, yet it is always, as Jean Cocteau said, “filmed death”. He feels he hasn’t loved them enough, and this idea torments him and will not let him be.”. In 1968, after having finished Andrei Rublev, Tarkovs… Misharin recalled that he and Tarkovsky only fell out seriously once or twice. For it belongs to the literature of depth, that is, to poetry, and not to the fluent type of literature that, in order to analyze intimacy, needs other people’s stories. The Mirror (Zerkalo or The Bright, Bright Day) is a poem. Yet The Mirror never slips into easy sentimentality (although it does come close once or twice). But Andrei Tarkovsky deploys it in quite different manner from the typical TV documentary. Pier Paolo Pasolini had cast his mother to play the aged Virgin Mary in The Gospel According to Matthew (and Martin Scorsese liked to use his mother in minor roles). The film uses numerous techniques to render a life, including the juxtaposition of timelines from the past, present, and future of main character Alexei’s life, the utilization of the same actors and actresses in multiple roles, the overlay of poetry over the visu… Andrey Tarkovsky was born in Zavrozhie on the Volga in 1932. In a 1975 interview, Andrei Tarkovsky said pace The Mirror that “there are no entertaining moments in the movie. by Kitty Hunter-Blair, Austin: University of Texas Press, [1986]1987, Second Edition, p. 184). Tarkovsky was very modest about the aims of his film. For Tarkovsky, childhood is largely a lonely experience, with parental affection a rarity. A-BitterSweet-Life is a creative engine with the mission to inspire your creativity and passion for the arts, featured in Tumblr's Spotlight for Filmmakers. 1 hr 12 mins. It is a paradox that Mirror, a film which confirm the deep and unbreakable ties between people, between generations, between the personal and the political, between ourselves and the world, is essentially a film about people who fail to communicate, who have failed to communicate. The mother and the boy of the past also dwell in the present. The Film Companion, p. 110), Related: “His pasts await him” (The Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 1972), • By Philippe Theophanidis on October 3, 2012 ― Published in Art, Communication, Movies | Tagged: Bachelard, childhood, couple, home, incommunicability, melancholy, memory, past, phantasm, Russia, séparation, Tarkovsky. The concept, according to Misharin and Tarkovsky, was to trace the “spiritual organization of our society” through “the rightful fate of one person; a person whom we know and love, who is called Mother”. Andrei Tarkovsky was born in April 1932, in Zavrazhe, some 500km away from Moscow. Andrei Tarkovsky's Madonna del Parto. He made five more films in Russia: Ivan's Childhood, 1962, Andrey Rublyov, 1966, Solaris, 1972, Mirror… It is loosely autobiographical, and combines many elements, from poetry read in voiceover by the director’s father Arseny Tarkovsky, to dream sequences, flashbacks, newsreel and mnemonics (memory devices). It is no accident that they are coloured by poetry. This script was titled Confession and was proposed to the film committee at Goskino. Ignat would thus have been introduced differently. In her Film Companion book to Mirror, Natasha Synessios shared a similar view: It is a paradox that Mirror, a film which confirm the deep and unbreakable ties between people, between generations, between the personal and the political, between ourselves and the world, is essentially a film about people who fail to communicate, who have failed to communicate. A likely opening of The Mirror would have been: (1) the titles followed by (2) the long tracking shot around the narrator’s apartment, establishing the present-day location, and the narrator, then (3) the printing works scene, then (4) the mother and doctor scene in the field. There is a historical, social and personal continuity. answer to Kubrick's '2001' (though Tarkovsky himself was never too fond of it), but he ran into official trouble again with The Mirror (1975), a dense, personal web of autobiographical memories with a radically innovative plot structure. Then I may hope that my page will possess a sonority that will ring true―a voice so remote within me, that it will be the voice we all hear when we listen as far back as memory reaches, on the very limits of memory, beyond memory perhaps, in the field of the immemorial. The present exists beside the past, not only in dreams and memories, but also in people, in their faces, personalities and actions. With ‘Mirror’ Tarkovsky relentlessly strips off the narrative spine of filmmaking - storyline, characters, scenes, dialogues, poems, hypothesis, newsreels are instead interlaced into several different time zones so as to create an organic unity of idea and form. The newsreel footage in The Mirror is a substantial element in the movie. Filming began in September, 1973 and finished in March, 1974. In 1960 he graduated from the Soviet State Film School with his first film The Steamroller and the Violin. Behind the camera, Vadim Yusov was Tarkovsky’s regular cameraman up until Mirror. The script continually evolved, with daily rewrites (that’s normal on many movies, but The Mirror had a loose structure, which could accommodate all sorts of additions or alterations. That screenplay was shelved, later to resurface as Mirror (1975). ), Libro Port, 1994, in Japanese ISBN 4-8457-0926-0 B5 size, 512 pages. “I believe if one tells the truth, some kind of inner truth, one will always be understood”, Andrei Tarkovsky commented, pace The Mirror. It is gathered from all sorts of sources, the result of anonymous camera teams, and from so many places – throughout Russia, but also in China, in Berlin, in Spain, in Prague, and in Hiroshima. He shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. Redemption is a bit flat, it smacks of Vera Panova. The movie, though, soars above pretension and artifice by the magnitude of its passion. It is a motif out of the dumbest pop promo (don’t Queen have a video where Freddie releases a white dove?). Of course memory has to be worked upon before it can become the basis of an artistic reconstruction of the past; and here it is important not to lose the particular emotional atmosphere without which a memory evoked in every detail merely gives rise to a bitter feeling of disappointment. Stalker (1979) had to be completely reshot on a dramatically reduced T o judge from his published diaries, the 1970s were a difficult period for Andrei Tarkovsky, full of anguish, heartache, and uncertainty. The first, the oneirically definitive house, must retain its shadows. It is a ciné-poem, complete with metaphors, allusions, references, historicity, lyricism, concrete and abstract images, a number of voices, motifs and symbols, autobiography, stanzas and refrains. Part of the point of using the same actors and actresses for the mother/ wife and narrator/ son is to show that the past and present are connected and interfuse. The Mirror was not sent to Cannes (Tarkovsky and co-writer Alexander Misharin blamed Filip Yermash, Goskino’s chairman, for this). Why Are You Standing So Far Away? By leaving out school and friends, Tarkovsky presents a highly selective view of childhood. It never becomes complacent or banal. Instead, Tarkovsky relies on the viewer’s knowledge of history to fill in the gaps. The narrator in The Mirror is strictly a narrator, in the technical, literary sense of the term. The Mirror also acts as the spiritual biography of an age: the eras of 1935-36 and 1942-43 are so poignantly evoked by the newsreels. The narrator was going to quote from Aleksandr Pushkin’s “The Prophet” (a favourite Tarkovsky text) and walk past a funeral at a cemetery, encouraging the narrator to muse on life and death. Het is Jean-Daniel Pollets grote doorbraak en het maakt deze film tot een meesterwerk waarnaar we eindeloos kunnen blijven kijken zonder dat de film veroudert of aan kracht inboet, zonder dat de woorden – dwingend, somber, inwijdend, doordrenkt van de immense gloed van de zon – ons ooit de indruk geven dat we ze al gehoord hebben. All the characters share that plight―they are tongue-tied, they stutter; overwhelmed by emotion they speak in … You were bolder, lighter than a bird's wing, Heady as vertigo you ran downstairs Two steps at a time, and led me Through damp lilac, into your domain On the other side, beyond the mirror. He is the narrator of the poem that is the movie. Although Arseni Tarkovsky and Maria Ivanovna were studying and working in Moscow, Andrei Tarkovsky was born in the tiny village at the confluence of rivers Volga and Nyomda. The stuttering and hypnotism scene (which opens the film) was probably going to be put somewhere in the middle of the film, because the twelve year-old Ignat is seen turning on the television in the present-day Moscow apartment. Among the thousands of mainstream (Hollywood) movies that try to depict children and childhood, very few come close to the luminous authenticity of The Mirror. The screenshots featured here all come from this YouTube copy: that’s because it features the exact same subtitles as in the 35 mm copy I saw. The Mirror is Andrei Tarkovsky’s beloved project, one he (seems to have) wanted to make for a long time (it remained his favourite movie, and closest to his concept of cinema). The most beautiful memories are those of childhood. How is it that you have such amazingly subtle understanding of all the confusion, complexity and splendour of life?”. (The newsreels, though, are roughly chronological). It does not signify life or symbolise it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness.” – Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting In Time. He is currently (2003) finishing his Masters in Architecture at Harvard Design School. 8,992 Yen (tax incl.) The concept of The Mirror dates as far back as 1964. The movie is a poetic exploration of childhood: the long dolly shots around the old house in the country and the Moscow apartment explore the spaces of childhood, the geography of memory: the table was there, the chair was here, the window was there, and so on. (Ibid., p. 29). The Mirror was not only about Tarkovsky’s past and family; there was plenty of Misharin’s background in there, too. Again, in Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky explains how memories work as some sort of artistic reconstruction: Generally people’s memories arc precious to them. As an evocation of childhood, the yearning, mystery and pain of it, The Mirror is unsurpassed in cinema. The first episodes of Mirror were written while Tarkovsky was working on Andrei Rublev. Alexander Misharin recalled that the writing process on The Mirror had been intense for a time: he and Andrei Tarkovsky had shut themselves away for three or so weeks and wrote every day. Next: tarkovsky new: 2009 LUL ... Tarkovsky explains that editing cannot be the dominant structural element of a film, as the protagonists of Soviet montage cinema (Kuleshov and Eisenstein) maintained in the 1920’s. It is no more than a straightforward, simple story. He made five more films in Russia: Ivan's Childhood, 1962, Andrey Rublyov, 1966, Solaris, 1972, Mirror, 1978 and Stalker, 1979. The Mirror, according to the script A Bright, Bright Day (Mosfilm, 1973), was going to have less documentary footage and more memories of Tarkovsky’s childhood. Q: In Mirror you have presented us your biography. As Biró emphasises, signposts in form of intertitles, change of camera angle or a switch … Their mutually-developed script initially was not approved by the film committee of Goskino, and it was only after several years of waiting that Tarkovsky would be allowed to realize The Mirror. What kind of mirror did you use? The release of Andrei Rublev was delayed until 1971. The quote reads: “A poet must stir the soul, not nurture idolaters.”. Pocket Guide, published by Crescent Moon Publishing in 2011. 03.Ağu.2012 - Spark your artistic passion. Tarkovsky also excludes a crucial part of childhood – education and school; also, the child’s relations with other children. Tarkovsky films are some of the quietest movies you’ll see. . There are no captions and no voiceovers identifying the many images and historical events. T he existence of this book was—to your humble Nostalghia.com webmasters—for several years a mere unsubstantiated rumour. Yet, they’re incredibly atmospheric and poignant. In the meantime, Tarkovsky worked as an actor and screenwriter before completing his next film, an adaptation … First Meetings Arseniy Tarkovsky Every moment that we were together Was a celebration, like Epiphany, In all the world the two of us alone. The Mirror was “extremely difficult to edit”, Andrei Tarkovsky confessed (my emphasis). Rather than being the narrator of a novel, however, The Mirror’s narrator is the narrator of poetry, because The Mirror is a ciné-poem, rather than the cinematic adaption of a novel. This script was titled Confession and was proposed to the film committee at Goskino. Over the years Tarkovsky wrote several screenplay variants, at times working with Aleksandr Misharin. The remarkable footage of the Soviet balloonists, for example, or the moving images of soldiers trudging doggedly through mud and water do not require the viewer to know all the details. This paper first appeared in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue canadienne d'études cinématographiques, Volume 11, Number 2 (Fall 2002), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and of CJFS. As of October 2012, the only Blu-ray edition available on the market is a Russian one without English subtitles. In 1968, after having finishedAndrei Rublev, Tarkovsky went to the cinematographer's resort in Repino intending to write the script for The Mirror together with Aleksandr Misharin. He was the first son of Maria Ivanovna Vishniakova and Arseni Tarkovsky. It comes as no surprise that Andrei Tarkovsky, master of Soviet cinema, turned to composer Eduard Artemiev to score his two lyrical and haunting films, The Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979), as he had done for Solaris (also available on Superior Viaduct). The post-production of The Mirror was troublesome because the first rough cuts of the movie didn’t work (and it wasn’t simply a case of the filmmakers hating the first rough cut, as they so often do). In it there can be seen a mud island with a snail on it, a syringe, a plate, a mirror, an aquarium with fishes, a sterylizer, an extractor, a religious icon, coins, some gauze, a gun, metal part, an industrial spring, a page from a calendar (28th), some metal parts, some wire, Stalker’s hand in the water (sepia). In the West, titles are not copyrighted (at least in the UK), but it would be a foolish company, however, that tried using names such as “Disney”, “MacDonald’s” or “Coca Cola” on a product or service, those corporations being notorious for the number of litigations they pursue). Confession is pretentious. In 1960 he graduated from the Soviet State Film School with his first film The Steamroller and the Violin. Tarkovsky’s Mirror is a philosophically personal and autobiographical film dealing with memory and temporality. It might have turned out self-indulgent and pretentious. Past (1935 and 1942) > Present (about 1974), Maria, the mother > Natalia, the modern wife/ mother, Children’s grandmother > Maria as an old woman (and the narrator’s mother). Cavafy, those masters of the poetry of nostalgia. Film as personal psychogeography, self-reflexive, even indulgent, recalling Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Amarcord (1973), classics of the autobiographical or personal movie genre (Ulysses’ Gaze (Theo Angelopoulos, 1995) is another). Tarkovsky also took a dim view of art’s ability to educate, too: “art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.” Art shouldn’t explain, or prove, or answer questions, Tarkovsky said. When the conception of a film is given forms that are life-like, and the concentration is on its affective function rather than on the intellectual formulae of poetic cinema (where the aim is manifestly to provide a vessel for ideas) then it is possible for the audience to relate to that conception in the light of individual experience. If the scenes were arranged in a particular pattern, Misharin said, some other scenes would be left out. He directed the first five of his seven feature films in the Soviet Union; his last two films, Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986), were produced in Italy and Sweden, respectively. And none of the characters in The Mirror refer to the footage, or even to the events depicted in the newsreels. In 1968, after having finished Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky went to the cinematographer's resort in Repino intending to write the script for The Mirror together with Aleksandr Misharin. (quoted in Mirror: The Film Companion by Natasha Synessios, London: I.B. The Mirror begins with one of the most poetic ten or fifteen minutes in cinema: from the moment where Maria is sitting on the fence, to the house on fire, then after that to the hair-washing and rain-filled room sequence. “I wanted to tell the story of the pain suffered by one man because he feels he cannot repay his family for all they have given him [Tarkovsky wrote in Sculpting in Time]. In fact I am categorically against entertainment in cinema: it is as degrading for the author as it is for the audience.” That’s a typical Tarkovskyan comment (but he’s totally, utterly wrong about entertainment, I think). In his films, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker and The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky defined a new way of looking at the world.His non-realistic, highly-charged images are a continuing source of inspiration - not only for a new generation of film-makers, but also for p It was The Bright, Bright Day (or The White, White Day) for a long time (this title comes from one of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poems). In February, 1973 Tarkovsky wrote: “I don’t like The Bright Day as a title. There was a moment of revelation when the 34 or so scenes fell into the final form. Scenes included the demolition of a church in 1939; the mother selling flowers in a market; a horse riding lesson; a scene at a ractrack; and a forest scene at night. Tarkovsky's films include Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979). The spectator has to make an effort to unravel the components of the piece, has to fill in gaps and re-order the events, but it makes sense in the end. The narrator was going to quote from Aleksandr Pushkin’s “The Prophet” (a favourite Tarkovsky text) and walk past a funeral at a cemetery, encouraging the narrator to muse on life and death. Like the poems of Rilke, Cavafy and Rimbaud, The Mirror is a dense mesh of constellations of images and memories, a veritable mnemonic banquet. Images from Zerkalo [The Mirror] (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975). The movie is one long evocation of one person’s childhood. "In "Mirror" I wanted to tell not about myself, but about my feelings, connected with the people that were close to me, about my relations with them, about my eternal compassion for them and the unrealizable sense of duty," said Andrei Tarkovsky. All I ought to say about my childhood home is just barely enough to place me, myself, in an oneiric situation, to set me on the threshold of a day-dream in which I shall find repose in the past. One can press the “CC” button at the bottom of the viewing window in order to display English captions. (tr. Andrei Tarkovsky had originally planned filming interviews with his mother with a concealed camera, using questions such as “when did you begin smoking?”, “do you like animals?”, “are you superstitious?”, “are men or women stronger, do you think?”, “do you ever have friends outside your circle?”, “do you always speak the truth?”, “what would make you especially happy now?”, “have you ever envied youth?”, “which are your favourite poems?”, “are you capable of hatred?”, “which part of your life would you say was happy?”, “what do you think about space travel?”, “do you like Bach?”, “what do you remember about the war with Spain?”, “what was the funniest thing that ever happened to you?”, “are you a good swimmer?”, “do you remember the day when you sensed you would become a mother for the first time?”, “which is your favourite season?”, “have you ever starved?”, “what do you think about war?”, “what is freedom?”, “how many years did you work at the printers?”, and “are you scared of the dark?”. There are moments of forced symbolism – the narrator releasing the bird, for instance, which is intended to relate to his death. by Maris Jolas, Beacon Press, 1994, p. 13). Een film als Méditerranée leert ons dat de tijd zich kan openen door zijn aanwezigheid te ontvouwen. He often isolates and enhances a key sound over others to … But Tarkovsky is not to referring to another studio, company or artist who might prevent him from using a title, but to the Soviet authorities. This is the key to understanding the movie. A lot of the footage is familiar from the countless documentaries on World War Two, on Russian history, on Nazi Germany, and on 20th century history (there are whole cable and satellite channels now dedicated to airing this kind of material). Instead he chooses two ages, five and twelve, in which children are still children, and not restless, disaffected, disappointed teenagers. There are further complexities: Andrei Tarkovsky’s real father reads his own poems (but the poetry in the movie is not identified as by Arseny Tarkovsky), while Tarkovsky’s own mother appears as the grandmother (Maria as an old woman), and the grandmother in the 1935-36 scenes (or she is Maria as an old woman transposed to the past). Some images correspond to a line in a poem, while the refrains and links are the shots of fire which fade to black. First, the scattered memories, which are at times enchanted and at times dreadful. One of the fan letters (which Andrei Tarkovsky quoted in his diary) enthused about The Mirror: “it is your best film, it is a film about life, the most truthful and realistic film of life that we have ever seen. In his book The Poetics of Space (originally La Poétique de l’Espace, 1958) Gaston Bachelard also wrote about the fleeing quality of memories and, consequently, about the difficulty one has to communicate what they are to others. The other script got great reviews both in and out of my school but a script coverage of the project slammed the brakes on any progress. It was, rather, ultimately a movie about feelings: about his feelings towards his loved ones and relatives, and about his own inadequacy – “my feeling of duty left unfulfilled”). There’s an enormous difference, after all, between the way you remember the house in which you were born and which you haven’t seen for years, and the actual sight of the house after a prolonged absence. So, although he is heard off-screen, interacts with characters (chiefly with Natalia), and is glimpsed briefly on his death bed, he is still not really meant to be a flesh-and-blood character like Maria, Ignat or Natalia. “His pasts await him” (The Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 1972). Some of the newsreel will be familiar (the nuclear bomb explosions require no gloss). Second, the painful gap that exists between a man and a woman: each time they make an effort to cross it, it seems to grow wider and wider.

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