The Mirror of Time and Memory

The Mirror of Time and Memory.

Live in the house-and the house will stand.

I will call up any century,

Go into it and build myself a house…

With shoulder blades like timber props

I help up every day that made the past,

With a surveyor’s chain I measure time

And traveled through as if across the Urals.

I only need my immortality

For my blood to go on flowing from age to age.

I would readily pay with my life

For a safe place with constant warmth

Were it not that life’s flying needle leads me on Through the world like a thread.

Arseniy Tarkovsky

The films of Andrey Arsen’evitch Tarkovsky fall into the separate genre of cinematic creations: they are more than drama or psychological thriller, more than philosophical cinema. Although Tarkovsky’s work has been deeply influenced with such prominent film directors as Kurosawa, Bunuel or Antonioni, the poetry of his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, Boris Pasternak and many other Russian poets and writers, his films manage to form something completely unique to the mind of their director, convey a diaphanous psychological message. His cinematography is a celebration, a theatre of “imprinted time,” trapped with the skillful techniques of the plot-creating and camera usage of the director. As if in the ‘Zone’ of his Staler the art of Andrey Tarkovsky freezes the moment, the gasp of time, enclosed into almost sculpture-like solid creation that opens up to the viewer its nostalgic breeze. The time exists, it crystallizes in form of faerie, elfish arabesque figures and characters and yet it evaporates filling the space with a sense of solitude and sorrow for the past.

Tarkovsky’s film Zerkalo or otherwise known as Mirror is a story of the human life; it is not quite a celebration of it; but rather a depiction of the web of the human senses. It is an autobiographic tribute to his abandoned by her husband during the war years mother, filled with the feelings of grief and amusement with her zealous self-sacrifice for the sake of her children. The narrator, or perhaps Tarkovsky himself, is trying to appease his guilty with indifference and scorn conscience with the memories of his childhood and attempts to relive or even incarnate the experiences of his past. The problems of the past are reflected and repeated in the present. Remembering Proust, Tarkovsky describes the effect of finishing Mirror:” Childhood memories which for years had given me no peace suddenly vanished, as if they had melted away, and at last I stopped dreaming about the house where I had lived so many years before .” As all of Tarkovsky’s films, Zerkalo is hard to be tied to any particular culture, it is universal, global in its meaning and message it conveys and yet fully comprehendible only by someone who experienced the described reality of pre-war Soviet times of Stalin’s repressions and the war itself.

The film opens with a prologue that shows life footage of a boy being treated from stuttering. In the end of the prologue, the treated patient says, ”I can speak now”; the entire essence of Zerkalo as “the remembrances of a man who recalls the most important moments in his life, a man dying and acquiring a conscience. ” is presented in this short sequence. This little sequel is symbolic of the authors desire to be able to speak freely of the truth that is being uncovered in front of the narrator’s eyes. And as a miraculously cured boy suddenly discovers his ability to talk, the author unveils and admits the truth of his life to himself.

Zerkalo incorporates three time schemes, one changing the other, that together constitute an autobiography of the artist, and a biography of two Soviet generations within a wide-ranging context of Russian, European, and world history, linked together subjectively by dreams, memory, time, and art itself. The short sequences from the pre-war years are being replaced by the more modern ones, i.e. 1970’s times, which are in turn suddenly replaced by the director with to the themes of war itself. The off-screen monologue introduces the recollections of the narrator’s childhood and his adult life that are being elucidated with the visualry of the images on the screen. The leaps between the scenes are perceived smoothly and line up into one picture. However, the view point that is being presented has an unusual approach: the past that is being shown is built