(tr. 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. Martyrology is better, only nobody knows what it means; and when they find out they won’t allow it. 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. 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”. Yet The Mirror never slips into easy sentimentality (although it does come close 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, according to the script A Bright, Bright Day (Mosfilm, 1973), was going to have less documentary footage and more memories of Tarkovsky’s childhood. The movie, though, soars above pretension and artifice by the magnitude of its passion. Some images correspond to a line in a poem, while the refrains and links are the shots of fire which fade to black. Images from Zerkalo [The Mirror] (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975). Since his death in 1986, Andrei Tarkovsky has become increasingly recognized as one of the great masters of world cinema. The complete film is available to watch on YouTube (at the time of this writing). “I believe if one tells the truth, some kind of inner truth, one will always be understood”, Andrei Tarkovsky commented, pace The Mirror. @Andrei Tarkovsky on the set of Stalker. Like the poems of Rilke, Cavafy and Rimbaud, The Mirror is a dense mesh of constellations of images and memories, a veritable mnemonic banquet. 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. 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. This must be the ordinary story of a life, with its hopes, its faith, its grief and its joys”. The title was taken from a 1942 poem by his father, Arseny Tarkovsky. There are moments of forced symbolism – the narrator releasing the bird, for instance, which is intended to relate to his death. All the characters share that plight―they are tongue-tied, they stutter; overwhelmed by emotion they speak in quotes, obliquely; disheartened, they take flight. Moreover, even more so than in The Mirror itself, the script deals with the romantic legacy of magic mirrors and its possible kinship to the art of cinematography. (And, to reinforce that, The Mirror quotes from poetry far more than novels). 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. 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. 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. True, Andrei Tarkovsky does simplify things by missing out the agony of adolescence. Except maybe through artistic expression: We can perhaps tell everything about the present, but about the past! Some of the newsreel will be familiar (the nuclear bomb explosions require no gloss). It does not signify life or symbolise it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness.” – Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting In Time. [Andrei Arsenʹevich Tarkovskii; Arsenii Aleksandrovich Tarkovskii; Aleksandr Misharin; Margarita Terekhova; Oleg Yanovsky; Moskovskaia kinostudiia 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. There are no captions and no voiceovers identifying the many images and historical events. The most beautiful memories are those of childhood. 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. If one thinks of The Mirror poetically, then the form – the overlapping, the montages, the merging of imagery and events from the past and present – becomes clear. 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. He made five more films in Russia: Ivan's Childhood, 1962, Andrey Rublyov, 1966, Solaris, 1972, Mirror… There is a historical, social and personal continuity. That screenplay was shelved, later to resurface as Mirror (1975). Part of what makes a Tarkovsky film so atmospheric is his unique approach to sound design. 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. It is no more than a straightforward, simple story. . (tr. The present exists beside the past, not only in dreams and memories, but also in people, in their faces, personalities and actions. 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. 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. One can press the “CC” button at the bottom of the viewing window in order to display English captions. The movie is one long evocation of one person’s childhood. Instead, Tarkovsky relies on the viewer’s knowledge of history to fill in the gaps. 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. 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. The concept of The Mirror dates as far back as 1964. The Mirror is the closest thing in cinema to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud or C.P. is better, but obscure.” It’s not just in pre-1989 Soviet Russia where filmmakers were forbidden to use a title by state institutions. The Bright, Bright Day screenplay had opened with a scene in a cemetery, and a funeral. 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. 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 was a moment of revelation when the 34 or so scenes fell into the final form. In Mirror Tarkovsky took this intuitive approach to creativity to an almost paradoxically methodological extreme. 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. In a 1975 interview, Andrei Tarkovsky said pace The Mirror that “there are no entertaining moments in the movie. 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. First Meetings Arseniy Tarkovsky Every moment that we were together Was a celebration, like Epiphany, In all the world the two of us alone. 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). Andrei Tarkovsky was born in April 1932, in Zavrazhe, some 500km away from Moscow. In his book Sculpting in Time the Russian filmmaker wrote: Anyone who wants can look at my films as into a mirror, in which he will see himself. 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. Is this a mirror-like Stendhal’s, a mirror which travels down the road, or is it a mirror in which you have found yourself, learnt something about yourself that … 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. "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. Why Are You Standing So Far Away? Stalker (1979) had to be completely reshot on a dramatically reduced Tarkovsky’s Mirror is a philosophically personal and autobiographical film dealing with memory and temporality. 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). Een film als Méditerranée leert ons dat de tijd zich kan openen door zijn aanwezigheid te ontvouwen. But much of it will be unknown to many in the audience. I am usually good with critiquing my work and taking coverages seriously but this coverage felt rushed, featured spelling errors, and made notes that showed that the reader didn't read it more than twice. As Biró emphasises, signposts in form of intertitles, change of camera angle or a switch … He made five more films in Russia: Ivan's Childhood, 1962, Andrey Rublyov, 1966, Solaris, 1972, Mirror, 1978 and Stalker, 1979. Only a few movies – like The Magnificent Ambersons or Akira – have a similarly miraculous first reel. 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. 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 concept of Mirror dates as far back as 1964, when Tarkovsky wrote down his idea for a film about the dreams and memories of a man, though without the man appearing on screen as he would in a conventional film. By leaving out school and friends, Tarkovsky presents a highly selective view of childhood. These episodes were published as a short story under the title A White Day in 1970. And none of the characters in The Mirror refer to the footage, or even to the events depicted in the newsreels. According to Andrei Tarkovsky’s diary, The Mirror was allocated 622,000 roubles (a small budget; about $2.5 million) and 7,500 metres of Kodak film. As Misharin told it, Tarkovsky’s wife Larissa had sewn a kind of sack with pockets in it, which they hung on the wall and placed the scenes in each pocket. (Editor Lyudmilla Feiginova does employ one of the standard devices of TV news and documentaries: she and sound man Semyon Litvinov add studio sound effects to footage that was shot silent (as a lot of it was).). 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. (But although The Mirror would be “a film built in its entirety on personal experience”, it wouldn’t, as Andrei Tarkovsky maintained in Sculpting in Time, be Andrei Tarkovsky talking about himself. As Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in Sculpting in Time, “a great deal was finally thought out, formulated, built up, only in the course of shooting”). 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). It is no accident that they are coloured by poetry. Book of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror. What kind of mirror did you use? The 1975 film had a number of titles. But Andrei Tarkovsky deploys it in quite different manner from the typical TV documentary. “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]. T he existence of this book was—to your humble Nostalghia.com webmasters—for several years a mere unsubstantiated rumour. In 1960 he graduated from the Soviet State Film School with his first film The Steamroller and the Violin. Tarkovsky's films include Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979). After that, the post-production of The Mirror continued without problems. 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. 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). Tarkovsky was given a budget of 622,000 Soviet ruble and 7500 meters of Kodak film, corresponding to roughly three takes assuming a film length of 3000 meters. They employed a common practice among co-writers: they wrote scenes on their own, then swapped them and edited the other’s scenes. 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”). Tauris Publishers, 2001, p. 110). The first, the oneirically definitive house, must retain its shadows. 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. 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 the meantime, Tarkovsky worked as an actor and screenwriter before completing his next film, an adaptation … 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 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. 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