“Mirroring Tarkovsky”, a massive retrospective of the work of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, opens this month at the British Film Institute, with lectures and screenings of his significant films, from Ivan’s Childhoodto Andrei Rublev, Stalker,Solarisand Mirror. The director worked under the Soviet system, but the concomitant restrictions on subject matter and film stock seem only to have made his work more ingenious — and famed for long, uncut takes. The new digital print of Mirrordeserves a big-screen viewing, with its smorgasbord of memories in dream, drama and newsreel form from the life of a dying poet, Alexei
Mirror was originally rejected by the authorities in 1974 for being “incomprehensible”, but since then its reputation has rightly grown. The film is perhaps Tarkovsky’s most autobiographical; his father, Arseny, recites his own poetry, and his relatives have parts, as well as the compelling Margarita Terekhova, who somewhat disturbingly plays Alexei’s mother and wife.
With its exquisite images, the film is an intellectual’s Inside Out, more about building mood (as well as a personal history of Russia from the Thirties to the Seventies) than about plot. There are strange sights: a stammering teenager cured by a hypnotist; a country childhood; a burning barn; a Stalinist printing error; a broken marriage, all variously shown in sepia, colour or black and white. Mirror is a film you allow to wash over you, stirring thoughts with its lyrical memories.
Andrei Tarkovsky, U, 106min
Mirroring Tarkovsky, BFI, London SE1 from Oct 19, Mirror (1975)