The Mirror (1975) 

Before the First Frame

The Mirror (1975)

A memory refracted, a life unstitched

Start Here

What does it mean to remember—not what happened, but how it felt?

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror does not offer a story. It offers time unspooled, the echo of childhood voices, a mother blurred by distance and love, a war glimpsed from the edges. Autobiographical in source but not in form, this is a film that resists every habit of comprehension—and dares you to watch with your soul instead of your intellect.

The Journey In

You might love this film if:

• You’re drawn to poetry more than plot

• You find comfort in ambiguity and layered time

• You feel memory as something tactile, like wind or ash

• You loved 8½, Persona, or The Tree of Life
  
  

What to expect:

• Nonlinear structure oscillating between dreams, memory, and archival footage

• No clear protagonist—just a fractured self speaking from across decades

• Dialogue that reads like prayer or philosophical monologue

• Deeply personal but profoundly historical

• Long, hypnotic camera movements that blur real and unreal
  
  

Moments Worth Noticing

• The wind as a recurring presence: is it memory? spirit? the passage of time?

• Mirror imagery and reflections—what is seen, and who sees

• A woman washing her hair, filmed like a ritual

• The collapse of chronology in the father’s voice

• Recitations of poetry written by Tarkovsky’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky

• Real war footage—disruption as both historical fact and psychic wound
  
  

What Stayed With Me

• The recursive circling of birth, death, child, mother, and father in memory

• The seamless drift between color, black-and-white, and sepia like layers of perception

• That childhood is not a time but a landscape we keep walking through
  
  

What Stayed With You?

• Did the lack of narrative structure frustrate or free you?

• Were there any images you felt without being able to explain?

• What does the film suggest about memory, and whose memory we inherit?

• How do you experience time differently after watching this?

The Close Up

Reflecting on Consciousness

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975) remains one of cinema’s most enigmatic and transcendent achievements, a work both intimate and historical, formally radical and spiritually unyielding. This analysis traces the film’s layered architecture, revealing it as Tarkovsky’s most direct reckoning with memory, time, and consciousness: not as themes, but as the very substance of its form. Drawing deeply from the contours of the director’s own life, The Mirror becomes a cinematic invocation, personal yet resonant with collective experience. Its refusal of linear narrative is not decorative, but foundational: the structure itself becomes memory, becomes thought, becomes the fragmented mirror in which history and subjectivity reflect one another.

I. Film Identity and Production Context

Conceived across a decade of gestation, The Mirror was born within the Soviet Union’s state-controlled Mosfilm studio, emerging as a 107-minute Russian-language meditation that defied all convention. Co-written with Aleksandr Misharin and rooted in Tarkovsky’s wartime childhood, his relationship with his mother Maria Vishnyakova, and the verse of his poet father Arseny Tarkovsky, the film threads biography into dream. Collaborators included cinematographer Georgi Rerberg, editor Lyudmila Feiginova, and composer Eduard Artemyev, each integral to the film’s haunting sonic and visual texture.

Yet The Mirror was nearly stillborn. The project faced intense resistance from Goskino and cultural officials like Filipp Yermash, who viewed its ambiguity, non-linearity, and inward gaze as ideologically suspect. After prolonged script battles, it was released in punitive “third category” circulation, approximately 73 prints, ensuring its domestic invisibility. Financial metrics are irrelevant here; its real currency lies in its aesthetic force and afterlife. Despite initial suppression, it gathered international momentum through festival screenings, critical essays, and later home video editions (notably the Criterion Collection). It eludes genre, yet inhabits many: Autobiographical Cinema, Poetic Film, Memory Film, Oneiric Cinema, Philosophical Cinema. Its radical interiority stands as an implicit critique of Brezhnev-era Soviet culture.

II. Historical, Political, and Cultural Context

Tarkovsky’s Mirror was crafted during the so-called Era of Stagnation, a period of bureaucratic ossification and ideological rigidity. Following the crushed hopes of the 1968 Prague Spring, the Brezhnev years saw the reassertion of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, and with it, a tightening grip on the cultural imagination. Yet Tarkovsky’s turn inward, toward memory, mysticism, and loss, reads as a quiet resistance. He did not confront the regime with overt polemic; he subverted it through form. Within the sanctioned shell of a state-funded production, he layered a deeply spiritual, anti-materialist vision. The trauma of WWII is rendered not in patriotic heroics but in aching domestic fragments. Stalinism is never named, but its shadow saturates the air. The Mirror dares to privilege subjective truth over state myth, evoking rural worlds on the verge of erasure and a past that refuses linear redemption.

III. Director Profile and Authorial Context

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986), son of the poet Arseny Tarkovsky and editor Maria Vishnyakova, carried the war inside him from childhood. A graduate of VGIK under Mikhail Romm, Tarkovsky shaped a cinema of time, spirit, and interiority, never reducible to ideology. The Mirror, his fourth feature, marks a point of artistic inflection: abandoning even the mythic frameworks of Andrei Rublev or the speculative conceit of Solaris, he dives instead into autobiography as abstraction. His aesthetic is unmistakable:

• Time sculpted through patient, ritualized long takes
  
  

• Compositions imbued with painterly stillness, echoing classical iconography
  
  

• Recurring visual lexicon: water, fire, wind, thresholds, mirrors
  
  

• A fluid dance between color, black and white, and sepia
  
  

• Aural complexity weaving Artemyev’s electronic textures, natural ambiance, silence, poetry, and Bach
  
  

Though often linked to Bergman or Bresson, Tarkovsky’s truest interlocutors were poets, painters, and saints. His refusal to compromise led to constant institutional friction, eventual exile, and global canonization. The Mirror is widely regarded as his most distilled and ungovernable vision.

IV. Influences and Legacy

The film breathes the rhythms of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poetry, not as adornment but as structure. It draws from Russian literary interiority, Orthodox metaphysics, the silence of icons, and the lyricism of classical painting. Against Soviet materialism, The Mirror elevates subjective vision, asserting that the soul, not the system, must be cinema’s axis.

Its influence, while difficult to trace directly due to its idiosyncrasy, echoes in the work of directors such as Lars von Trier, Terrence Malick, and Andrey Zvyagintsev. It demonstrated that cinema could mirror consciousness without narrative compromise. Though unrewarded at release, it became a cornerstone of international film curricula, a touchstone of poetic cinema, and a lasting testament to artistic defiance. For collaborators like Terekhova, Rerberg, and Artemyev, it became defining. For viewers, it became a place to return to.

V. Audience and Critical Reception

Reception was polarized. Within the USSR, official response ranged from confusion to hostility. Its ideological nonconformity and formal opacity led to its categorization as culturally marginal. Viewers were either alienated or transfixed. It drew bafflement and walkout, but also cult devotion among the intelligentsia.

Internationally, recognition was gradual. Early critics admired its beauty but struggled with its opacity and cultural specificity. Over time, aided by home video and Tarkovsky’s growing legend, the film underwent a critical reawakening. What was once “difficult” became “essential.” Today, The Mirror stands among Tarkovsky’s most celebrated works—a prime case of artistic reception transcending institutional recognition. Its belated embrace in post-Soviet Russia reflects both cultural trauma and aesthetic reclamation.

VI. Formal and Thematic Analysis

Tarkovsky’s Mirror is not about memory. It is memory. Its structure rejects causality in favor of association, reflection, and recurrence. Time folds inward. Childhood, adulthood, history, and dream intersect not through plot but through sensation. The film dissolves genre to create a psychic architecture—part recollection, part invocation.

Visual form and emotional logic are one:

• Long takes slow the viewer into memory’s rhythm
  
  

• Color shifts mark temporal slippage or inner states
  
  

• Water, fire, and mirrors serve as thresholds between worlds
  
  

• Space holds affect: the country dacha as nostalgia, the apartment as enclosure
  
  

• Sound—poetry, music, ambient noise—becomes the voice of the unconscious
  
  

Terekhova’s dual role embodies memory’s unreliability, emotional projection, and unresolved maternal entanglement. The tone is elegiac, but never inert. Anxiety, reverence, tenderness, and awe move in subterranean waves. At its heart, The Mirror is a meditation on the nature of memory, familial fracture, historical haunting, and the redemptive (or destructive) power of art.

VII. Deep Scene Deconstruction

Several scenes exemplify Tarkovsky’s formal method:

• The Mother’s Levitation (B&W): A moment suspended in dream logic. Light diffuses through the room. She floats, untethered. Memory’s sanctification. The mother as icon, as longing, as miracle.
  
  

• The Burning Barn (Color): Childhood recollection rendered mythic. Rain and fire collide. Awe and terror meet. The scene burns itself into the viewer, as into the mind of the child.
  
  

• The Printing Press Error (Mixed): Stark, anxious realism. Noise, pressure, failure. Soviet bureaucracy laid bare in tonal contrast to the dreamlike past. A sequence of claustrophobic friction.
  
  

Each scene embodies its own temporality, its own temperature of remembrance.

VIII. Synthesis and Reflective Notes

The film’s structural radicalism is not aesthetic posturing—it is philosophical method. By collapsing chronology and rejecting narrative closure, The Mirror resists ideological containment. The tension between subjective interiority and objective history is not resolved but held open. Tarkovsky’s control is total, yet the effect is ambiguity, not certainty. This is his rebellion.

Forged in a climate of repression, the film achieves a form of freedom, not in content, but in form. Its haunting beauty, elusive meanings, and disorienting honesty position it as a film that will never age because it was never timely to begin with. It exists in a zone apart: a vessel for the sacred, the broken, the remembered.

Conclusion

The Mirror is less a film than an incantation. It does not ask to be watched, it asks to be entered, absorbed, and carried. From fragments of biography, Tarkovsky constructs a universal language of loss, wonder, and time’s unraveling. Its radical openness, its poetic silence, its refusal to explain—these are not flaws, but its invitation.

Fifty years on, in an era reckoning with truth, trauma, and historical collapse, The Mirror remains eerily present. It is a film not of its time, but for those willing to feel time differently. It does not close, it lingers. A mirror not of what we see, but of what we carry.

After the Credits

The Mirror (1975)

A soul seen sideways, across fog and fire

Let’s Begin with Not Knowing

You don’t have to understand the film. You have to let it affect you.

Maybe nothing is clear. Maybe that’s the point.

What matters is what it stirs. What shifted in you.

What We Might Share

Some openings for reflection—follow whichever thread pulls:

• What did the film feel like—emotionally, bodily, atmospherically?

• Which image or moment lingered in your mind the longest?

• Did anything in the film resemble a memory of your own—if not in fact, then in feeling?

• How does Tarkovsky handle time? Does the film invite you to see your past differently?

• What role does poetry play in the film? Could this have been a poem instead of a film?

• Who is the film about? Who is speaking? Who is watching?

• What is the relationship between the personal (the family) and the historical (war, Stalinism)?

• How does Tarkovsky use the mirror—literally and metaphorically? What reflections are offered? What is withheld?

A Quiet Return

Sometimes we walk out of a film not with answers, but with a new kind of silence.

That silence is part of the film too.