Andrej Tarkovskij :: The Mirror

The wooden house in Yuryevets had been gone for decades, nothing left of it but a depression in the ground where the foundation once sat.

Andrei Tarkovsky had it rebuilt there, on that same hollow, board for board, as close to memory as a construction crew could manage, and had the field beside it resown with buckwheat because that was what had grown there when he was a boy. Then he brought his own mother to see it. The camera was already running. What she does in front of that reconstructed house is not a performance. It is an old woman meeting her own erased life, standing again, and nobody on set could have written her face.

That gesture is the whole of Zerkalo in miniature, so it is worth starting there rather than with the plot, which resists being started with anyway. A dying man remembers, or half-remembers, his mother and his wife, played by the same actress so that the two women blur on purpose; his own childhood war years; his father's absence; newsreel footage of Sivash, of Spanish refugees, of a stratospheric balloon, spliced in as though memory kept its own archive next to the personal one. Chronology gives up early and does not come back. The film asks to be entered the way memory actually works, not the way stories are usually told.

Goskino's chief, Filipp Ermash, rejected the finished film in the summer of 1974 as incomprehensible, and then, within months, approved it without a single cut, an inconsistency the Soviet bureaucracy never bothered to explain to itself. It opened in April 1975 with almost no advertising, the kind of release that is really a form of hiding a film in plain sight. And yet, by the accounts of Tarkovsky's own collaborators, the cinemas that did show it kept filling anyway, word moving faster than the state's willingness to print posters.

There is a story from an early screening, for critics rather than the public, that says more about the film's real difficulty than any essay has managed since. The room argued for hours, hunting the hidden meaning, certain there had to be one buried deep enough to justify the argument. A cleaning woman had been waiting the whole time to do her job. Eventually she asked how much longer they would be. Someone told her they were discussing a very complicated film. She said she had seen it too, and had understood everything. Whether or not it happened exactly this way, the story has survived because it is true in the way that matters: the film's difficulty was never really where the critics kept looking for it.

The father the whole film aches around, mostly absent from the frame, is present nonetheless in a way fiction cannot fake: the voice reciting poetry over several of its most exposed passages belongs to Arseny Tarkovsky, the director's actual father, a serious poet in his own right, reading his own lines, including "Pervye svidaniya," First Dates, written years before the film and now folded into his son's account of a childhood he had largely watched from a distance. A film about a father's absence carries, inside itself, the father's real voice. Few directors have ever staked a film on a detail that unguarded.

Western readings have mostly reached for Jung, for dream logic, for the essay-film as a genre unto itself, all of it defensible and none of it quite where the Russian-language criticism has tended to sit. Maya Turovskaya, who knew Tarkovsky personally and had access to the Mosfilm archives few Western critics ever saw, wrote about the film less as a puzzle than as a native form of remembering, closer to how a Russian household actually keeps its dead and its absent close, through object, through repetition, through a house you rebuild rather than a plot you resolve. That is a different film from the one usually described abroad. It is also, probably, the truer one.

None of the film's difficulty required solving in the end. A mother stood in front of a house that no longer existed, in a field that had been made to remember its own crop, and nothing about her face needed subtitles.