Mirror
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky USSR 1975 105’
Russian with English subtitles | 35mm transferred to digital video
Andrei Tarkovsky drew on memories of a rural childhood before WWII for this personal, impressionistic and unconventional film poem. For perhaps his most daring experimentation with film structure, the director intersperses scenes from three eras – a childhood in the countryside, the Great War, and post-war maturity – to create a prismatic reflection of his own life and those of his parents.
Abandoning linear narrative in favour of dramatising discontinuous shards of memory (particularly relating to his mother Maria, played by Margarita Terekhova), Tarkovsky pioneered a poetic and richly allusive form. Wartime newsreel footage, self-consciously painterly compositions, indelible imagery (a field whipped suddenly by wind, a gas lantern flickering out), and the director’s mesmeric camera movements combine to create a work of cumulative, rhythmic effect. The soundtrack features music by Bach, and Tarkovsky’s father Arseny Tarkovsky reading from his own poetry. —BFI
“You’d think Mirror might be a heavy, intellectual film, but it is direct, even basic: remembering, childhood, loss, speculation… It talks to people not through words, but through images and emotions. Wonderfully shot and composed, it contains some of the most spectacular imagery ever captured on screen.” Barbara Schweizerhof
Mirror screens at Baltic in response to Saodat Ismailova’s exhibition As We Fade, and precedes the cinema weekend Kino Perestroika: Cinema of the Soviet Borderlands from 28 – 29 March.
Level 1 Cinema
Pop-up bar open for drinks from 18.00. Doors open 18:30; Film starts 18:45.
