The Mirror: Dark Surrealism of Andrei Tarkovsky
One thing that had fascinated him since his adolescence was
the power of the unconscious, which could make a stutterer speak well and help
him make himself understood. It was the power of the unconscious that could
also help any artist express himself by means of his respective form of art. All
that an artist would have to try to do in this situation was to find a way to
get access to his unconscious by grasping and effectively communicating his
lifetime mental images, thoughts, and memories to other people. It would have
to be done in a way enabling the author to apply, along with the audience, the
power of their collective conscious to building a more tangible representation
of their mental images. In the same manner, a sculptor translates his own
vision into a material form.
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932 - 1986), who had firmly positioned
himself as the finest Soviet director of the post-War period, incorporated the
most tragic moments of his life experience into a stream-of-consciousness-like
manner of narrating a story of his life, which he himself increasingly viewed
as devoid of any meaningful narrative of a story, in a film, which he called a
nightmare.
In the film – The Mirror – the author stresses his
philosophic eye he had developed to viewing life’s problems. He remembers the
moments when he as a child began to look at himself and the world around him in
the most tragic philosophical way. The tragic moments included his first
observation of his own adolescent reflection in the mirror, his first dramatic
encounter with the life and works of Leonardo Da Vinci, his first mysterious
reading of Pushkin’s letters to Chaadaev. Those were the moments that set the
path of his thoughts for years to come, making him a cursed person, doomed to
be haunted for the rest of his life by the Eternal Philosophical Questions of
humanity and particularly the Cursed Questions that challenged the Russian
aristocratic intellectuals since the 19th century.
Not surprisingly, the film is punctuated by philosophical
poetry of the author’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky, the invisible narrator
recurrently asking the important questions of life. The Mirror is Tarkovsky's
own reflection on these questions and more. The surreal character of the film
first of all is intended to let the viewers know that the author does not fully
understand the overall meaning of those images, thoughts, and memories. The
viewers are called upon to join the author in his attempt to make sense of life
in general and of his own life in particular.
As the viewers are called to join forces with the film’s
director to build a tangible presentation of our perception of reality, the
film makes a statement of profound philosophical significance intuited by the
artist and delivered in his unique artistic way. The mirror here refers to the
consciousness of man, stating that our shared perception of reality is mere
reflection of reality, the true sense of which can only be deciphered by
decoding the images in our mind in the same manner as we try to interpret the
meaning of our dreams. Thus is the oneiric nature of the film and A.
Tarkovsky’s reference to it as a nightmare.
Given the autobiographical character of the film, it can be
viewed as the author’s confession, indeed. But that is a strange confession.
The author confesses his guilt but admits that not only he cannot be judged by
it, but that he has come to a hint of understanding the reason for it, as well.
However, it was just a hint and the author did not feel entitled to make sense
of it all on his own. That is why he presents his flow of consciousness in form
of his dreams and memories as such, using all his talent and mastery of his
cinematographic art to help the viewers enter his consciousness and experience
his death bed nightmares the way he experienced them.
The hope on the author’s part is that the people who take
efforts to penetrate his troubled unconscious will be able to co-author along
with him something that will help all other people eschew suffering and pain,
which he had inherited from his parents and passed on to his wife and children
later in a sort of a spiteful circle.
The author viewed himself as a mirror, which could not help
reflecting the surrounding reality and subsequently spend the rest of his life
being haunted by those reflected images that take the form of one endless
nightmare, made of wartime-newsreel-footage-like mental pictures and
voiceover-audio-like voices, including that of his father. Interspersed with
moments that most resemble a traditional narrative, the author’s memories are
mostly made up of scenes that do not come in a chronological order and often
feature dreamlike qualities. As such, they are often not recognizable to other
people, who are not familiar with the life of the author, and therefore seem even
more meaningless to them.
Strangely enough, but the author tacitly admitted that he
himself could no longer make any sense out of that nightmare, called his
thoughts and life memories, and asked the viewers to help him out, opening to
them in an artistic way his own mind, his own unconscious in a faint hope to be
able to make himself understood.
The Mirror’s surrealism is dark. It is dark not only because
the author feels helpless in the face of life, like when the barn burned down
and all they could do was watch. It is dark in the face of death as well, even
though since his childhood the author was not entirely strange to religious
outlook. The author has no hope of eternal light or life after death. Partly
why he is in need of other people’s help, is the author’s lack of religious
faith, which he had lost eventually in the course of his life after having been
tragically seduced even as a child by the philosophic and scientific trickery
of the genius of the archetype of the Renaissance Man. To him death was the
end.
The Mirror is a film about the final hours of the author – a
dying man in his forties – that are being spent in hallucinations about his
childhood and his mother, about himself as a child and a grown man, and about
his lover. The brightest moments of his life were floating across his mind
where he could no longer distinguish between himself as the child and as the
father. He could no longer distinguish between his mother, his wife, and his
lover. All became one. Everything was intermingled and confused. The mirror of
his consciousness was dimming. He saw himself and his little sister being led
away by their grandma across the insanely beautiful evening meadow on a forest
edge with rich deep green grass sleepily drowning in translucent milky fog. He
remembered himself surrounded by that still beauty of the silent nature as they
were walking in the grass and the moment he decided to break that sleepy spell
by a defiant yell that pierced the air. Perhaps, it was that piercing shriek
that brought this particular memory to the surface of his dimming
consciousness. Like a dream provoked by sudden external noise.
Their grandma held the children by their hands and as she
led them away across the meadow, she was occasionally casting secret worried
glances in the direction of the forest edge, where the figure of their mother
was standing surprisingly alone in the grass. There by the trees in the privacy
of the lushest meadow grass, he remembered how he was happily lying on the
ground and she was standing above him looking over the grass at the kids as
they were being led further and further away from her.
Then suddenly he saw them all as if from a distance. They
all were there, surrounded by the drowsy forest and sleepy grass. All together
and moving apart. He was moving away from them all, from the forest, and from
the meadow. Dark tree branches started creeping in, blocking the sight of him
and his sister, his grandma, his mother, and the beautiful meadow and the
woods. Yes, he was floating away and the dark trees with their black trunks and
boughs were slowly covering the sight, increasingly blocking the view. Their
black bodies amassed leaving but a tiny fading light somewhere in the middle
until it became darker and darker still until the light dimmed away
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