Tarkovsky's Mirror: Time, Memory, and the Long Take

Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975) opens with a stuttering boy undergoing hypnotherapy to cure his speech impediment, a scene that has no evident connection to anything that follows and that Andrei Tarkovsky included, by his own account, almost as a statement of purpose: the film that follows will not explain itself through conventional narrative logic, and the viewer’s task is not to decode a plot but to submit to an associative structure closer to how memory actually behaves — nonlinear, emotionally weighted rather than chronologically ordered, returning obsessively to a handful of images and unresolved feelings rather than advancing toward resolution. Few films released by a major national cinema have gone further in that direction, and Mirror remains, nearly five decades later, one of the more demanding and rewarding attempts in the medium’s history to represent the actual texture of remembering rather than merely depict remembered events.

An autobiography that refuses to explain itself

The film draws directly on Tarkovsky’s own childhood — a father who left the family, a mother who worked to hold the household together during and after the Second World War, the family’s evacuation from Moscow to the countryside, the private terror and boredom of a childhood lived under wartime and postwar Soviet conditions. But Mirror refuses the conventions of autobiographical cinema almost entirely: there is no linear account of a childhood proceeding toward adulthood, no framing device that clarifies which scenes are memory, dream, or newsreel-derived historical record, and — in the film’s most disorienting formal choice — the actress Margarita Terekhova plays both the narrator’s mother as a young woman and his estranged wife as an adult, a doubling that collapses two relationships from different decades of the narrator’s life into a single, deliberately confusing performance.

The narrator himself, the adult Alexei whose consciousness the film is nominally organizing, is almost never shown on screen — his voice narrates and occasionally addresses other characters, but the film withholds his face for nearly its entire runtime, a choice that keeps the film’s perspective diffuse rather than anchored in a single visible protagonist the way autobiography typically requires. The effect is less like watching someone’s life story than like being inside someone’s associative memory as it moves, unpredictably, between a rural dacha in the 1930s, wartime evacuation, and a fraught adult marriage, without the narrator ever fully organizing the material into an account he could simply tell you.

Poetry as the film’s second voice

Running throughout Mirror, read on the soundtrack in voiceover, are poems written by Arseny Tarkovsky — the director’s own father, a poet whose absence from the family structures much of the film’s emotional content and whose actual verse becomes, in a doubling as pointed as the film’s dual-role casting, the medium through which the absent father is nonetheless given voice. The poems deal with memory, mortality, and the passage of time in ways that echo and deepen the film’s visual concerns rather than simply illustrating them, and Tarkovsky’s decision to use his father’s actual published work, rather than commissioned or invented verse, folds a genuine biographical fact directly into the film’s fictionalized memory-structure in a way few other films have attempted with comparable directness.

The film also incorporates substantial passages of authentic newsreel and documentary footage — Soviet troops crossing Lake Sivash during the Second World War, Chinese Cultural Revolution crowds, a hot-air balloon flight from the 1930s — material that Tarkovsky intercuts with his fictionalized personal scenes, blurring the line between collective historical memory and private, individual recollection. The juxtaposition asks the viewer to consider whether a single life’s memories can ever be fully separated from the larger historical forces moving around them, a question the film raises without resolving, consistent with its general resistance to explanatory closure.

The long take as a way of thinking about time

Mirror’s visual style depends heavily on the extended take — shots held far longer than conventional editing rhythm would suggest, often tracking slowly through interior or exterior space with minimal cutting, a technique cinematographer Georgy Rerberg executed with a fluidity that became one of the film’s most discussed formal achievements. Tarkovsky himself wrote extensively, in his later book Sculpting in Time, about editing and duration as the essential material of cinema — his conviction that a film’s real subject is always, at some level, the experience of time itself, and that cutting too quickly between shots destroys the audience’s ability to inhabit a moment rather than merely observe it.

That commitment to duration places Tarkovsky at the head of a lineage that later critics and filmmakers would formalize as “slow cinema” — a mode of filmmaking built on extended takes, minimal dialogue, and a refusal of conventional narrative pacing that runs through directors as different as Béla Tarr, Chantal Akerman, and, in a more contemporary register, Pedro Costa, whose own patient, duration-driven cinema shares Tarkovsky’s underlying conviction that certain kinds of emotional and historical truth are only accessible to a camera willing to simply wait.

The house, the fire, the wind in the grass

Certain images recur across Mirror with an insistence that borders on the ritualistic: a wooden country house, later burning in a scene of eerily calm destruction; wind moving through a field of tall grass in slow motion; a wall collapsing; milk spilling in an interior lit by a single window. None of these images serves a conventional narrative function — none advances a plot point or resolves a piece of information the viewer has been waiting for. Instead, they function closer to the way recurring images work in dreams or in the associative logic of psychoanalysis, returning with a weight the film never fully explains, asking the viewer to sit with their emotional charge rather than decode their symbolic meaning. Tarkovsky was notably resistant, in interviews and in his own writing, to offering fixed symbolic readings of these images, insisting instead that cinema’s task was to present, rather than to explain, the texture of a remembered emotional world.

That resistance to explanation extends to the film’s treatment of gender and domestic life. The mother figure, played by Terekhova, is shown enduring genuine hardship — wartime scarcity, an absent husband, the physical labor of running a rural household alone — without the film offering the kind of clarifying backstory or interior monologue that would resolve her into a straightforward object of sympathy or blame. She remains, throughout, as opaque to the adult narrator recalling her as she presumably was to the child who lived through those years, a deliberate refusal of the false clarity that adult retrospection often imposes on childhood memory.

A film that resists but rewards a second viewing

Mirror was, by most accounts, poorly received by Soviet cultural authorities on its 1975 release, criticized for its obscurity and its perceived elitism relative to the accessible, socially legible cinema the Soviet state generally preferred to fund and distribute — a tension that ran through much of Tarkovsky’s career and eventually contributed to his decision to leave the Soviet Union permanently in the early 1980s. International critical reception, by contrast, grew steadily more admiring over the following decades, and the film now appears regularly on critics’ polls of the greatest films ever made, including the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound survey, which has ranked it among world cinema’s most significant works in successive decennial polls.

What keeps Mirror difficult, even for viewers who admire it, is precisely what makes it durable: it declines to resolve into a story that can be adequately summarized, because its actual subject — the way memory returns to certain images and feelings without regard for chronological order or narrative tidiness — cannot be represented faithfully by any tidier structure. Watching it a second time, with the doubled casting and the nonlinear chronology already known, does not make the film easier so much as it reveals how deliberately its difficulty was constructed: not obscurity for its own sake, but a formal choice in service of representing something genuinely resistant to conventional narrative form.

FAQ

Q: What is Tarkovsky’s Mirror about? A: The film draws on Andrei Tarkovsky’s own childhood — an absent father, a mother holding the family together during and after the Second World War — but presents this material nonlinearly and associatively rather than as a conventional chronological autobiography, mixing memory, dream, and historical newsreel footage.

Q: Why does the same actress play two different characters in Mirror? A: Margarita Terekhova plays both the narrator’s mother as a young woman and his estranged adult wife. The doubling deliberately collapses two relationships from different decades of the narrator’s life, reflecting the film’s broader interest in how memory blurs distinct people and periods together.

Q: Whose poetry is used in Mirror? A: The film’s voiceover uses poems written by Arseny Tarkovsky, the director’s own father, whose real absence from the family shaped much of the film’s emotional content. Using his actual published verse folds a genuine biographical fact directly into the film’s fictionalized memory structure.

Q: Is Mirror considered part of the “slow cinema” tradition? A: Yes, retrospectively. Its extended takes, minimal dialogue, and resistance to conventional narrative pacing place Tarkovsky at the head of a lineage later formalized as slow cinema, which includes directors such as Béla Tarr, Chantal Akerman, and Pedro Costa.