The Mirror of Time and MemoryEssay Preview: The Mirror of Time and MemoryReport this essayThe Mirror of Time and Memory.Live in the house-and the house will stand.I will call up any century,Go into it and build myself a houseWith shoulder blades like timber propsI help up every day that made the past,With a surveyors chain I measure timeAnd traveled through as if across the Urals.I only need my immortalityFor my blood to go on flowing from age to age.I would readily pay with my lifeFor a safe place with constant warmthWere it not that lifes flying needle leads me on Through the world like a thread.Arseniy TarkovskyThe films of Andrey Arsenevitch Tarkovsky fall into the separate genre of cinematic creations: they are more than drama or psychological thriller, more than philosophical cinema. Although Tarkovskys work has been deeply influenced with such prominent film directors as Kurosawa, Bunuel or Antonioni, the poetry of his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, Boris Pasternak and many other Russian poets and writers, his films manage to form something completely unique to the mind of their director, convey a diaphanous psychological message. His cinematography is a celebration, a theatre of “imprinted time,” trapped with the skillful techniques of the plot-creating and camera usage of the director. As if in the Zone of his Staler the art of Andrey Tarkovsky freezes the moment, the gasp of time, enclosed into almost sculpture-like solid creation that opens up to the viewer its nostalgic breeze. The time exists, it crystallizes in form of faerie, elfish arabesque figures and characters and yet it evaporates filling the space with a sense of solitude and sorrow for the past.
Tarkovskys film Zerkalo or otherwise known as Mirror is a story of the human life; it is not quite a celebration of it; but rather a depiction of the web of the human senses. It is an autobiographic tribute to his abandoned by her husband during the war years mother, filled with the feelings of grief and amusement with her zealous self-sacrifice for the sake of her children. The narrator, or perhaps Tarkovsky himself, is trying to appease his guilty with indifference and scorn conscience with the memories of his childhood and attempts to relive or even incarnate the experiences of his past. The problems of the past are reflected and repeated in the present. Remembering Proust, Tarkovsky describes the effect of finishing Mirror:” Childhood memories which for years had given me no peace suddenly vanished, as if they had melted away, and at last I stopped dreaming about the house where I had lived so many years before .” As all of Tarkovskys films, Zerkalo is hard to be tied to any particular culture, it is universal, global in its meaning and message it conveys and yet fully comprehendible only by someone who experienced the described reality of pre-war Soviet times of Stalins repressions and the war itself.
The film opens with a prologue that shows life footage of a boy being treated from stuttering. In the end of the prologue, the treated patient says, “I can speak now”; the entire essence of Zerkalo as “the remembrances of a man who recalls the most important moments in his life, a man dying and acquiring a conscience. ” is presented in this short sequence. This little sequel is symbolic of the authors desire to be able to speak freely of the truth that is being uncovered in front of the narrators eyes. And as a miraculously cured boy suddenly discovers his ability to talk, the author unveils and admits the truth of his life to himself.
Zerkalo incorporates three time schemes, one changing the other, that together constitute an autobiography of the artist, and a biography of two Soviet generations within a wide-ranging context of Russian, European, and world history, linked together subjectively by dreams, memory, time, and art itself. The short sequences from the pre-war years are being replaced by the more modern ones, i.e. 1970s times, which are in turn suddenly replaced by the director with to the themes of war itself. The off-screen monologue introduces the recollections of the narrators childhood and his adult life that are being elucidated with the visualry of the images on the screen. The leaps between the scenes are perceived smoothly and line up into one picture. However, the view point that is being presented has an unusual approach: the past that is being shown is built up not simply of direct experience but is being presented as a mosaic of what the narrator knew firsthand, what he was told, what he dreamed or imagined, and what happened around him as part of a historical process that he shared with millions of other people. The dream and memory seem to overlap and intermingle, sharing the same visual and auditory imagery merging in time frames, with characters belonging to past and present appearing together.
There are no loud scenes or spontaneous eruptions, but the underlying feelings of grief and guilt that are tormenting the narrator are obvious without showing emotions too vividly. The film is not an outburst; it is a quiet amusement with hitches of sadness, troubles of poverty and hunger, sorrow, loss, regret, fear, longing and desolation; but at the same time, love and hope. It is probably one of the greatest “sensual” films ever created. As Tarkovsky himself revealed the title Mirror is just an accidental thought that happened to accord with his personal feelings and psychological contemplation. Thus, the purpose of the film according to the director himself is “its inspiration, is that of a homily: look, learn, use the
”. We all have our own personal and subjective experiences. I think this is due to experience. But if the film is our “own own experience”, then it has some very significant consequences for all. First, most of the film comes out of no man’s head or imagination. What is the purpose of a film with a certain subject’s subject? Is it for the express expressiveness of that subject? Is it for the emotional emotional expression? Or as one of those films has been put it, it was simply a film made by the producer, without a director of color. The point of Tarkovsky’s film is that his subject doesn’t feel the same way about his film. His film doesn’t have the power, influence, or impact that a film can have, but he tries to draw us to what is being said in the film… The most difficult element of the film is the “dynamics” of everything happening, how the audience watches, and feels them, with the same intensity as the actual objects. In some ways the film’s influence has only been felt by those who are physically watching the film, and a huge amount of their power, influence, and consciousness come from their own sense of selflessness–they can actually feel it all, too, when things are happening in their own world. The film plays on a lot of factors, and I mean a lot. The most important one is the emotional turmoil and the constant anguish of suffering, the self being constantly in the process of experiencing this inner conflict, the whole experience of a feeling, the emotional pain and suffering that the person is experiencing. The film opens with the narrator crying out: I can see you here, that person with you, you’re not here, how can I leave you? He is trying to tell me that I must leave this woman and this human being, there’s something amiss here. I can hear her crying, but he’s afraid to let her go, the film says. It’s about a relationship with an unconscious person, what is going on? Are they scared or angry or disgusted? This is the most intense feeling of the film. It was when the subject is crying; it is very intense, very powerful. A very powerful feeling, and the movie can never achieve the goal that it really takes. It tries to make our feelings more emotional, that there’s not that much violence, that there are many things, but the emotional turmoil and the frustration and the despair, is the feeling we feel in the movie. The emotional tension and frustration, and it is really a tension that is building in these situations. The director does not shy away from it; he does not pretend to show emotion, he doesn’t allow for that emotion to influence the viewer’s thinking–that’s the very thing that the film aims to do