Mirror (1975)
Tonight, 8pm
Museum of Fine Arts (465 Huntington Avenue)
Details

Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror, as you might expect, is a movie about sight. We hear early on that "words cannot express emotions," and the rest of the film is spent exploring this initial proposition. Off-screen, a disembodied narrator movies us from moment to moment, unconnected by anything other than the associative powers of memory. It's a lyrical film about the process of autobiography and the challenge of conveying interiority. It's not a film for everyone (or even most people), but anyone who finds Terrence Malick movies too action-packed and heavy-handed should love Mirror.

Seemingly plotless, the movie invites us to guess at the order of events as it shifts back and forth through different points in time (pre-War, the War years, and post-War), and different modes of filmmaking. Newsreel footage is blended into the film, while color and black and white vie to be the dominant aesthetic. Sometimes the use of black and white indicates we've moved into a dream, while other times (as in the newsreels), it reinforces the actuality of what we're seeing. The film is probably best described as a composition of moments, at times electrifying in its surrealism, and at others morose in its realism.

Post contributed by Eitan Kensky. More on "mirror" imagery after the jump.

Tarkovsky furthers the disjunctions by having his actors play multiple characters, creating tricks of memory and psychology. The narrator tells his wife that whenever he thinks about his mother he always sees the wife's face, and his son is literally himself as a young man. These tricks engage the viewer as an active participant, forcing us to enter the narrator's mind in order to cohere the sequence of images.

It's worth repeating that Mirror is not a movie for everyone, nor for every time. It's an interesting, challenging movie; the type of film that bears multiple viewings, if you could bear to watch it multiple times.