Through a glass, enduringly: Three reflections on Tarkovsky's Mirror

1.

A television documentary shows a young man being treated for a severe stutter. A woman perches upon a bowed fence, gazing upon a pastoral landscape. Nearby children are sleeping. A gust of wind brushes through the undulating foliage, causing everyone to pause, as though grasping at some elusive memory. Soon a house will catch fire. Later the woman will rush back to the printing press where she works, panicked that she may have made a disastrous typographical error—this is Stalinist Russia, and there are words that can ruin lives. Soon a father will tell a son about a red-haired girl he once loved. There will be newsreel footage, of the Spanish Civil War, of Soviet troops wading through the shallow, muddy waters of Lake Sivash, of clamoring Chinese holding up Mao's Little Red Book. There’ll be a second woman, physically resembling the first, but more guarded, modern and icily sexy than her twin, who’ll examine herself in mirrors while talking to a man who remains off-camera. There’ll be a snow-blanketed field where children play in an evenly scattered formation, as though staged by Brueghel. All of these scenes, separated by time, by their varied roots in personal memories or dreams, hearsay or history, flow into one another, linked only by the filmmaker’s carefully guided stream of consciousness and ever-drifting camera; by the immersive central performance by Margarita Terekhova, who resembles the young Meryl Streep, as the filmmaker’s mother and first wife; and by poems read by their author, who’s also filmmaker’s father, though this is never made explicit. Zerkalo, or The Mirror (1975), has typically been described as Andrei Tarkovsky’s most difficult film. So why is this the one that moves me most?

2.
Bridging Solaris (72) and Stalker (79), The Mirror hovers between these science-fictions as something grounded in personal experience, in the realms of childhood and parenthood, war and terror. It is among the closest things we have to a poetic memoir from a major filmmaker. It floats in the confluence of the political and the personal while eschewing context. I’d suggest regarding The Mirror as an essay film as much as anything else, yet ultimately the film’s genre is stubbornly sui generis. Among its offerings is the opportunity to watch a film discover its own form as it unfolds. If you treasure this iconic maverick of Russian and later European cinema, you partly do so because of his relentless belief in the medium’s possibilities. Tarkovsky often looked to painting, music and literature for inspiration, yet rather than result in something merely mimetic or regressive, his absorption of other media rendered his films only more distinctive and progressive, more uniquely cinematic. Because The Mirror is so personal; because it’s as perplexing as it is hauntingly beautiful; because its structure requires such an act of surrender from viewers unconditioned to its rhythms and ambiguities, it speaks directly to each individual’s unique points of connection to what transpires on screen, whether it be the tensions lingering between divorced parents, the longing for some lost idyll or some now-aged or dead parent to take us by the hand, the blur of historical upheaval, or the sight of our home going up in flames.

3.
Everything we need to comprehend about the film’s fundamental purpose is made plain in the title: this is a work of reflection. Appropriately, there are reflective surfaces everywhere, not to mention water, pouring down walls in the most dream-like moments. It’s also an interrogation of vanity and fears of aging. Like a hall of mirrors, it’s a labyrinth where truth, conjecture and fantasy, where reality—Tarkovsky’s actual parents, the archival footage—and re-enactment—the dacha which we return to again and again was meticulously reconstructed on the original site from photos of the actual dacha were Tarkovsky spent childhood summers—are often indistinguishable. To “decode” The Mirror, to catalogue and understand the full significance of its many layers, requires repeat encounters and research into both Tarkovsky’s life and Soviet history. (Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie's Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue is an excellent place to start.) But to understand the emotional textures of The Mirror should only take a single, patient viewing, after which this ghostly parade of memories will likely remain unforgettable.

Ascension, nostalgia, illusion and transcendence: Eclipse offers a pair of remarkable films from the forgotten Soviet era master Larisa Shepitko

Larisa Shepitko was born in 1939 in the Ukrainian city of Artemovsk. She attended the Moscow Film School and studied under the great Alexandr Dovzhenko, director of Arsenal (1928) and Earth (30), but being an all-too-apt pupil, and part of what would prove an iconoclastic generation of Soviet filmmakers, she would not uphold or even reconfigure the traditions of her mentor so much as follow his example as an innovator and exacting aesthete, developing an utterly distinctive voice, one that would seek poetic methods of externalizing internal, individual transformations rather than, in accordance with official Soviet ideology, speak for the glory of a people.

Wings (66), one of two films in Eclipse’s new no-frills Shepitko box, begins with an image of pedestrians moving in several directions on a village street. This image of public life, at first inexplicably strange, seemingly slightly distorted, somehow alienating, is revealed as something literally separate from the quiet, tidy world we’re entering when a figure suddenly enters the frame and moves toward us, the camera tracking backwards to show that the crowds are on the opposite side of a window from him. The figure is a bespectacled, anonymous tailor, unimportant to the rest of our story, but his duty in this first scene in emblematic: he’s measuring Nadezhda Petrukhina (Maya Bulgakova) for her power suit.

A decorated World War II fighter pilot, Nadezhda is being costumed for her new role as director of a provincial trade school, her severe new threads rendering her androgynous and angular. The job is intended as a reward for her heroism yet it quickly finds her uncomfortably trying to fit into the role of an authority figure over a generation for whom her past means little. The sense of falseness associated with her position is echoed throughout Wings with several theatrical or illusory scenes in which key elements disconnect: a soundless speech on a TV; firemen apparently running toward but in fact only running through a drill; two middle-aged women in an empty café reminiscing for their lost youth over beer and plates of meat, who begin to sing and waltz together, until it is revealed that a crowd of men with arched brows are observing from just outside the café windows, and the women embarrassedly separate and smooth out their clothing. So much of this place Nadezhda inhabits seems to exist as simulation.

Nadezhda will frequently be seen attempting, with barely contained desperation, to strike a tone of merriment amongst her colleagues, family and townsfolk, but one of the only scenes in which she seems to truly feel herself is one where she’s essentially alone. She stands in the street as it begins to rain and the other villagers all run for shelter. She gazes toward the newly vacant horizon and her point-of-view seems to lift off, taking her into the dampened sky and into an episode of helpless nostalgia for the days when she flew fighter planes and was so in love with a fellow pilot whose death she witnessed from her own cockpit. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking scene, emotionally matched only by the film’s finale, where an act of panicked escape becomes something transcendent.

These themes of transcendence and flight are inherit in the very title of the other film in Eclipse’s Shepitko box, The Ascent (76), set in 1942 Belarus, where starved and weary Soviet partisans are on the run from Nazi invaders, in a landscape so seized by winter that only the barren, inky, crooked foliage breaks up the grey-whiteness that’s seemingly melded earth and sky. The film follows two of the partisans eventually captured by the Nazis, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin), sent out to forage for food. Sotnikov, who already seems the physically weaker of the pair, is badly injured, yet as their plight worsens and they, along with three other locals, are set to be executed, Sotnikov unearths some immense inner resolve, devises a plan to become a sort of martyr, and little by little seems to glow, becoming increasingly beatific as he nears his own death.

The Ascent is a very grim film that does not flatter human nature, but it is inspiring in its lyricism, strange development of tension and paradoxical equation of escape with surrender. Music is seldom used, but when it is it makes for eloquent, nearly dream-like passages. The almost hallucinatory, not to mention Christian mystical tone that envelops the story as Sotnikov’s face takes on a more iconic light in Shepitko's consistently remarkably close-ups, aligns it to the contemporary work of Tarkovsky, films like Andrei Rublev (69) and Solaris (72), as does the use of Tarkovsky regular Anatoli Solonitsyn, appearing here in the very enigmatic role of a Russian interrogator working for the Nazis.

Shepitko would doubtlessly have gone on to further establish herself as among the greatest filmmakers of the late Soviet era and beyond, but sadly, The Ascent would be her last film. She was killed in 1979 along with four of her collaborators while scouting locations for her next project Farewell to Matyora. The film was later completed by Elem Klimov, her husband, the director of another masterful war film, Come and See (85).

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: a masterful, hallucinatory pageant brimming with sensuality, colour, natural beauty, mustaches

Great myths and folktales endure not on account of their universality—which is beyond question—but on the capacity of our finest storytellers to render them vividly, to renovate them according to changing modes of expression, to bring a personal voice to them, and endow them anew with vivacity. Such stories speak of the business of living in terms that transcend the limits of reason, thus, in 1964’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini zabutykh predkiv), when one man is suddenly driven to slay another, when a tormented, lonesome lover allows himself to be carried writhing down rapids on a spindly raft of lumber, or when that same lover, now physically wounded, scavenges the forest at night hoping to be enveloped by death as a means to finding himself once again in his lover’s embrace, the events feel like the opposite of mere artifice. They resonate as more truthful than what we generally refer to as realism.

But then Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors—the artistic breakthrough of Sergei Parajanov, a Georgian born to Armenian parents who had the decidedly mixed fortune to find himself forging a career within the Soviet film industry—has its finger on the pulse of myth like few other films. The slaying of the man is followed by an enigmatic flash of red horse silhouettes; the lover on the raft captured in a long, unbroken, rapturous camera sweep (which can't help but look forward to numerous like images from Werner Herzog); the search in the forest constructed from close-ups of faces seemingly floating through a web of trees, cheeks brushed by branches with near-palpable sensuality. The tirelessly adventurous camerawork, care of the great Yuri Ilyenko, a writer/director in his own right, is somehow at once delirious and precise, full of low, creeping angles where foliage brushes the lens and breaks up the frame; of careening flights through the collective rituals of Carpathian village life; of scenes that at times resemble some hallucinatory staged anthropological documentary. More than four decades after the fact Shadows still feels vibrantly exotic, a thing set apart, its particular poetry uncorrupted by the rest of the world’s culture of movies.

Shadows, set in the early 19th century, is based on the book by Ukrainian writer Mikhaylo Koysyubinskiy and functions as a carefully detailed window into the daily life of the Hutsuls, the highland people who for centuries have inhabited the Ukraine, as well as the northern extremity of Romania. The film is a sumptuous pageant of traditional costumes, religious rites and iconography, strange, powerful music made with impossibly long trumpets, and a dazzling array of elaborately groomed moustaches. At its narrative centre is an ebullient variation on Romeo and Juliet: Ivan (the deeply haunted Ivan Mikolajchuk) and Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova) grow from a childhood characterized by bloodshed and blissful interaction with nature to an adulthood characterized by harsh weather, hard work, adultery, sorcery, drunkenness and betrayal, all the time concealing a forbidden love that slowly plunges into morbid obsession, though finally proving itself to be even stronger than mortal life.

The man at the helm of all this was reaching the height of his talents and would subsequently feel the wrath of governmental forces bent of punishing such vision as unacceptably decadent. While still young, Parajanov showed great affinity with music and painting, and both mediums heavily inform the sensibility at work in Shadows, which possesses a compelling, lyrical fluidity broken by flutters of striking frozen images, as well as a richness of colour and is heightened by the movement of elements and animals. This dialogue with other mediums is but one of numerous cinematographic ingredients unmistakably mirrored in the contemporaneous films of Andrei Tarkovsky, especially 1962’s Ivan’s Childhood, and it comes as no surprise to discover that Parajanov and Tarkovsky were great, mutually admiring friends who shared similar difficulties with Soviet censorship and even died of the same disease. Like Ivan’s Childhood, Shadows fixates engagingly on horses, water and trees, and its soundtrack seems always to return to a motif of voices calling out names into vast landscapes. Unlike that of Tarkovsky however, Parajanov’s approach is gifted with a willful, buoyant naïveté and effervescent sense of freedom, moving effortlessly between broad symbolism and an uninhibited, textured emotionality.

Though it deals in symbols and mysticism, it needs to be emphasized that Shadows is grounded in feelings and experiences of tremendous immediacy. In the end, Ivan’s story is simply that of a man who even after settling into a potentially happy, normal life with a sexy, loving wife, can’t quite shake off the grips of the one that got away. It’s what distinguishes a film like Shadows from ones we think of as fairy tale flicks, delighting viewers with its folkloric spectacle and archetypical imagery while penetrating those murkier, very adult feelings locked up inside us. Parajanov wasn’t able to make many films during his life, but the legacy of Shadows and its follow-up The Colour of Pomegranates are alone enough to cement his place among the most important filmmakers of cinema’s first century.

Ivan's Childhood: the special pleasure of genius not yet fully formed

Though sometimes underappreciated by the director’s admirers as a less mature work, one predating his soon-to-be realized aspirations toward a very particular formal and philosophical rigour, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 film Ivan’s Childhood deserves to be seen and re-seen for perhaps these very same reasons. A film about the corruption of innocence, it is in fact characterized by the endearing innocence of its approach, one expressing a budding director’s youthful enthusiasm for staging images of simple (if enigmatic) lyrical beauty that contrast the story’s underpinning theme of the tragic toll of war on man and nature. Tarkovsky would go on to make films far more ambitious, audacious and personal than Ivan’s Childhood, but none of them that possess quite the same affecting charm.

Since this was Tarkovsky’s first film after leaving film school, and since the project didn’t originate with Tarkovsky (he inherited it from another director who’d been ushered off the film, while the script was an adaptation of Vladimir Bogomolov’s novel) Ivan’s Childhood can be seen as a sort of bridge linking Tarkovsky’s apprenticeship within the approved vocabulary and ideology of the “thawed” but still restrictive post-Stalin Soviet film industry to the deeply idiosyncratic, unabashedly complex and poetic body of work that would come to distinguish Tarkovsky as one of the world’s most distinctive, dazzling and, for some, frustrating filmmakers. Watching it today in Criterion’s lovingly packaged and supplemented new DVD release, we can see the film as a beguiling and fascinating artifact of a certain moment in history.

However, the moment in which Ivan’s Childhood is set takes us back more than a decade and a half before the film’s year of release. Its titular character (played with striking polarities of unadulterated awe and rugged, preternatural confidence by Nikolai Burlyaev) is a 12-year-old scout working for the Soviet military during the closing chapters of World War II. Ivan’s family has been murdered by Nazis, violently hurling him into a world of adult grotesqueries to which he has adapted all too well. He used to talk in his sleep, he tells a grown-up comrade, but now he lacks rest, and is nervous all the time. He’s made strong alliances with Russian field commanders and is considered a valuable asset. He’s threatened at certain points with being transferred to a military school and angrily protests the idea, saying he’s more useful at the front. His superiors must agree, since Ivan’s childhood will continue to be spent on the peripheries of combat, and will in fact never progress to manhood proper.


For those familiar with the imagery of his subsequent work, Tarkovsky’s most obvious contributions to the story of Ivan’s Childhood are the film’s multiple dream/memory sequences: the beatific mother walking along the beach, the cart spilling apples which are muzzled and chewed by dewy horses, the rustling of leaves as they brush past Ivan’s naked skin and the otherwise absent sunlight and clean water. With these digressions, Tarkovsky takes a technique so basic to storytelling and brings it to an impressive level of multiple meanings and cinematic textures. Yet really, the bleak realistic scenes in the film are equally evocative and lulling in their frequently vertical imagery: the flares that fall like stars, the dangling nooses, the tall, spectral birch trees, the crashed plane and a memorable kiss shared over a trench that gradually doubles in our imagination as an abyss.

It should also be said that it’s here in Tarkovsky’s feature debut that his influences are presented most nakedly. He produces interesting variations on the stylistic flights found in previous Russian war films, such as The Cranes Are Flying, certain deeper compositions echo those of Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman, and the film’s scenes of hushed, crouched movement in dark water pleasingly recall Ugetsu, the most famous work by Kenji Mizoguchi, one of Tarkovsky’s few confessed idols. Rather than make Ivan’s Childhood feel derivative, these references function as a sort of starting point for Tarkovsky’s directorial journey.

Criterion’s package includes an illuminating half-hour commentary by Tarkovsky scholar Vida T. Johnson, who co-authored the terrific book The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, placing special emphasis on Tarkovsky’s use of other art forms such as music, literature and painting in the development of his style and content. There are also interviews with cinematographer Vadim Yusov and the now middle-aged Burlyaev, who tells a great little story about Tarkovsky’s osmosis-like way of instructing his actors. As well, a handsome booklet includes a poem by Tarkovsky’s dad and essays by Tarkovsky and Dina Iordanova.