"Mirror" has a phased significance in Tarkovsky's creative career. The film is considered a model of the Soviet "author's film". The theme of the film is directly related to the memory of the author, the fate of the author's mother and other relatives, and the author's consciousness that he is part of human history.
The structure of "Mirror", especially the structure of time, looks a lot like a kaleidoscope. The multicolored glass in the tube is refracted and transformed into a new combination of strange patterns. Tarkovsky gathers the scattered fragments of reality and memory into a unified whole, like a mosaic composed of glass sheets of different colors and different shapes.
In "Mirror", Tarkovsky regards the development of history as the change of personal destiny. The time structure of the film is like a smoothly running machine composed of dreams, fantasy and vision. The editing method based on the association principle in the film is also inherent in the nature of the "author's film". This principle of free association is not to list events as a historical chronology in chronological order, but to make events have a unified historical character. Tarkovsky's interest in history lies not only in its objective, documentary meaning, but also because of its inherent and unannounced meaning. The author of "Mirror"—the protagonist—the narrator's perception of this inner meaning is the theme of the film. History, in Tarkovsky's view, is both "internal" and "external" world conditions. They occur and appear simultaneously in the feeling and vision of the protagonist of the film. This visual similarity is the protagonist's perception of dreams. The director expresses this perception from two viewpoints at the same time: the dreaming "me" and the dreaming "me". Generally, in dreams, people’s perception of subjective time and objective time is not integrated as one in a sleepless state when a person is awake, but detached. Therefore, the objective time of history is like a reflection of personal existence in the feelings of the protagonist of "Mirror".
It can be considered that the author-the protagonist-narrator in "Mirror" is Tarkovsky's second "I", his special "mark", and a "transformation of the author's feelings of the times." ". The protagonist expresses his feelings about abnormal phenomena in historical time—World War II, the Spanish War, the cult of Stalin, and the threat of nuclear war—as his own spiritual suffering. Therefore, the style of the film is similar to the revelation and enlightenment of the Apocalypse.
In "Mirror", the director compares mother to nature. Nature, which is the factor that gives birth to life in the mother's body, is the mother of mankind. Tarkovsky believes that mothers are immortal, and mothers mean instant and eternity. Therefore, he emphasized the tradition and inheritance of history and culture with the image of his mother in the film.
Tarkovsky always regarded Akhmatova, the Soviet Russian poetess, as her poetic and spiritual mother. The woman in the green velvet dress that the author’s son Ignat saw in the "empty" room of his father's house in "Mirror" resembles the poetess Akhmatova. For the director, this image is the heir and developer of a specific cultural tradition.
"... She has to connect this tradition with our contemporary children anyway. It seems like a general line, it means the unification of cultural roots. This woman is a person who connects the broken timeline together. ......" This is how the director explained the connotation of this image. When the woman asked Ignat to read Pushkin’s letter to Chadaev, the voice of Tarkovsky’s father and famous Soviet poet Arseny Tarkovsky rang out of the painting.
Thus, the father’s poetry and the image of the spiritual mother link up historical time, artistic time and cultural traditions, forming a spiritual image of an immortal mother in the son’s heart.
"Mirror" presents a strange spiritual world built on association. It is not easy to enter this world, but anyone who enters it will definitely find extremely rich emotions and images.
The Soviet film industry hailed Tarkovsky's creative activities as the pinnacle of Soviet "author films" from the 1960s to the 1980s. The famous Swedish director Ingmar Bergman called Tarkovsky "the master who created a new language for film." Tarkovsky is one of the outstanding artists of all stages and nationalities in the process of world cinema. His films are a special response to the spiritual changes that have occurred in the entire human race. Tarkovsky's creative activities are not only an important phenomenon of contemporary Soviet literature and art, but also representative of the current stage of world film development.
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