In 1974, Andrei Tarkovsky, with the success of the sci-fi movie "Solaris", was finally free to choose the subject of his shooting. In the previous years, due to the opposition of the (Soviet) State Film Commission, many of his scripts were rejected and work has been suspended. But this time, Tarkovsky, who was in his middle age, chose autobiographical themes, looking back at his childhood, teenage years, and father and mother. This is the "Mirror" which was later praised by Bergman and Haneke called "the miracle of movie history". However, after the release of "Mirror", a considerable number of viewers and scholars expressed confusion. Tarkovsky has repeatedly emphasized that "The Mirror is nothing unintelligible. It is just a very simple linear narrative story. Everyone can treat it as their own experience." However, it exists between the sound and the picture. The sense of rupture between time, the emotional logic (rather than simple rational logic) that the camera cut follows, and the extremely personal feeling of time still confuse the audience who is watching the movie for the first time. This is a movie that requires the audience to constantly mobilize their own life experience and emotional perception to immerse in it, and it is far from enough to "watch" externally. In other words, "Mirror" defines what film can do as art, not to provide visual wonders and entertainment experience, but to expand the awareness of the human mind. This is also Tarkovsky’s cognition of poetry ("The mission of the poet is to arouse the spark of the soul, not to cultivate idolatry."-the lines of the protagonist in "Mirror"), and his life in the film industry In pursuit. As an autobiographical film, "Mirror" is especially special. It is almost the kind of film made for myself. The seemingly random fragments are actually carefully interspersed with code words, private metaphors, and memories that only act on individuals. Identify things. Therefore, only by rereading "Mirror" can we remember these hints, construct the secret connection of these fragments, and understand the "memory" expressed by Tarkovsky. In fact, the incredible part of "Mirror" is here. It tries to express the memory problem that everyone will face in their lives, but it touches the ultimate secret of the personal spiritual world: how humans try to accurately speak about memory. The unspeakable, and how memory, as a reality abandoned by time, gradually invades people's dreams, reality and imagination, and how it secretly acts on human language and human will.
1. Three narrative methods of memory
In the first paragraph of the feature film, the young mother sits quietly on a hedge. In the field in the distance, the figure of a man walks from the distant view to the close view. Mother's lines hinted that while looking at the fields, she once mistaken the stranger for the returning father. After watching the stranger leave, the camera returns to the mother's back, and follows in the mother's footsteps, passing by a child who fell on the ground (the child was supported by the nanny), another child is eating on the dining table, milk and food are scattered messily At the table, while the mother walked through all this desperately, indifferent to the chaos in life, the voice-over is the father recite a love poem:
Every time we meet, we celebrate it as Epiphany.
There is only you and me in the whole world.
You are agile and light, better than the wings of a bird.
Hastily ran down the stairs, stepping through two steps in one step.
You pulled me through the damp lilac bushes.
Go to the other side of the mirror...your territory.
...
Honest God, you belong to me.
You woke up. Changed the language of the human world.
My throat suddenly filled with new power.
When I said the word "you", I found that it had a new meaning "king".
In a trance, everything is changing.
Trivial matters are over us.
Staying true to each other. Emerge in endlessly.
We are being led, not knowing where to go.
The fantasy city drifted by, like a mirage.
Wild mint pave the way for us,
The birds escort us,
The fish in the water follow against the current,
The sky opens up our love,
Destiny is following in our footsteps.
Wielding a razor like a madman.
This poem begins in the sweet daily scene of the meeting of lovers, and the pitch continues to rise. The lover's "you" has become "the language of the world" and the "king", and finally, it ends in an incredible situation: everything seems to surround this love affair And unfolding, even "destiny also follows our footsteps", thus reaching the grand and noble spiritual realm. And through the next paragraph, we know that the protagonist’s poet father abandoned his mother and child in 1935. This episode is entirely based on Tarkovsky's childhood experience. Father Arsenyi Tarkovsky left home, leaving behind a country mansion, a lonely mother, and many poems. Tarkovsky’s childhood was immersed in his father’s poems, perhaps including this love poem written to his mother-this constitutes Tarkovsky’s childhood memories (these poems form Tarkovsky’s father’s Spiritual identity), and another recollection is the reality of the mother waiting for her father alone. The sweeter and noble the father's poems, the more painful the reality of his absence. Especially when the mother mistaken the stranger for the father, the sense of loss of hopelessness reached its culmination. So, at the end of this clip, when the emotion of the poem climbed to the climax, the mother finally broke her forbearance and wept at the camera. We have seen the power of language shifted and lost.
Then, there was a shout of fire outside the house, and the mother rushed out. The two children at the dining table heard their mother say that the house was on fire, and ran out. At this time, Tarkovsky used unreasonable scene scheduling-the camera did not follow the child's figure to the burning house, but stayed in front of the messy empty table until a milk can rolled from the table to the ground. . After that, the camera slowly surrounds the interior of the house, focusing on the shadowy backs of the two children standing at the door. Through the backs of the children, we can see the faint firelight. When the burning house finally appeared in front of the screen, the scene was calm and landscape, rather than chaotic and catastrophic. This kind of bizarre visual representation is undoubtedly a recollection after rational modification, a re-creation based on memory rather than direct memory. The memory of the past is constructed through recollection and joins the daily order of reality. This confusion between memories and recollections is confirmed by the protagonist's later monologue:
"I often have a dream, in which I return to my most beloved place, the house my grandfather built. Forty years ago, I was born on the dining table in that house. Every time I want to walk in, I am always blocked by something. . I have this dream time and time again. When I see the log fence and the dark storage room, even in a dream, I can realize that I can only dream of it. So the happiness disappeared because of me Knowing that I will wake up. Sometimes, a little sound awakens me from the dream of my childhood house and pine trees, and I feel sad and look forward to this dream again. This dream brings me back to my childhood. Relive the joy of childhood , Makes me feel that everything is still ahead, everything is possible."
The repetition of the dream makes the dream itself a kind of memory. Although the reality's recall of memory imitates the scene in the memory, it is mixed with the sadness of loss. Only through dreaming can you find what you lost in reality: the emotions in your memory.
Thus, the character dreams through recollection. The paragraphs of the dream are black and white, and everything in the dream is out of order, deformed, and exaggerated. For example, when the father was washing his mother’s hair, suddenly the water tank disappeared, the mother stood like a bird, and the house began to peel and collapse. The young mother walked to the mirror, but an aging mother was reflected in the mirror... This is not what the protagonist expected. A happy dream, but a dream full of danger and anxiety. The middle-aged protagonist wakes up from his dream and receives a call from his elderly mother. The protagonist mentioned his laryngitis, talked about no longer trusting the language, and also responded to the time when the first two scenes took place-in 1935, the father's departure and the house that caught fire. Then, in the lines, the protagonist hinted at a communication barrier that could never be resolved between himself and his mother, and the mother mentioned a reality that happened: Lisa, a colleague who worked in a printing factory together, died.
After the call was over, the next paragraph naturally connected to the paragraph where my mother went to the printing factory to proofread the manuscript when she was young. The camera follows her mother from outside to the office and to the room where the printing machine is located. Through the movement of the camera and the interaction with others, it creates a political atmosphere of tension and distrust between people. My mother suspected that she had made a mistake in the proofreading. We used the cry of another girl and the mother's refusal to explain to her colleagues to figure out the seriousness of the matter. The "that word" has never been revealed in the movie, making the fear and restlessness tighten within the silence, unable to escape to the meaning of any word. The background of this passage is the period of the Great Purge. We can feel the inexpressible tension and depression our mother feels. In particular, fear does not point to a specific event, but an abstract existence, which will come randomly at any moment.
After the inspection, there was no error in the proofreading. Mother slowly walked out of the room, we saw the exhausted face of her mother, almost suffered an inner catastrophe. At this time, as the camera stared at the mother's face for a long time, the father's voice-over appeared again:
Yesterday, I have been waiting since early morning,
They guessed that you won't come.
Remember what a wonderful day it was?
Sunny as a holiday! I don't have to wear a coat.
Today, you are here, but the weather is
Depressed and dim
It's raining, and it's getting late,
On the icy branches, the rain is flowing,
Words are difficult to soothe, and Fangpa cannot be wiped dry.
This is still a love poem, but the emotions are far less confident than the last poem. In this poem, although "I" is waiting for the lover, the "weather" is gloomy and dim after the lover arrives. "Dark weather" can be interpreted as a bad social environment. Lovers wanted to share the good time, but now they have been tested by the environment and have to share the dim side of the times. Here, the love affair no longer turns to sing about all things, but to the inside of the relationship between the two people who are attached to each other. As a result, the juxtaposition of poems and pictures once again produced a contrast: in a politically high-pressure environment, the mother experienced spiritual fear and depression alone. In Lisa's subsequent attack on her mother, the fact that her father abandoned her mother was once again mentioned. Lisa believed that the reason why the father left was because of the mother's personality defect, and the mother fell into a better helpless state.
In this segment, the protagonist obviously cannot participate in the mother's memory. Only through the mother's later retelling can the protagonist know the mother's experience on that day. Therefore, this picture transforms the memory told by the other into the personal imagination of the memory of the other. Although the story comes from the mother’s real experience and details, it belongs to the protagonist’s fictional category-only through fiction, the protagonist completes his lateness to the mother. Understanding.
2. Three sets of mirroring relationships across time
After ending the memories of his childhood father, the movie time is back to the present again. The picture changes back to color, the face of a young mother is shown in the mirror, and through the protagonist’s lines "You really look like my mother" and the subsequent dialogue about educating children, we know that the woman in the mirror is not the mother, but the actor Ma Another role played by Grete Terehova in the film: the wife who has divorced the protagonist in reality. This is probably the confusing effect that Tarkovsky deliberately created: it not only confuses the audience, but also seems to confuse the protagonist, so that later the protagonist said: "Whenever I think of my childhood mother, all I think of is your face. "
On the one hand, memories are invaded by reality. At the same time, when the protagonist stares at his wife in reality, reality seems to have the texture of memories. The mother in memory and the wife in reality should belong to two different time and space, but because of the similarity, they become the entity and mirror image of the same person, coexisting in the same time and space. The wife repeatedly mentioned the relationship between the protagonist and his mother, blaming the protagonist for neglecting his mother, and the mother's appeal was attached to his wife. The difficulty of the relationship between the protagonist and his wife is the continuation of the communication barrier between the protagonist and his mother.
Coexisting with the female mirror image of "the wife in reality and the mother in memory" is the male mirror image of "the protagonist of childhood and the son in reality". The protagonist does not want his son to be like himself in the absence of his father. growing up. The reality of divorce faced by the protagonist reluctantly imitates the childhood in the memory. As a father, he is passively absent from his son's childhood. Time is like a whirlpool, placing the "I" in reality in the position of "my father" in childhood. So far, the third group of mirror images has been revealed, namely "My childhood father" and "I am now a father" .
In addition, we noticed the movie’s treatment of the protagonist. His adult image never appeared in front of him. Instead, he was replaced by dialogue, monologue, and voice on the phone. This is similar to the protagonist’s father’s voice-over. It can be said that in reality, "I "It became an imitation of the father's voice in the memory. This time, symmetry occurred between the two voices.
3. Three aspects of history
The picture in "Mirror" switches between black and white and color. So far, dreams are black and white, and fiction is black and white. Reality is colored, and the recall of memory in reality is also colored. The following historical documentaries are black and white, which seems to imply that the official record of history is the same thing as dreams and fiction. And history, the presentation in the movie is multi-layered.
After the wife asks the protagonist to take care of her son, the camera cuts directly into the gathering of his wife and Hispanic friends. Some Spanish war documentary clips are cross-edited in the daily life of Spanish immigrants. On one side is the daily life of specific people: men imitating bullfighting performances, young women’s dances, and intermittent conversations; on the other side is the people in the documentary: relief teams, bombed streets... and history and reality are cut through rapid jumps. Fast, paradoxical, and distorted like a dream.
This is people who are trapped in history, people who are immersed in details, moments, and scenes but cannot see the ins and outs of history. They can only have emotions rather than emotions, experiences rather than meanings.
At the same time, the son was placed in the protagonist's house, and he saw a strange woman in the restaurant. The old woman told her son to read a note, which was taken from a letter written by Pushkin in 1936:
"The division of the church caused us to separate from Europe. Every major event that shocked Europe. We are all outsiders. However, we have our own special destiny. Russia, with its vast territory, swallowed up the invasion of Mongolia. The Tatars were also on our western border, and they were deterred and eventually retreated to their wasteland. So the Christian civilization was preserved, and in order to fulfill this mission, we lived in a special way. This way of life kept us Catholics. His identity has isolated us from the Catholic world. You think our history is beyond doubt, and I can’t agree. Can’t I really find a value that will appeal to future historians? I love our monarch, but I am not satisfied with everything around me. As a writer, I also feel humiliated and annoyed. But I can swear that nothing in the world will make me abandon my country or the history that God has given to our ancestors... and nothing else. Demands."
When the son was interrupted by the knock on the door, he went out to open the door and returned, and found that the old woman had disappeared. Only the disappearing mist on the table proved that she had existed. The ghost of the poet, the image of the old woman, clearly refers to the famous poetess Anna Akhmatova of the Silver Age. A noble image who is also loyal to the history of her ancestors, fears her own time, and has been devastated by the spirit but insists on writing poetry. Corresponding to Pushkin's status as the "sun of Russian poetry", Akhmatova is called by the Russians " The moon of Russian poetry" used poetry to illuminate the dark age she was in. Or you can simply think of this disappearing old woman as a ghost of history. The ghost of history speaks to us through culture—historical sediments—and those remaining words and noble beliefs found in words, although Weak and short, but have the power to penetrate history. In other paragraphs of the movie, it mentions Dostoevsky, Chekhov's "Sixth Ward", Turgenev's "House of Nobles"... Although these cultural memories are always embedded in personal life memories, they are not Did not stop the entire human history from heading towards war, massacre, and madness.
In another note read by his son, Tarkovsky expressed this concern: “As for the question of whether science and art can affect people’s morals, Rousseau’s answer is: no.”
At the end of this clip, the protagonist’s voice appeared on the phone and talked to his son about the love that happened in his teenage years, awakening the memory of history——
The picture is a shooting range in winter. The boyhood protagonist hears the instructor's command, but insists on making Russian actions. Here, language as a man-made norm is no longer an absolute truth, but merely an identification of national identity. Through the lines, we know that this was a certain period after Leningrad was occupied, and the protagonist’s father died in the siege of Leningrad. The protagonist does not hesitate to offend the instructor, but still insists on agreeing with the Russian language. After training full of conflicts and confrontations, and an unexpected accident, the protagonist finally left the shooting range alone. The war documentary appeared again. The protagonist’s father begins to recite another poem:
...
There is no death in the world,
Everyone is immortal, everything is eternal.
Whether you are seventeen years old, or seventy years old.
You don’t have to fear death,
There is only truth and light in the world.
There is no death or darkness.
Finally we reached the seashore.
I am one of those who pull the net,
Watch the immortal school of fish.
In a house that never collapses,
I want to summon all centuries,
Summon them to come in and build my home together.
So, on my table,
Your sons and daughters sit with your wives.
Great-grandparents and great-grandchildren get together.
The future is doomed now.
Facing you, I gently lifted my palm,
There will be five rays of light left for you.
With the shoulder bone as a support, I lift up every passing day.
I use a folding ruler to measure time.
I roam in it, like walking through the mountains.
Compared with my own life, I intercepted a section of it.
We go south,
The grassland lifted up the circling dust.
The long grass blocks the way, the grasshoppers that have been wandering,
Tap my horse's hoof with the tentacles.
...Like a monk, it predicted my death.
I took my destiny and tied it in the saddle.
I will ride my horse to the future.
Standing on the stirrups, I still look like a boy.
My immortality is enough, because,
My blood has flowed through the vicissitudes of life.
I am willing to give my life in exchange for an eternal corner,
Safe and warm, no longer a flying needle of life,
Pulling through the world, like a silk thread.
This poem responds to the relationship between the individual and the times. The magnificent slogan in the first half expresses the great belief in pursuing immortality, not fearing death, and building a home. But in the second half of the poem, he gradually shifted from slogan-like shouting to worrying about the personal life situation, until he felt the unknown destiny that was about to fall on him. At the end of the poem, the poet shows a certain exhaustion after pursuing lofty beliefs. Compared with achieving great careers, the poet is willing to sacrifice his life in exchange for a safe corner after death, instead of devoting his life to war, nation, and society. Great cause to be promoted.
And the documentary pictures corresponding to the voice of the poetry have changed from soldiers wading through the water to Hitler’s death, the Pearl Harbor air raid, the US military dropping the atomic bomb in Japan, the cult of personality during the Cultural Revolution in China...History is accelerated by the continuous development of events. At my own pace, all details have been cancelled. The cross-editing scene with the documentary is: the young man is on the snow overlooking the people coming and going in the distance, tending to be infinitely still, and suddenly, a bird flies over the brim of the young man’s hat. Compared to the cold, vast, and ruthless historical process, the individual Life seems so vivid, fragile but precious.
Once again, my father's poems provide spiritual support and comfort to the protagonist who is at a loss in the historical torrent. This directly triggered the protagonist's nostalgia for his father, and the movie scene also shifted to the scene of his father's return. The scene of the father’s return must have made the childhood "I" so deep that "I" not only remembered the moment when he rushed into the arms of his father, remembered the shiny military uniform of his father, but also remembered the scenes that happened before: my childhood sister and me Arguing in the woods, I suddenly heard my father's call. This is the voice of the protagonist who has been waiting for his entire childhood, and it will surely echo repeatedly in his life from now on.
4. Ways of language, memory or regret
In contrast to a childhood full of emotional tension, the reality of the protagonist as an adult is deep in the mud. At this time, the protagonist seems to be so weak that he has lost the power to mend his life. After a brief but feeble conversation with his wife, he once again fell into the trap. A childhood dream. This time, the dream scene became decayed and broken. A chicken smashed the window glass. The dining table in childhood was placed on the wilderness. The high wind blew down the things on the table. The past became completely impossible. Recurring past. At the end of this disturbing dream, the young "I" walked through the dilapidated scenery of the childhood home. A door that "I" could not open suddenly opened automatically, and the mother was there. It can be said that the mother, as the emotional core of "I" in childhood, supports the entire childhood world of "I". Although, it was this kind of relationship that continued into the adulthood of "I", which directly caused the trauma that could not be healed in the relationship between me and my mother.
In the last recollection of the memory, the mother took the childhood "me" to the neighbor's house. Mother sold a pair of earrings to the neighbor. While "I" was sitting in the living room waiting, I saw milk spilled on the table. Milk jugs and pouring milk appear repeatedly in "Mirror", and it seems to Tarkovsky that they are undoubtedly some kind of markers that trigger personal emotional memories. (Years later, the broken milk jug appeared in Tarkovsky's last film "Sacrifice".) After that, "I" looked at a mirror in the living room, and I looked at me in the mirror. come over. The lens advances towards me who is staring at the mirror image-the memory looks into the "me" in reality, and the "me" examines the memory.
After that, the mother took the childhood protagonist home. By the riverside, the mother and son walked with their own minds. The father's poem appeared for the last time. The poetry focuses on the relationship between the soul and the body. From the soul trying to break free from the bondage of the body and fly to the sky freely, to the poet's realization that "a soul without a body is sinful", the body that has been neglected for a long time is finally placed in harmony with the soul by the poet. Equally important status. In the protagonist’s childhood life, the father exists through the voice of poetry, representing the “soul”, while the image of the mother who maintains daily life is closer to the “body”. Here, the voice of poetry no longer represents the break of language, but through poetry. The protagonist completes some kind of reconciliation with his parents.
However, we clearly feel that the edges of memories, dreams and dreams are more ambiguous, and the switching is more abrupt and tough. In the dream, my childhood self walked through the empty house, holding the milk jug and staring at the mirror in the dark. In my dream, my childhood I returned to the mansion and the wilderness. Mother sat there, but she was old. Tarkovsky simulates the speed and density of the memory of a person before death. As the last production activity we were born as a person, the image of this memory is almost like the emotional crystal of a person's life.
At the same time, while the protagonist was lying in the hospital bed, the doctor diagnosed his condition outside the door: "It is not because of laryngitis, but because of memory and conscience."
Laryngitis is only an external manifestation of the condition, and in the final analysis, illness is due to the heaviness of the reality shaped by memory. Since reality cannot be cured, the protagonist has to return to the place of memory again and again in his heart, rethinking and reforming it repeatedly. Tarkovsky said, “Trying to solve the problem through your own past is a way of regret.” Although in the movie, this attempt to heal myself by going back to the past failed. On the sickbed where the autonomous father died, there was an enlightening bird spreading its wings after the trauma.
This vaguely tells the secret of "Mirror": Tarkovsky completed a certain self-healing by examining his own past, which once again confirmed his belief in the film. Just like the scene of curing stuttering at the beginning of the film, it has no plot connection with the film itself, but simply shows the mysterious healing power of language. This image is also a mirror, an invisible mirror hidden in the movie "Mirror". It's just that this mirror points to human language. And language, in Tarkovsky's world, is also film, mirror and dreamland at the same time.
Now, nearly half a century has passed since Tarkovsky filmed "Mirror." Images have never been flooded, spread rapidly, and flooded in every corner of our daily life as they are today. Culture has never been as impacted by consumption and entertainment as it is today. Movies no longer pursue the quality and density of poetry. However, when we watch "Mirror" again and again, we will still be fascinated by its deep emotions and dreamy images. This film that responds to the theme of time finally became a miracle in time, a monument, it records the most difficult and thrilling work in the world: how people cherish their doomed memories, and how people struggle to resist despair to cure Own.
2018.6.1
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