Mirror is a very difficult film to understand. At times it seemed like shots were thrown into the movie randomly. I'm certain that nothing about this movie was random, I just don't know how to connect it all.There were many things in this film that were shown repeatedly. One was the glass (or whatever it was) that kept falling off of the table. Another was that it was raining a lot of the time, like when the woman was running down the street to the newspaper factory. It is also raining inside the house when the woman is washing her hair. Tarkovsky also shows many people looking into mirrors. After the woman washes her hair in the basin, she looks in the mirror and sees an old woman. When she goes to her neighbor's house, the neighbor keeps looking at her earrings in the mirror everytime she passes by it. Even when she finally sits down, she holds up a small mirror to look at them. When Ignat is sitting in the neighbor's house he looks at himself in the mirror also. Finally, in one of the flashbacks, when the little boy is holding the big vase full of milk, the entire shot is a reflection in a mirror.
Something else I noticed was that after the man (I don't know any names, hopefully this isn't confusing) talks about how he was in love with a red-head who always had a blistered lip, Ignat is shown in the neighbors house and he appears to also have a blistered lip. I don't know what the connection between the two would be though, if there is one.
I noticed that there were many transitions between color and black and white, showing the past and the present. Some of the things shown didn't seem to have any connection with the rest of the film, like the clip of the men in the hot-air balloons. I also did not understand the scene with the Spanish people (the woman dancing and the man slapping her). I'm really looking forward to breaking some of the scenes apart tomorrow to get a better understanding of this film.
2 comments:
Your reaction to the film very much resembles the way I felt after first watching it. Many of the same scenes and images you mention (and your entry is showing the picture of one of my favorite scenes--Alyosha in front of the mirror!) were the same ones that struck me.
And with regards to the characters, I had exactly the same difficulty you did determining who they were. It was only some days afterwards when I first realized (by reading something about the film, I don't remember what) that Margarita Terekhova is playing two roles in this film: the narrator's mother *and* his wife Natalya. We're actually told in the opening credits that she plays both roles ("Mother and Natalya", I believe), but there's simply no way a viewer can process that information before seeing the film, I think.
And the little boy is playing both the narrator (Aleksei, or Alyosha) as a kid and the narrator's son Ignat. So the film shifts rather seamlessly from two different time periods (the first time period ranging from the 1930's thru the 1940's and the second one taking place sometime in the early 1970's). We never see the face of the narrator as an adult during the entire film--though we do see his body and his hand holding the bird right as he dies at the end.
To me it seems much better not to know this when you're first watching the film--precisely because I figure Tarkovsky must not be giving us this information for a reason. And I really do not think I would have enjoyed the film as much the first time I watched it if I'd already known these things.
And Tarkovsky feels very strongly that the essence of his film is not to be found in any sort of knowledge or "information" but in a reception of his ideas and images. And he stresses (though I'm not sure I always agree) that his images are *not* symbols--that is, that they're to be taken for what they are (milk is milk, the bird is a bird) rather than as symbols that "represent" something.
Ohh I see, that makes more sense. Thanks!
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