Shards of memories-dreams of an individual, collective nightmares-do not merely haunt Tarkovsky's most challenging work; they are the film, which invents, as Ingmar Bergman noted, “a new language, true to the nature of film...life as a dream.” Ostensibly an autobiographical portrait, The Mirror also offers a crash course in twentieth-century history, as stock footage of world upheavals-the Spanish Civil War, the Siege of Leningrad, the Cultural Revolution-intertwine with images of childhood: a field, a fire in a rainstorm, a father's voice, a mother (played by various actresses, including Tarkovsky's own mother). “I can speak,” a once stuttering boy clearly states, but only after being hypnotized; indeed, The Mirror seems refracted from a hypnotized world, where images reveal more than language ever could. “Words cannot express a person's emotions; they are too inert,” insists a poem written and read by Tarkovsky's father; Tarkovsky's art, however, does just that.
The Mirror is repeated on Saturday, January 11, and Sunday, January 12.