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access to Temporality and Film Analysis
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C H A PTER 3
Andrei Tarkovsky’s fourth feature film, Mirror, had a complex and dif-
ficult production history. The shooting script and film itself went through
torturous changes, many of which were demanded by Goskino, the State
Committee for Cinematography in the USSR.1 The project developed
over ten years, but was always fundamentally concerned with memory and
the traces of passing time. Mirror was partly inspired by Tarkovsky’s own
childhood memories, of a time spent in the countryside during wartime
evacuation, and by the poetry of his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, which
is recited in the film.2 Many of the film’s scenes take place in a dacha
(country house) that was rebuilt to mirror the dacha where Tarkovsky had
spent time as a child. Tarkovsky’s family photographs were used to recre-
ate not only the house but also the clothes, poses, objects and lighting in
Mirror.
Unlike Antonioni, Tarkovsky has not inspired criticism based upon an
aesthetic of the ‘momentary’, but rather upon the passing of time in the
long-take. This has largely been encouraged, it seems, by his own writing
on film in his theoretical work Sculpting in Time, where he privileges
duration and rhythm in film. According to Tarkovsky,
Rhythm in cinema is conveyed by the life of the object visibly recorded in the frame.
Just as from the quivering of a reed you can tell what sort of current, what pressure
there is in a river, in the same way we know the movement of time from the flow of
the life-process reproduced in the shot.3
It is the ‘distinctive time running through the shots’, rather than the edited
assembly of shots, which makes ‘the rhythm of the picture’.4 Although
contested by his fellow editors, the director continually claimed that he
edited Mirror not on the basis of concepts or readily definable intellectual
‘meanings’ but through the images’ ‘own intrinsic pattern’.5 Tarkovsky
re-edited the film over twenty times before the assembly of the shots and
the rhythm of the work as a whole was acceptable to him.
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how does time make itself felt in a shot? It becomes tangible when you sense some-
thing significant, truthful, going on beyond the events on the screen; when you
realise, quite consciously, that what you see in the frame is not limited to its visual
depiction, but is a pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame and to
infinity.19
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certain fork in the path, then it could only be the father returning home.
What we see during this speech, however, is a stranger (the country
doctor) taking this fork in the path and approaching the dacha, suggesting
that the Narrator’s voice is ‘unseeing’ rather than omniscient.50 This is an
early indication of a troubled and disjunctive relationship between sound
and image. Later in the film, the Narrator recounts that:
With an amazing regularity I keep seeing one and the same dream. It seems to make
me return to a place, poignantly dear to my heart, where my grandfather’s house
used to be . . . Each time I try to enter it, something prevents me from doing that. I
see this dream again and again. And when I see those walls made of logs and the dark
entrance, even in my dream I become aware that I’m only dreaming it. And the over-
whelming joy is clouded by anticipation of awakening. At times something happens
and I stop dreaming of the house and the pine trees of my childhood around it. Then
I get depressed. And I can’t wait to see this dream in which I’ll be a child again and
feel happy again, because everything will be still ahead, everything will be possible.
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geneous reflected and refracted images that circulate with one another. In
Mirror, elements from what have been termed the past and the present
are continually intruding upon each other in a manner that suggests the
impossibility of accessing a pure memory of the past. As Bird has pointed
out, Tarkovsky continually ‘underscores the inseparability of images from
the imagination that retains and identifies them’.53 The Narrator com-
plains that, for example, whenever he tries to remember his mother, she
always has the face of his wife Natalia (they are both played by Margarita
Terekhova). Remembered images and sequences tend to modulate into
and out of scenes from artworks. In one scene, for example, wartime con-
straints force Maria to try to sell a pair of earrings to the doctor’s wife.
The camera focuses upon the bare, muddy feet and dirty clothes of Maria
and her son (Alexei, the Narrator as a young boy). By contrast, the doc-
tor’s wife is wearing an improbable purple satin dress and headscarf that
gleam in the dim lamplight. Turovskaya attributes her appearance to the
fact that, as is suggested by the recurrence of a Leonardo da Vinci book
throughout the film, the Narrator’s childhood was influenced by art. In
his memories, the doctor’s wife, home and ‘cherubic baby swathed in lace,
unexpectedly assume the colours and textures of the High Renaissance’.54
A filmed landscape of children playing on a snow-covered hill has drawn
comparisons to Brueghel.55
Throughout the duration of the film, memory does not lend itself to an
unproblematic capture. Brief flashes of memory-images recur throughout
Mirror to disrupt this apparent attempt to absorb oneself within a stable
chronology of memory: a hand warmed against a fire, which later reap-
pears as part of a memory-sequence linked to the young Narrator; wind
rushing through trees; and a fire burning on a hill. These flashes of recal-
citrant images interrupt a continuous sequence and disrupt the Narrator’s
attempt to salvage a homogenous duration of memory. The concreteness
of cinematic space is destabilised throughout the film’s duration. The
childhood home is constantly seen by means of different angles, lights,
and filters; it is sometimes unclear whether we are seeing the same house
throughout the film. The home is recreated in each sequence, drawing
attention to the fluidity of memory and the impossibility of ever grasping
or returning ourselves to the past. Particularly when filmed by a moving
camera rather than framed in static shots, the spaces of the film appear
impossibly fluid, suggesting endless uncharted mazes of rooms and cor-
ridors. Mirror also presents a continuous confusion between ‘real’ and
‘reflected’ space. The sequence that presents a fire burning in a neigh-
bouring barn is a revealing example of this. In this scene, the slow moving
camera pans out of the room that two children (the young Narrator and his
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sister) have just left, passing across a mirror that shows them watching the
fire with their backs to the mirror. We hear a panicked call of ‘Dounya!’
from some distance as a different boy walks out from a space seemingly
behind the mirror and enters a space where he can see the fire burning a
short distance away. He is reunited with those who called him, who are
suddenly much closer than the sound of the cry would have suggested. To
get to the fire, however, he has walked in the opposite direction to where
the mirror has suggested it is burning: he seems to have walked to the side
of the mirror to see what it reflects, rather than away from it.
The way in which the characters occupy the film’s spaces is funda-
mentally precarious. The adult Narrator, for example, although aurally
present, is largely absent from the visual images, allowing the camera
to glimpse a part of his body only once. Characters are framed against
thresholds throughout the film, beyond which they cannot seem to pass.
In the Narrator’s apartment, for example, his son Ignat discovers an
unknown woman in one of the rooms. She asks him to read an extract from
Pushkin as he stands at the doorway. Hearing a knock at the door, Ignat
finds an old woman – his grandmother – standing at the entrance to the
apartment. Misrecognising him, however, she does not enter the apart-
ment and leaves. When Ignat returns to the room, he finds that the woman
he has been reading to has disappeared. The camera focuses upon the
indexical heat-stain made by her teacup as this material trace of her pres-
ence rapidly fades. In another sequence, noted by Synessios, the Narrator
as a young child cannot open the door to the room where his mother is and
then, when it opens on its own, cannot enter, but remains standing on the
threshold.56
The unity of the narrating consciousness itself is ultimately thrown into
question. We might assume that the Narrator who introduces the film to
us at the beginning, and then is partially seen at the end, presumably on
his deathbed, is the psychological source from which the images emanate.
The sequence near the film’s conclusion appears to go some way towards
attempting to anchor and explain the source of the images that we have
seen. The Narrator’s doctor, his authority in these matters suggested by
a white lab coat, asserts that the Narrator has become obsessed with his
memories owing to his guilt for some wrong done to his mother, which
is not entirely clarified. The discrepancies and disjunctions between
sound and image mentioned above, however, continually complicate easy
attributions, destabilising a sense of a unified and coherent narrating con-
sciousness. The film, furthermore, sometimes seems to encourage us to
attribute the procession of scenes to characters other than the Narrator;
that is, particular characters appear to be somehow aligned with specific
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him as he walks through the darkened house; as the poem ends, however,
it pans left to show curtains and sheets of varying textures and transparen-
cies caught by a gust of wind, then pans right again to follow this move-
ment. It then tracks slowly forward, towards a small mirror at the end of
the room, and comes up against a translucent lace fabric that is suddenly
jerked away, allowing unimpeded passage. Continuing its slow track,
another lace fabric is brushed aside, as though by an invisible hand. When
the camera nears the mirror, we can see reflected in it a very large, bright
light, reminiscent of lights seen on film sets. Without pause, the camera
tracks obliquely around the mirror into the dark room, and the next shot
returns the young Alexei to view. In this sequence, there appears to be a
gesture towards reflecting back the mechanical (the large light), as well as
an uncanny sense of using invisible hands to brush fabrics out of the way.
This confusion of the human and the mechanical is echoed in diegetic
instances. When Maria is washing her hair, she is shown with the long,
wet strands covering her face; her arms hang crookedly out to her side,
so that she appears frightening and uncanny. Filmed in a slow motion
overlaid with ominous electronic notes, her figure seems not quite human.
As Mulvey has pointed out, the blurred threshold between the animate
and inanimate is a constant source of human fear and fascination, one that
was also in evidence in early cinema: ‘a mechanical replica of the human
body and the human body from which life has departed both threaten
the crucial division between animate and inanimate, organic and inor-
ganic’.69 This shot of Maria belongs to a tradition in which, to appropriate
Mulvey’s words, ‘replicas of the body acquired the appearance of life,
for instance, in the marionette theatre, clockwork toys, or the fantastic
stories of automata’.70 The movements of the camera similarly refuse to
rest within the boundaries of what we might think of as ‘mechanical’ or
‘human-like’, but move within and through these continually in time.
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posture of viewing’.91 Marks has argued that, faced with an image which
we cannot understand, such as images which are defamiliarised through
the passing of time, we are ‘forced to search our memories for other virtual
images that might make sense of it’; if we are unable to do so, we confront
the limits of our knowledge.92 The fleeting nature of the image is unlikely
to encourage the attribution of fixed symbolic meaning, yet the provoca-
tion to thought may be as powerful as the evocation of tactile response.
Towards the end of the film, the image recurs, this time in its context, as
part of a sequence showing the red-haired girl as the owner of the hand,
a sequence framed by Andrei’s looks in the mirror in the doctor’s house.
The recurrence of the image of the hand may evoke the viewer’s memory,
influencing the perception of the present image. This sequence provides
us with a context into which we may wish to reintegrate the previous
image, activating a participatory mode of spectatorship. In providing the
potential to reactivate viewers’ memories, shots such as this may recreate
the object for perception as we thicken it with our own associations.93
Aesthetic Transfiguration
Critical writing around the sensory aspects of Mirror posit an experiential
quality to the images, but also frequently frame them within a discourse
on spiritualism and the metaphysical. That is, the images are not just
material or haptic, but are seen to move beyond this to provide an experi-
ence of transcendence. Alternatively, the images of the natural environ-
ment and the Narrator’s home are associated with a childhood vision.
Below, I outline some of these suggestions, before presenting an analysis
of the images of textures and natural elements that is based neither on
spirituality nor childhood vision, but on aesthetic transfiguration.
At once unburdened with symbolic meanings and simultaneously
endlessly meaningful, Tarkovsky understands his images of natural phe-
nomena and simple objects to evince the presence of the transcendental,
effecting a revelatory cinematic experience. ‘What you see in the frame’,
he writes, ‘is not limited to its visual depiction, but is a pointer to some-
thing stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity.’94 This transcend-
ent emotion is the ‘great function of the artistic image’, which becomes ‘a
kind of detector of infinity . . . towards which our reason and our feelings
go soaring with joyful, thrilling haste’.95 Tarkovsky believes in the power
of the artwork to raise humanity to a higher level of spirituality, assum-
ing an idealist notion of the harmonious artwork as elevating the soul in
which ‘the conception of images is governed by the dynamic of revelation’.
He states that ‘in the case of someone who is spiritually receptive, it is
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children sometimes fix their attention on an object to a point where the concentra-
tion makes it grow larger, grow so much it completely occupies their visual field,
assumes a mysterious aspect and loses all relation to its purpose . . . likewise on the
screen objects that were a few moments ago sticks of furniture or books or cloakroom
tickets are transformed to the point where they take on menacing and enigmatic
meanings.109
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language humans think and speak’. In her speech, the word ‘you’ acquires
a new sense, now meaning ‘Tsar’. ‘Everything on earth was transfigured’,
the poet continues, ‘even simple things: the basin, the jug’. The poem’s
subject is the transfigurative power of love, something that is also explic-
itly emphasised when Maria is seen levitating above the bed after unwill-
ingly killing a chicken at the doctor’s house. She says to the father: ‘at last
I soared up . . . don’t be surprised. I love you.’ Kral has written that, in
Tarkovsky’s films, ‘people and things seem to us to have an exceptional
clarity, urgency, and grace, as if we ourselves were in love and suddenly
experienced the world with redoubled intensity’.122 While the expressed
or implied emotions of the characters may indeed resonate with those of
viewers towards the film (not just ‘love’, but also nostalgia and longing),
the transformation of everyday objects such as ‘the basin, the jug’, which
feature heavily in Tarkovsky’s films, are, I believe, more to do with his
cinematic aesthetic of transfiguration.
In Mirror, the natural elements themselves are used to transfigure the
visible world. As Bird has pointed out, the first poem comments upon the
image which it accompanies, that of rain falling outside the dacha, which
dematerialises objects, making us aware of water itself as a medium.123
The ‘basin, the jug’ are transfigured ‘when layered and rigid water stood
between us’, suggesting a mediated screen through which objects are per-
ceived. This technique is refined in Tarkovsky’s next film, Stalker, which
showcases several beautifully slow pans over a close-up view of gleaming
objects and fish underwater. The natural elements in Mirror often act as
frames themselves, within the frame of the screen. The fire in the barn, for
example, is itself set within a cool blue and green frame of the forest and
the sky. We perceive it through the rain and with other, surrogate, specta-
tors in front of us. This is a ‘natural’ frame within the cinematic frame, but
acquires its own aesthetic value. These frames are continually in motion,
subject to the mobility of the camera and the vicissitudes of passing time.
This motility is evident with the various visual ‘quotations’ of paintings
that transfigure the presentation of the natural world. Unlike filmmakers
such as Peter Greenaway or Jean-Luc Godard, Tarkovsky rarely allows
his quotations of artworks to approach stillness or emerge as ‘tableau
vivants’. Instead, the figures within the frame and the frame itself are
continually fluid, modulating in and out of, or through, the artworks. As
in L’Avventura, the inclusion of paintings and drawings partly operates to
highlight the affectivity of cinematic temporality and movement. This is
the case not only when the film shows a moving embodiment of an artwork
or an era of painting, as in the aforementioned earring sequence or the
Brueghelian winter landscape, but also when we see an original painting
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that the camera has filmed. After the father is reunited with his children
in a burst of operatic song from the St Matthew Passion, for example, the
film cuts to Leonardo’s portrait of ‘A Young Lady with a Juniper’, which
according to Tarkovsky served the dual function of ‘introduc[ing] a time-
less element into the moments that are succeeding each other before our
eyes’ and comparing the woman with Margarita Terekhova, who appar-
ently had ‘the same capacity at once to enchant and to repel’.124 What
is extraordinary about the introduction of this painting, however, is the
complex way that it is shown, in an aesthetic process of imaging rather
than through a simple straight cut to the portrait. As the Bach music
continues, the film suddenly cuts to an extreme close-up of a painted
landscape barely recognisable through a blue flare from the camera lens
that takes up more than half the screen. As the camera pans left, the face
of the portrait comes into view as the reflected flare also moves left, across
the face, disappearing only as the camera zooms slowly out from the
extreme close-up, announcing a specifically cinematic rendering of this
portrait. What is also important is what follows: a cut to Natalia in mid-
shot as the camera zooms towards her face to frame her in close-up. These
camera movements away from, and towards, the painted and filmed faces
transfigure the painting cinematically.
Contrary to what has sometimes been written, Tarkovsky does not
present images akin to ‘still life’ painting.125 The conglomeration of
objects that he frequently places together, such as glass milk jugs, bread,
lamps, mirrors, and cloth, are always seen through the transfigurative
force of the camera’s movement and focus in time. In the earring scene,
for example, the film shows Alexei seated in the centre of one of the
rooms, filled with various sheens and textures of half-hidden objects in a
brown-hued gloom. There is then a cut that singles out several elements
in extreme close-up: two potatoes and a small puddle of milk on a dark
wooden shelf. As we watch, a drop falls to join the puddle, then another,
and the camera begins to slowly pan down the shelves, past a gleaming
copper receptacle, to locate the bottom of this milky waterfall, where
another puddle is being enlarged with more drops of milk. This sequence
can be seen to perform, cinematically and through time, something that
is in fact a concern of still life painting: decay and deliquescence, more
aptly expressed by the French term nature morte. The passing of time that
it suggests, however, is cinematic, in the use of a cut from a long-shot to
a close-up, the pan, and the isolated sound of the dripping milk. In the
last few seconds of this shot, furthermore, symphonic music is heard,
which will overlay Alexei’s look into the mirror and his memories of the
red-haired girl, continuing the theme of the desire to somehow capture
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Audiophilia
Sound is also used throughout the film to perform a vacillation between
materiality and its destabilisation. On the one hand, sound can be used to
give a palpable texture to scenes, and a corporeal and ‘realistic’ presence
to spaces and objects; the floor seems tangible and concrete, for example,
when we hear a milk bottle rolling across it.137 At other times, however,
sound becomes ambiguous and defeats what Altman has called the ‘sound
hermeneutic’, which matches sound to a source in the image, and hence
‘provides a sense of closure that allows perception of the depicted world
as coherent’.138 As Truppin notes, Tarkovsky’s sounds ‘destabilize, they
make the coherent and comfortable seem suddenly strange and disori-
entating’.139 Tarkovsky manipulates the spatial signature of sound, that
is, the combination of aspects such as reverberation level, volume, and
frequency that allow us to place it in a particular physical environment.
The film’s sounds seem diegetic because they have highly specific spatial
signatures, yet these often do not seem to coincide with the space from
which the sound is apparently emanating.140 An example of the destabil-
ising tensions between sound and image occurs during the sequence in
which the mother returns to the printing works. All the sounds are muted,
except for her clearly audible breathing, and the sound of the print-
ing presses, which increases as she walks towards them. These sounds
place us aurally alongside her subjectivity and what Altman has called
‘point-of-audition’. He applies this concept to moments where there is
an impression of auditory perspective created by changes in volume and
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make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the
fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle . . . to succeed in shift-
ing the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body
of the actor into my ear.142
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already mentioned, are often divorced from the temporal rhythm of the
images that they are usually attached to, which encourages us to attend
to the sound with more interest than if it had been registered as merely
emanating from a stable source. A recurring phenomenon in Mirror is to
introduce a sound at the end of a particular scene that belongs to the next
scene. At other times, the sounds are preceded by a momentary silence,
such as the water dripping from the mother’s hair when she washes it.
Many sounds are isolated and amplified to drown out other sounds, such
as the sound of boots crunching snow or the instructor’s heartbeat in the
shooting range sequence. The film also uses point-of-audition to draw
attention to sound. In the scene of the burning barn, the film noticeably
employs the mother’s point-of-audition to isolate the crackling roar of
the fire, which increases as she approaches it. The burning building is
thus made forcefully present to us aurally. A more extraordinary example
occurs in the Sivash footage sequence. In the first few shots of this footage,
the soldiers pass close to the camera, and we hear their boots squelching
through mud in an audible close-up. In a shot that shows the soldiers
from some distance, the sound is suddenly muted, and only returned to
full volume when the soldiers are shown closer again. Tarkovsky made
certain that the sound, recreated and recorded for the film, is matched to
the footage, in a disturbing alignment of naturalistic, vibrant sound to the
procession of the ghostly, though not-yet dead.
The manipulated naturalistic sounds are also sometimes intertwined
with more obvious electronic sounds. In the example above, the slosh-
ing footsteps are soon joined on the soundtrack by portentous drums and
electronic strains. When the mother takes a shower at the printing works
and the water runs out, the dripping of the shower modulates into an
electronically manipulated gurgling and the resonant sound of whining
pipes. Similarly, the first time the wind is seen emerging from the trees in
an uncompleted action, it is heard over an ominous electronic score. All
of these techniques work to foreground sound, dislodging it from a natu-
ralistic recording and locating it within an aesthetically designed sound
spectrum.
The use of canonical, classical music is a fundamental aspect of
Tarkovsky’s emphasis upon cinema as art. In Mirror, the music is imme-
diately linked to the film as an aesthetic product when a Bach prelude
is heard alongside the credits, which run against a black background. It
fades as the mother is seen sitting on the fence, tuning out as the camera
approaches her and begins its diegetic narrative presentation. The classical
music is here immediately linked to the cinematic art form as announced
by the credit sequence. The music links particular scenes and sequences
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echoes this description of the film as a near palpable object, writing that
the images are organised ‘in layers formed one on top of another’.154 At
times, such metaphors become hybrid, Synessios for example, writes that
‘literary references, too, colour the canvas’.155
Mirror, eliding many of the structural and narrative conventions of clas-
sical cinema, appears to somehow overflow and exceed the boundaries of
cinema itself in much of the critical writing on the film. This persistent
attribution of metaphors, as Sobchack has pointed out, indicates that there
is a gap in language and expression with which to speak about the film expe-
rience, hence encouraging writers to borrow from the language of other art
forms and media.156 Tarkovsky’s pronouncements on this issue are, as is
often the case, contradictory. He himself uses various metaphors to describe
artistic experiences, although these are more frequently of a religious or
spiritual nature. At the same time, however, he argues that the idea of a
‘composite cinema’, which states that cinema is an amalgamation of other
art forms, denies the validity of cinema as an art form in itself, and ‘implies
that cinema is founded on the attributes of kindred art forms and has none
specifically its own; and that is to deny that cinema is an art’.157 While
Tarkovsky has, as Bird argues, contributed to the interpretation of his films
as ‘woolly mystical fables’ through the self-important tone of his writing, it
remains essential to remember this assertion of the artistic element of the
cinematic experience: ‘the meaning or significance of Tarkovsky’s films are
accessible only through their direct apprehension as art works’.158
The title of Tarkovsky’s film names possibly the most infamous cin-
ematic metaphor: the mirror. Synessios writes that Tarkovsky was fasci-
nated with the semantic roots (for example the word ‘zret’) of the Russian
word for mirror (‘zerkalo’) which imply not merely looking, but looking
intently and perspicaciously. The verb ‘zret’ also means to ripen and
mature, ‘therefore the word itself reveals a way of looking, and, by aural
association, a process of maturing, ripening’.159 Furthermore, the same
roots underlie the word for ‘audience’ (‘zriteli’). The mirror, however,
has been the metaphor for disembodied viewing par excellence, most
commonly, but by no means only, in psychoanalytic criticism. Theorists
of embodiment have unsurprisingly criticised the way in which this
metaphor reinforces the alienation of vision from the body, rendering the
viewer a passive receptacle for the film’s deceptive and illusory images.160
As Sobchack has pointed out, the metaphor of the mirror confines the
film to the screen rectangle and discusses it as a static viewed object.161
In Deleuze’s writings, however, the mirror has resurfaced as part of his
conception of the crystal-image, although he does not, as Emma Wilson
has noted, engage in depth with psychoanalysis in his work on cinema.162
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the mirror-image is virtual in relation to the actual character that the mirror catches,
but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with only a virtuality
and pushes him back out-of-field . . . the character is no more than one virtuality
among others.165
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flickering flame of a lamp. While these elements are not seen in the next
sequence (the Narrator’s telephone call to his mother), water returns
in the printing works scene, soaking the mother with rain as she runs
there. The poem spoken over her journey through the factory’s corridors
resonates evocatively with the deluges of water seen. The poet speaks of
his frustration at missing a meeting with his lover on a sunny day, as she
comes instead on an ‘utterly gloomy and cloudy day. It rains, and it’s
getting unusually late, and rain drops down the cold terrain, unsoothable
by word, unwipable by hand . . .’. The poem recalls Maria waiting at the
dacha, watching the rain, her tears unsoothable, for a lover who never
appears. When she subsequently tries to take a shower at the printing
works, the water literally stops flowing, and it does not appear again until
the Sivash footage, approximately halfway through the film.
An important recurring image is that of hands. The hypnotist in the
film’s first sequence cures the stuttering boy through an intense focus
on his hands. When hands attached to an unseen character (Ignat) are
turning the pages of the Leonardo da Vinci book, they stop at a sheet
showing the artist’s sketches of hands, themselves already repeated on the
page in various poses. The film here mirrors the many drawn hands with
a living, moving embodiment. I have already commented on the other
important reappearances of hands – that of the older Maria touching her
reflection, the momentary flash of the hand warmed against a fire, and a
repetition of this (although not in a close-up, but in a mid-shot) as part
of a wider narrative context. These repetitions do not necessarily have a
particular meaning, but their constant reoccurrence may prompt a flow of
associations, perhaps provoking viewers to an engagement that increases
in affective force throughout the duration of the film.
A possibly more obviously meaningful pattern or mirroring occurs
throughout the film in the positioning of Natalia, the younger Maria and
the older Maria in the frame. Natalia’s crouching position on the ground
as she gathers her belongings, for example, is repeated when we next see
the mother, crouching on the ground sawing firewood. When we last see
her in this sequence, it is in a close-up, as she watches with ambivalence
the reunion of her husband with his children. In the following scene with
Natalia, the camera zooms towards her face as she says, ‘you could have
come more often. You know that he’s missing you’, a statement that has
equal relevance to Maria’s situation, as though Natalia is continuing, or
perhaps initiating, a dialogue between Maria and her husband. In one of
the film’s final sequences, the camera approaches the older Maria from
behind, her hair coiled in a bun, smoking. The configuration of this scene
recalls the camera’s movement at the film’s beginning, when it focused
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Notes
1. The complex process of production is beyond the scope of this chapter, but
is thoroughly documented by Synessios.
2. Natasha Synessios, Mirror (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 11–12.
3. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2010), p. 120.
4. Ibid., p. 117.
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5. Ibid., p. 116.
6. Synessios, Mirror, pp. 7, 38.
7. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 183.
8. Ibid., 183.
9. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 39.
10. Ibid., p. 39.
11. Ibid., p. 28.
12. Donato Totaro, ‘Muriel: Thinking With Cinema About Cinema’, Offscreen
(July 2002), www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/muriel.html.
13. Jon Beasley-Murray, ‘Whatever Happened to Neorealism? – Bazin,
Deleuze, and Tarkovsky’s Long Take’, iris, 23 (1997), p. 37.
14. Ibid., p. 39.
15. Ibid., p. 49.
16. Ibid., p. 39.
17. Synessios, Mirror, pp. 50–1.
18. Vlada Petric, ‘Tarkovsky’s Dream Imagery’, Film Quarterly, 43.2 (1989),
pp. 28–34 (p. 28).
19. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 117.
20. Ibid., 83.
21. Petric, ‘Tarkovsky’s Dream Imagery’, p. 30.
22. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 168.
23. Ibid., p. 22.
24. Totaro, ‘Muriel’.
25. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, pp. 63–4.
26. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 81.
27. John Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 166.
28. Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, p. 42.
29. Ibid., pp. 42–3.
30. Synessios, Mirror, p. 63.
31. Doane, Cinematic Time, p. 15.
32. Ibid., p. 33.
33. Helga Nowotny, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1994), p. 132.
34. Ibid., p. 137.
35. Ibid., p. 138.
36. Rick Altman, ‘Sound Space’, in Rick Altman (ed.), Sound Theory, Sound
Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 62.
37. Doane, Cinematic Time, p. 16.
38. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 130.
39. Ibid., p. 130.
40. Doane., Cinematic Time, p. 10.
41. Ibid., p. 22.
42. Banfield cited by Mulvey, Death, p. 57.
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77. Peter Kral, ‘Tarkovsky, or the Burning House’, Screening the Past (2001),
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/cl0301/pkcl12.
htm.
78. Mark Le Fanu, Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (London: BFI, 1987), p. 79.
79. Synessios, Mirror, p. 70.
80. Ibid., p. 3.
81. Le Fanu, Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 69.
82. Ibid., p. 80.
83. Dalle Vache, Cinema and Painting, p. 153.
84. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film
(New York: Verso, 2002), p. 65.
85. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 77.
86. Ibid., p. 77.
87. Marks, The Skin, p. 162.
88. Synessios, Mirror, p. 51.
89. Christie, ‘Introduction: Tarkovsky in his Time’, p. xviii.
90. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 63.
91. Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 18.
92. Marks, The Skin, p. 47.
93. Ibid., p. 147.
94. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 117.
95. Ibid., p. 109.
96. Ibid., p. 41.
97. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1972), p. 5.
98. Ibid., p. 84.
99. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 51.
100. Petric, ‘Tarkovsky’s Dream Imagery’, p. 33.
101. Synessios, Mirror, p. 69.
102. Truppin, p. 235.
103. Dalle Vache, Cinema and Painting, p. 137.
104. Ibid., p. 138.
105. Ibid., p. 137.
106. Le Fanu, Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 80.
107. Turovskaya, Tarkovsky, p. 82.
108. Peter Green, Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1992), p. 85.
109. Louis Aragon cited by Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 69.
110. Synessios, Mirror, p. 66.
111. Kral, ‘Tarkovsky, or the Burning House’.
112. Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), p. 11.
113. Kral, ‘Tarkovsky, or the Burning House’.
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