Zerkalo (1975)

Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Writers:

Aleksandr Misharin (writer)
Andrei Tarkovsky (writer)

Release Date:

April 1975 (Soviet Union)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

A man in his forties is going to die and remembers his past. His childhood, his mother, the war, personal moments but things that also tell the story of all the Russian nation...

Plot Keywords:

Burning House | Stream Of Consciousness | Plotless | Home | Surreal

Cast

Margarita Terekhova	...	Mother / Natalya
Ignat Daniltsev	...	Ignat / Young Aleksei
Larisa Tarkovskaya	...	Nadezha
Alla Demidova	...	Lisa
Anatoli Solonitsyn	...	Forensic doctor
Tamara Ogorodnikova	...	Nanny / Neighbour / Strange woman at the tea table
Yuri Nazarov	...	Military trainer
Oleg Yankovsky	...	Father
Filipp Yankovsky	...	Aleksei age 5
Yuri Sventisov	...	Yuri Zhary
Tamara Reshetnikova
Innokenti Smoktunovsky	...	Aleksei (voice)
Arseni Tarkovsky	...	Father (voice)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
L. Correcer
E. Del Bosque
Tatiana Del Bosque
Teresa Del Bosque
Diego García
Nikolai Grinko	...	Director of printery
Alejandro Gutiérrez
Teresa Rames

Also Known As:

Зеркало (Soviet Union: Russian title)
Sarke (Soviet Union: Georgian title)
The Mirror (USA)
White, White Day (English translation of working title)

Runtime:

108 min

Country:

Soviet Union

Language:

Russian | Spanish

Color:

Black and White | Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Singapore:PG | Australia:M | Iceland:L | Canada:G (Ontario) | Argentina:13 | Finland:K-12 | West Germany:12 | UK:U | Hong Kong:I

Company:

Mosfilm Unit 4

Trivia:

In the first scene involving a telephone call, the shot tracks past a poster for French adaptation of Andrey Rublyov (1969), another Andrei Tarkovsky film.

Movie Connections:

Featured in Uzak (2002)

Soundtrack:

They Tell Us That Your Mighty Powers

Tarkovsky's enigmatic masterwork.

I found this film quite difficult to get into since I'm more used to conventional plot driven narratives, a concept that was anathema to Tarkovsky. Certainly the Soviet authorities did their best to limit the venues where this film could be seen, condemning it's personal nature as decadent, self-indulgent and against the formal traditions of Soviet cinema, a cinema which Tarkovsky himself did not have a good word for. Russians who did see it sent many letters to the director saying how much it affected them and mirrored their own childhood experiences. Tarkovsky himself had difficulty in 'finding' his film during production, and originally worried that it would not work. Many critics questioned whether the images were symbolic in some way, but Tarkovsky dismissed symbolism as decadent. He sited Japanese writers of the middle ages rejecting such things. He had no time for surrealism either, pointing out that Dali himself had rejected the concept as facile. And yet the pull of dreams are un-mistakable in this work. Tarkovsky stated that the artist himself does not necessarily know the meaning of an image but is compelled to express his vision.

Despite some of the problems in viewing this film there are plenty of moving and mysterious moments, not least the wistful and melancholic look on the face of the mother as she lays in the grass, contemplating her children's future.