I've seen your film four times in the last week. And I didn't simply go to see it, but in order to spend just a few hours living a real life with real artists and real people.... Everything that torments me, everything I don't have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me - it's all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror. For the first time ever a film has become something real for me, and that's why I go to see it, I want to get right inside it, so that I can really be alive.
Tarkovsky recalls the work that went into editing Mirror, in which the structure of the film was altered and the sequence of the episodes changed. It would seem the film would never find its form, that too much was missing. And yet, one day, he writes,
the material came to life; the parts started to function reciprocally, as if linked by a bloodstream; and as that last despairing attempt was projected onto the screen, the film was born before our very eyes.
Somehow, the two hundred shots of Mirror came together. Tarkovsky writes of a ‘time pressure’, in which the scenes have to come together to preserve a consistency of time, in the same manner one joins water pipes of a different diameter. The criterion that guides editing is life, according to Tarkovsky – life as it is ‘constantly moving and changing’, allowing each person to ‘interpret and feel each separate moment in his own way’.
What is essential is that the audience experience a time that is uncoerced by the director; yet, as Tarkovsky writes:
There is still an apparent dichotomy: for the directors sense of time always amounts to a kind of coercion of the audience, as does his imposition of his inner world. The person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world), and becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your ‘own’ and others remain strangers; and I think this is not only perfectly natural, but, alas, inevitable.
I am intrigued about the notion of taste at issue here: the idea that, somehow, the director's experience of time would resonate with one's own, to the extent that one is possessed, or, perhaps, dispossessed by the work. Better still - there is the notion that this play of possession and dispossession is at issue in every moment of our lives, and particular when we give ourselves to drifting or to idleness, or when our attention is captured for a moment by something that is mundane and surprising.
What is essential is to cross the bridge from the opening to the work to life. This is not an opposition. Perhaps the bridge leads into the work itself. It is never a question of the representation of the world in the film. The film, sculpted from time, resonates with the rebirth of the world. 'In a word, the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as a drop of water. Only in a drop of water!' A drop of water: an event, banal but world shaking, ordinary but extraordinary insofar, in a moment, it captures us and holds us still. A drop of water - the image is sufficient unto itself, but so too is the event. We live our lives at one time in terms of our desire to complete tasks, to finish projects, but at another - and in the same moment - in the fascination when we are unable, any longer, to be able, to assemble ourselves such that we are capable of anything at all.
'Everything that torments me, everything I don't have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me it's all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror.' - Everything is in the film. But this is because the film answers to the movement within things as they give themselves to be experienced and as we give ourselves over to them. Everything is there because it attests to a kind of 'push' or pressure that inhabits things, that is their movement in time, their constancy, their flowering or their withering which escapes determination. This is what resonates in me as I watch the film; I am claimed not by director's vision, or even his experience of time, as Tarkovsky suggests, but by time itself.
Mirror is not the film in which one recognises oneself, or recognises one's childhood. I cannot contemplate Mirror - I am not the spectator; the work does not lay itself before me. Above all, it does not let me see myself. Alexei, the child of the film is fascinating because I am seized by the fascination that seizes him as he gazes into the mirror. It is then that he allows us, too, to gaze at the film as into the mirror in which we can no longer see ourselves. At that moment, we are no longer capable of seeing, of assuming a distance from what we see. We see the film with the blindspot which permits our sight - with the incapacity from which everything we are capable issues and to which it must return. Websites as rich and as beautiful as Nostalghia mean that none of us, now, need be alone in our fascination with this film. But we share nothing but our blindness.