a family at war with art
by Douglas Messerli
Aleksandr Misharin and
Andrei Tarkovsky (screenplay), Andrei Tarkovsky (director) Zerkalo (The Mirror) /
1975
I believe I
first watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, The
Mirror in 1991, writing a bit of nonsense about it long before I had begun
the annual cultural memoirs of the My
Year series. The fact that I truly did not understand the work very well as
is apparent in the abstract generalities I chose to discuss it:
"The Mirror is a film of forgetting, or the need of it. Tension must be redirected. Fear, anger, hate, must be cut away for the survivor to be free to love and speak anew."
I
continued, on the film’s structure:
The pattern of this film, however,
necessarily is one of memories, connections,
relationships—an absolute jumble of
alliances and links. The Spanish Civil War,
the Siege of Leningrad, Mao’s attack
on Russians are part and parcel of the
structure of relationships between wife, husband, mother, father, son.
I reflect today, after seeing that
film at least two more times: “perhaps, yes and no.” Yet it is also clear that
I couldn’t quite comprehend what I saw. What seemed so difficult and “jumbled”
back then—and still apparently feels that way to a number of contemporary film
commentators—now feels much more coherent and ordinary, without the film having
lost its sense of wonderment.
In some respects, Tarkovsky tips his hat
to his methodology in the very first scene of the film, wherein, through a
television commentary, we observe a behavioral psychologist attempt to cure a
young stuttering boy (the same actor who plays Alexei and Ignat throughout) undergoing
a kind of hack version of hypnosis or thought transference. Certainly the rest
of this director’s film can be said to be hypnotic, as in a series of
stunningly beautiful images, in color and black and white, as the story weaves
in an out of the Tarkovsky family psychological tensions, focusing on both the
childhood of the director and his poet-father.
Although both sets of families might
desire to live in the isolated world represented by the country house in which
the action of the film begins, the males of both generations quickly abandon
that world.
The film begins there, in the country,
with the director’s mother, Maria (Margarita Terekhova) sitting alone on a
fence as she watches an approaching man—which she might wish were her missing
husband—a local doctor (Anatoli Solnitsyn) who asks about the path to the
nearby village. Maria explains that he should have turned at the bush in the
distance, but the doctor, briefly enchanted by Maria’s beauty, remains,
somewhat flirtatiously discussing small topics like the weather and the region
around. She threatens to call her husband, but he doubts that she may even be
married, since she has no ring. What we already know (through the narrator and
images) is that the father, Arseny, has left them, and that indeed this young
woman has two children to care for.
The event, although beautiful to behold,
might be entirely without meaning except that it represents both the utter
loneliness and sadness of the beautiful young woman, and explains Alexei’s
(also known as Alyosha) (Ignat Daniltsev) fears and his quietude throughout.
The collapse of the fence when the doctor attempts to sit beside Maria, clearly
symbolizes the collapse in part of her and her children’s world as the events
of World War II and the global politics of the post-war period are interwoven
into the fabric of both the father’s and Alexei’s family lives.
Throughout, and in varying degrees, outlying buildings catch fire and
burn to the ground, children are forced to go to battle, the Spanish Civil War
destroys thousands just as the siege of Leningrad had destroyed as many before.
In non-linear time, Tarkovsky represents that the fear and even hysterics of
this family are tied together not only my personal betrayal and absence but by
global events beyond their control.
In one highly dramatic scene, Maria,
working now in the city as a proofreader (possibly for her own husband’s
collection of poetry) rushes to work terrified that she has missed a glaring
typo. The book has already gone to print, while her colleagues reassure her
that everything will be fine. Running to the cabinet where finished manuscripts
are stored, she discovers, indeed, that she there no such typo in the work,
only to later be harshly attacked for her selfishness by the colleague, Liza
(Alla Demidova) who has previously attempted to assure her.
Tarkovsky coils the skeins of his story
even more tightly by serving, at moments, as narrator himself, by using the
voice of his own father, Arseny, to read his poems throughout, and by employing his real mother, Maria Vishnyakova,
as the elderly Maria, while using the acting talents of his own wife, Larisa
Tarkovskaya. In short, it is hard at times to dissociate the dramatic family
drama from the real-life drama that has already long ago been played out. Like
his father, Aleksei too divorces his wife, Natalia (also played by Terekhova)
who lives apart with their son Ignat. As I noted in my early notes, the past,
in this film, does indeed repeat itself.
Having now read about the life and poetry
of Arseny Tarkovsky, however, I recognize how alienating and even frightening
it might have been for the young Alexei to even visit his father, who lived in
an apartment of relative luxury filled with literary and art books, while the
mother and son remained in a dilapidated home, at one time so hungry and
penniless that Maria walks barefoot to the distant home of same doctor who
appeared in the second scene of the film, to ask for help. The doctor is not at
home, and his wife, although greeting them as friends, does not bother to feed
the two before, embarrassed by her visit, Maria and her son quickly retreat..
Throughout, Tarkovsky uses images—the
burning structure, a pitcher of spilled milk, a levitating woman, and a stock
archive shot of the first atomic bomb—that he will use again in his final film,
also about family life, The Sacrifice.
In fact, that same title might almost have
worked for this beautiful film as well, being as it is, a study in the
sacrifice of the ordinary lives of human beings at the altar of art. Art, that
often distorted mirror of life, has no room for the joyful loving, breathing,
and tortured beings of the real world. Is it any wonder that, at one point, the
young Ignat steals from his father an expensive book of major art drawings and
leaves it in the woods to be destroyed by nature?
Los Angeles, September 13, 2015
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (September
2015).
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