The Mirror, 1975, Andrei Tarkovsky

The worlds that Tarkovsky creates feel much like ours except on an almost miniature scale. I've never felt so much like a voyeur when watching a film than my experience watching Tarkovsky's lifespan of work. The pacing is tauntingly meditative at times stalling in moments that are otherwise devoid of action, begging you to notice the way wind stirs blades of grass or how long it takes for sweat to drip down someone's forehead. An initial introduction while frustrating can prove to be an intense recollection of the intricacies of living if you choose to endure it. In my experimentation of filmmaking from the roots of photography I'm primarily interested in the malleability present between the two mediums. It becomes clear that Tarkovsky shared an interest in the manipulation of the passage of time concerning the still image. His own photographic practice often through the means of polaroids as an "instant memory" heavily informed his filmmaking process as both mediums seem to suggest a deep longing for the ability to "sculpt" time. Tarkovsky constructed his films with the still image in mind which is somewhat of a subversion of the modern film. My understanding being the action sequence almost always acted as a buffer from the highlights being the moments of quiet, where the audience is allowed to linger and study the "perfect moment", so to speak. The Mirror, a subjective semi-autobiography of Tarkovsky's life holds many moments of stillness. Following the oneiric theory that states the acts of filmmaking and dreaming both hold similar qualities, the plot is non-linear and centered entirely around the mind of the main character. This decision allows Tarkovsky to construct these moments that defy our understanding of how time and memory interact with each other and the world at large. We discuss the fallacy of truth in relation to photographs much more than cinema though through techniques such as repetition of scenes and series of unpredictable shifts from greyscale to color throughout we as the viewers get a sense of how the medium is being pushed to it's limits and how our ability to navigate fact from fiction is being challenged. (Week 7)