There are moments in Mirror when it feels as though Tarkovsky is exploring the outer boundaries of the possibility of fiction, and he has no option but to concede that fiction will not do what he needs. In these moments we see images of war, as soldiers trek through mud-wracked fields, or alternatively, more curiously, a mass of Chinese wave Mao’s little red book. These Chinese images fall out of apparent context into the film. The images of the Soviet war have a logic in this memory piece, reflecting the ubiquity of the second world war in post-45 Soviet filmmaking. The images of Russian soldiers lock us into the world of Tarkovsky’s children and describe the terror that helped form that world. But the images of the Chinese seem to push the narrative further, seeking to locate it in a more universal twentieth century experience, something which is amplified by the curious Spanish section, when unexpected characters appear, talking in Spanish about bullfighting, again contrasted with documentary footage of the Spanish Civil War.
Who are these Spaniards, or these Chinese, and what are they doing in Tarkovky’s delicate memory piece? But then our memories are not confined to the details of family or place. Our imaginations even as children engage with the morbid fears of the age. At another point, there’s footage of the nuclear bomb exploding, and any child who grew up in the shadow of the cold war had the bogeyman of nuclear annihilation lurking somewhere in their consciousness. Fiction can only go so far, at some point the filmmaker has to declare that his imagination has been formed by the actuality of the world.
Having said that, in Mirror we see again the breathtaking scope of the auteur’s imagination. The way he painted poetry with a camera that glided, like a ghost, through the scenes of a child’s past. There are so many moments for the high priests of cinematic criticism to dwell on that we could be here all year. Ideas and images thrown together in a style that sometimes borders on the Dada-esque, Tzara racing around fitting pieces together that don’t appear to match, but somehow do anyway. There is something almost childlike about this investigation of being a child. The construction of the film foregoes the adult demands of coherence, delighting in a language that is being created anew, for the very first time, all over again. In this film, more perhaps than any of his others, there is a connection with Godard, both employing a seemingly haphazard process of assemblage to stretch the boundaries of cinematic possibility.
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