MIRROR

A subtly ravishing passage through the halls of time and memory, this sublime reflection on twentieth-century Russian history by Andrei Tarkovsky is as much a poem composed in images, or a hypnagogic hallucination, as it is a work of narrative cinema. In a richly textured collage of varying film stocks and newsreel footage, the recollections of a dying poet flash before our eyes, his dreams mingling with scenes of childhood, wartime, and marriage, all imbued with the mystical power of a trance. Largely dismissed by Soviet critics on its release because of its elusive narrative structure, MIRROR has since taken its place as one of the director’s most renowned and influential works, a stunning personal statement from an artist transmitting his innermost thoughts and feelings directly from psyche to screen.

“The film’s dream logic, its sustained sense of privacy and mystery, reasserts the intuition that yes, of course, nature is sentient, communicating apart from and beyond human striving.” – Michael Almereyda