The Mirror (1975)

Mirror (Russian: Зеркало, romanized: Zerkalo) is a 1975 Soviet avant-garde drama film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and written by Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Misharin. The film features Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Alla Demidova, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky's wife Larisa Tarkovskaya, and his mother Maria Vishnyakova. Innokenty Smoktunovsky contributed voiceover dialogue and Eduard Artemyev composed incidental music and sound effects.

Mirror portrays a dying poet pondering his memories. It is loosely autobiographical, unconventionally structured, and draws on a wide variety of source material, including newsreel footage of major moments in Soviet history and the poetry of the director's father, Arseny Tarkovsky. Its cinematography slips between color, black-and-white, and sepia. Its nonlinear narrative has delighted and frustrated critics and audiences for decades. The film's loose flow of oneiric images has been compared with the stream of consciousness technique associated with modernist literature.

Mirror initially polarized critics, audiences, and the Soviet film establishment. Tarkovsky devised the original concept in 1964, but the Soviet government did not approve funding for the film until 1973 and limited the film's release amid accusations of “cinephilic elitism”. Many viewers found its narrative incomprehensible, although Tarkovsky noted that many non-film critics understood the film. Since its release, it has been reappraised as Tarkovsky's magnum opus and one of the greatest films of all time. It is especially popular with Russians, for many of whom it is the most beloved of Tarkovsky's works.