Mirror

barnes & noble had a 50% off sale for all criterion discs and i made the rash decision and bought this movie with the intention to activate my creativity brain cells for a paper due next week. needless to say, i think that this is the best impulse decision i could have made this week. after watching the sacrifice, i felt intellectually challenged for not understanding it, now after my rewatch of the mirror i’m reminded that the reason why i felt that way is because i shouldn’t have been looking for non-existent intellectual themes in the first place. in a way, tarkovsky’s way of filmmaking is the antithesis of mainstream films. not meaning that it makes it better or more advanced, but instead that it is vastly different from anything out there. its similar to bergman and bresson. it doesn’t attempt to convince you of what it’s saying, but once you’re drowning in its imagery and getting lost in its ambiguity, then you are hit with it. epiphanic. there is confusion, there is frustration, but throughout the long duration of the film, the confusion turns into certainty and you feel it emotionally. it’s the issue of emotion vs intellect that during a tarkovsky film, you suppress every ounce of intellect in your body, and put your brain on an emotionally-driven autopilot.  the mirror is probably the best showing of this. the film itself is structured between three historical events: before the war, during the war, and long after the war. but instead of dissecting individual events and creating a cohesive timeline out of the non-linear story, tarkovsky portrays his life and translates his inner emotions in a way that is not a common or complicated one, but a communicable one. the mirror isn’t pretentious, and i feel like people view it that way since they mistake it as an attempt at trying to have some deeper meaning. what it is trying to be is a collection of memories that given the narrative in the film, cannot be comprehended individually. the memories in the film can vary: they can be trivial, they can be dreamlike, they can be about emotions like love and loneliness, but they can also be about the past and present and something as frivolous as the effects of nature. these aren’t themes that you could piece together using logic and reasoning, but more themes that you understand by feeling them. chronology means nothing when looking through memories but emotions mean everything.  what makes this film impactful and allows people to have such an emotional attachment isn’t the visceral imagery or the complete unconventionality of it, but it’s the fact that it’s able to grab ahold of you because of just how human it is; you are able to find relatability in it. which is why i find it hard to truncate this down into one singular meaning. think of the title as a metaphor: when looking at a mirror, you shouldn’t be analyzing every detail and critiquing every blemish because it distracts you from the bigger picture, yourself. and this is why i feel that the “correct” meaning of a film is just supposed to be part of the conversation, but not the sole discussion about it. making art a noun strips away the core values. films should not be watched to be analyzed but should be watched to be experienced.  it is now sunday night/monday morning, i started this review on friday, and within the 2/3 days that i spent writing this, i have done no work on my paper because i refuse to analyze films. however, i did end up buying the rest of his filmography so i think it balances out.  the end. <3