Andrei Tarkovsky Made One of the Most Unusual and Best Movies Ever — And It’s Still Confounding Us 50 Years Later

The name Andrei Tarkovsky may not be as well-known a name in pop culture when compared to the two foreign language auteurs of the 20th century with whom he is most often associated: Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa. That might be down to Russaphobia, the fact that he only has seven feature-length films, or the generally inaccessible themes of his films. But his films have stood the test of time—and are often lauded as some of the greatest of all time—because of how well they blend filmmaking, poetry, and philosophy, often underscored by otherworldly or supernatural settings.

Many of his films have inspired the greatest directors of all time and many still working today, like Terrence Malick and Alejandro González Iñárritu. His films have been remade, like this sci-fi remake from Steven Soderbergh, and been paid homage to, like in Alex Garland’s trippy sci-fi horror from 2018. The film by Tarkovsky that is often regarded as his best work, the one that has ranked highest in the Sight and Sound top 100 list, is also the toughest to quantify and understand. Mirror which turns 50 this year, having been released in 1975, is a work of extraordinarily poetic cinema, equally haunting and beautiful in its visual lyricism.

What Is ‘Mirror’ About?

No viewer of Mirror should be blamed for misunderstanding it because it is an esoteric, philosophically ambiguous film with a plot that is not the easiest to follow. Mirror tells the story of Aleksei and his memories throughout his lifetime, with three different actors (Ignat Daniltsev, Filipp Yankovsky, and Innokenty Smoktunovsky) playing him before World War II, during the war, and in the post-war years. The film is constructed in fragments, with nonlinear scenes interspersed through a rough timeline of Aleksei’s life. His childhood is marred by war in Russia, raised by his mother after his father abandoned the family.

His complex relationship with his mother is portrayed alongside his failed marriage to a woman who looks extraordinarily similar to his mother (Margarita Terekhova). The discontinuous, nonchronological plot combines newsreels, dreams, and the poetry of Tarkovsky’s real-life father, Arseny Tarkovsky. All these extended cinematic techniques represent the guilt Aleksei feels and his failed attempts at reconciliation with his past. The film is filled with rich symbolism, oneiric imagery, and a nonlinear structure that blurs the lines between reality and fiction.

No Film Deconstructs Memory like ‘Mirror’

Mirror is one of the most profound cinematic explorations of memory ever created. This is partly because Tarkovsky goes above and beyond merely depicting memories. Instead, he deconstructs them, revealing the elusive, fragmented, and deeply emotional nature of the concept of memory. The fragmentation of the film represents the realistic flow of memory, abandoning linear storytelling. Instead of a temporal rhythm, there is an emotional rhythm to the film, jumping between moments of great spiritual strength instead of being focused on the chronological timeline. By employing such an approach to nonlinear storytelling, Tarkovsky elevates the film to another level entirely, heightening its emotional power by breaking down the events of a man’s life into haunting, stand-alone memories.

Like how real memories are often triggered by a smell, sound, or gesture, Tarkovsky uses cinematic hints and gestures to bring Aleksei’s memories flooding back to his conscious mind. He uses visual and textural contrasts—like in the film’s most famous image of a barn burning down flanked by rain pouring down the house’s walls—to awaken sensory memories for the viewer. He repeats visuals time and again, like the mother washing her hands or the young boy looking through a doorway, to construct this atmospheric sense of déjà vu throughout the film. This haunting instability lets memory unravel naturally, with a raw intensity that elevates Tarkovsky’s film to its legendary status.

Tarkovsky uses memory as a tool to speak to the philosophical and poetic forces that exist in the world. Tarkovsky’s conception of time is central, with the past, present, and future intermingling continually. The subjectivity of time is a deeply philosophical concept, and one Tarkovsky explores in his more well-known sci-fi film Solaris as well. The temporal collage that this film basically is speaks to the fluidity of time, a closer representation of how we actually experience the passage of time.

Tarkovsky often carves out the sacred from the ordinary in his filmography, and nowhere is that more prevalent than in Mirror, particularly at its ending. Tarkovsky believed that cinema could capture the soul of the spiritual world. The divinity in the small things in Mirror, like drops of water or breezes blowing through curtains, reveals the concept of the sacred being hidden amongst the mundane in the world. Mirror acts as a philosophical prayer for that which we have forgotten and a lament for those things that we cannot let go.

Films like Mirror are few and far between and do not come around very often. For all that Tarkovsky created and achieved in his career, none has surpassed what he created here. The film, rather bizarrely, did not receive an official premiere. Tarkovsky wanted it to feature at the Cannes Film Festival, but the Soviet authorities refused and sent a different film instead (countries could only submit one film a year to the festival back then). Mirror was initially met with muted praise, but as time has passed, more and more appreciation has come for Tarkovsky’s monumental meditation on memory. Its influence still grows to this day—Christopher Nolan even cited it as an influence on the cinematography of Oppenheimer—and will undoubtedly only continue to do so. It might be difficult to understand, and will no doubt confuse viewers, but those who are willing to give it a chance will find one of the greatest and richest film experiences of all time.