This extract comes from the beginning of the film Mirror, which is largely autobiographical and tells the story of Alexei’s life from childhood to adulthood. The intensity of the sequence is not due to the narrative thread, which is very tenuous - a woman has to say goodbye to a man, returns home where her children are eating and they witness the burning of a barn outside the house - but to great sensory depth and intensity, of remarkable diversity.
It is built around the house and the question of the passage from inside to outside. The sequence begins on the outskirts of a house in the Russian countryside. It is cold, the elements are very present: a swift, sudden gust of wind shakes the grass, the woman clutches her shawl as she reaches the wooden house, deep in the shot. The ground is hard and wet: a woman carries a child lying in a makeshift shelter on a bed of straw.
Inside the protective home, great attention to detail is given to a range of sensations that appeal to the viewer's sensory memory. In a single, very short shot, the children eat. Our attention is drawn equally to the milk spilled on the wooden table, the scattered raspberries, the cat lapping up the milk and having salt poured playfully on its head. Faced with a blaze which consumes the barn, the woman grabs a bucket from the well, drawing water to cool herself. There is no opposition presented between inside and outside, but a great permeability between the two worlds is offered - a slow tracking shot accompanies the mother's gaze to the bouquet in front of the open window which leads us outside, where rain soaks the empty garden. Similarly, the last part of the sequence, which is highly structured, embraces the call for help that comes from outside in the same cinematic gesture, the children who rush to see the fire and the mother who goes out, joining the man, looking into the blaze. In Tarkovsky's cinema, both the material and objects have their own organic life and exist as much as the characters: thus when the children leave the table in a hurry, the camera remains on the table and the bottle falls to the ground, rolling on the floor. The soundtrack reinforces the power of this sensory universe: the whispering of the children and the cries of the neighbours, the footsteps on the wooden floor, the crackling fire, the drops of rain falling from the roof. At the beginning of the sequence, these everyday sounds are partially covered by the voice-over reading a poem. It is the voice of Arseni, Tarkovsky's father, reading one of his texts. In this sequence, which apparently has no scenic importance, the spectator has the impression of entering a universe of great sensory power which forms a world of its own. There are no temporal markers, but there is the sensation of time passing and the impression of nostalgia. The passage of sensations, sometimes linked to contradictory emotions (the mother's tears, the children's joy mixed with terror at the fire) concern the characters as much as the audience. They also appear, through this enigmatic poem, as reminiscences on the director's childhood.
Comment
This extract comes from the beginning of the film Mirror, which is largely autobiographical and tells the story of Alexei’s life from childhood to adulthood. The intensity of the sequence is not due to the narrative thread, which is very tenuous - a woman has to say goodbye to a man, returns home where her children are eating and they witness the burning of a barn outside the house - but to great sensory depth and intensity, of remarkable diversity.
It is built around the house and the question of the passage from inside to outside. The sequence begins on the outskirts of a house in the Russian countryside. It is cold, the elements are very present: a swift, sudden gust of wind shakes the grass, the woman clutches her shawl as she reaches the wooden house, deep in the shot. The ground is hard and wet: a woman carries a child lying in a makeshift shelter on a bed of straw.
Inside the protective home, great attention to detail is given to a range of sensations that appeal to the viewer's sensory memory. In a single, very short shot, the children eat. Our attention is drawn equally to the milk spilled on the wooden table, the scattered raspberries, the cat lapping up the milk and having salt poured playfully on its head. Faced with a blaze which consumes the barn, the woman grabs a bucket from the well, drawing water to cool herself. There is no opposition presented between inside and outside, but a great permeability between the two worlds is offered - a slow tracking shot accompanies the mother's gaze to the bouquet in front of the open window which leads us outside, where rain soaks the empty garden. Similarly, the last part of the sequence, which is highly structured, embraces the call for help that comes from outside in the same cinematic gesture, the children who rush to see the fire and the mother who goes out, joining the man, looking into the blaze. In Tarkovsky's cinema, both the material and objects have their own organic life and exist as much as the characters: thus when the children leave the table in a hurry, the camera remains on the table and the bottle falls to the ground, rolling on the floor. The soundtrack reinforces the power of this sensory universe: the whispering of the children and the cries of the neighbours, the footsteps on the wooden floor, the crackling fire, the drops of rain falling from the roof. At the beginning of the sequence, these everyday sounds are partially covered by the voice-over reading a poem. It is the voice of Arseni, Tarkovsky's father, reading one of his texts. In this sequence, which apparently has no scenic importance, the spectator has the impression of entering a universe of great sensory power which forms a world of its own. There are no temporal markers, but there is the sensation of time passing and the impression of nostalgia. The passage of sensations, sometimes linked to contradictory emotions (the mother's tears, the children's joy mixed with terror at the fire) concern the characters as much as the audience. They also appear, through this enigmatic poem, as reminiscences on the director's childhood.