ZERKALO                                        

Other Titles: MIRROR

Director: Andrei TARKOVSKY

Release Year: 1974                                                                          Cast and Credits

                                                                                                                   Interview with Tarkovsky about Mirror

The award-winning director Andrei Tarkovsky, (one of his better known films is Andrei Rublev), the son of a famous Russian poet, was born in 1935 and grew up in and around Moscow during the Second World War. This non-narrative autobiographical film is considered by many Russian-speakers to be his best film and is his most personal meditation on time, history and the Russian countryside. In a series of episodes and images, he captures the mood and feeling of the period just before, during and after the war. Lyrical reminiscences of his mother and of his father's poetry figure large in the film, along with extraordinary images of nature. Combining black-and-white and color work, with some unusual documentary footage, this highly regarded movie is structured with the logic of a dream. -- Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

                        Tarkovsky…on the set of Mirror

Tarkovsky's visually sumptuous fourth feature offers an idiosyncratic history of twentieth-century Russia, in the form of a poet's fragmented reflections on three generations of his family. The poems used in the film were written and read by Tarkovsky's own father; Tarkovsky's mother appears in a small role as the protagonist's elderly mother. In a dual role, actress Margarita Terekhova is both the protagonist's wife and his mother as a younger woman. "The Mirror is Tarkovsky's central film, and his most personal one, although it might be better described as a transpersonal autobiography. Dreams and memories of an individual protagonist (who is never seen on screen) blend with dreams and memories of the culture. The generations of one family mingle. The Mirror achieves something which is uniquely possible in cinema but which no other film has even attempted: it expresses the continuity of consciousness across time, in a flow of images of the most profound beauty" (Amnon Buchbinder). "Unique its form, unique its vision" (Chris Peachment, Time Out). "Profoundly intimate . . . one of the rare completely achieved films of autobiography" (Mark Le Fanu).