"And the overwhelming joy is clouded by anticipation of awakening. At times something happens and i stop dreaming of the house and the pine trees of my childhood around it. Then i get depressed. And i can't wait to see this dream in which ill be a child again and feel happy again because everything will still be ahead, everything will be possible..."
Lillian Herman was giving a speech at a crowded lecture hall one afternoon when a young man stood up in the back and whined, "Why don't you endorse gay lib?"(considering she had publicly opposed many social injustices throughout her career). Hermann peered out out over her dark glasses, leaned over her cane, and responded in a brisk tone that "the forms of fucking do not require my endorsement."
That anecdote is one that is vaguely analogous to the view I have towards understanding(or not) the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. The master of poetic cinema, over the years it has become trivial,even borderline maddening, to try to make sense of his plots. What I have resigned to now, or perhaps finally been aware enough to discover, is to just engulf myself in the sheer beauty of his films. "The Mirror",a stream of consciousness film directed by Tarkovsky in 1978, is undoubtedly his most beautiful. It's extremely rare that I would recommend a film in which my entire understanding of it could be inscribed with a blunt crayon on the rim of a shot glass,but this is the exception. When I think about it, if asked to write about my understanding of life on that very shot glass, the results may be just as murky. It would most likely come out as a liminal, inenarrable mess. This is where the importance of art(and the artists editing) comes in of course. Tarkovsky, like any great artist,is impeccable in his selection of what to illuminate,and what to obscure. I've always felt that the best art is the kind that makes it look easy. "Mirror" is so minutely planned that it couldn't possibly resemble the cacophony of sensations we experience everyday, but it comes as close as any film I've seen.
The effortless flow,combined with the level of self relfexivity that would rival anything from Charlie Kaufman, Godard, etc etc is what makes "Mirror" a special film. In the beginning, films from directors such as Godard emphasized an almost nauseating ideological viewpoint in the place of actual storytelling.(Interesingly enough, Godard famously said he would rather watch James Bond films than those of the philosophically pretentious Antonioni).In contemporary times, self reflexivity in film lends itself to an endless loop of irony and just plain old wordiness. I'm thinking of Adaptation, A Cock and Bull Story,and Blazing Saddles, and Synecdoche New York,to name a few. Post-Modernism and irony, once rebellious forces that brilliantly exposed various lies, have become the standard, which as anyone knows, immediately removes it of it's rebellious force.Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy, ultimately leaving many of us feeling more alone. I get this same feeling when I watch one of my favorite TV shows:The Simpsons. I love it, but after about an hour, I feel like taking a shower.
"Mirror" avoids the psychoanalytic method of reflection that permeates so much of our culture. It instead emphasizes, through a rotation of some of the most gorgeous frames ever seen, existential solitude, ongoingness and waiting. About the most you'll get from this film is something along the lines of "What profound melancholy and suffering is implied in his inexpressive subtle gaze." You can choose to do the work of drawing emotional cues from the film, or you can just appreciate the imagery. The nice thing about it is the film doesn't care either way.
There really is nothing in it that would help you reconcile whatever things we all flock to art with in hopes of a palliative cure. There are no clever jokes, expository dialogue, easily discerned expressions, etc etc. Tarkovsky is often accused of being a cinematic naif,uninterested in the demands of modern audiences. I, for one, enjoy the perceived naivete present in his plot lines. It's, plain and simply, increasingly difficult to be as naive as we would like."Mirror" eschews self-consciousness and hip fatigue. A film like this is outdated, of course, before it even starts. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. To watch a film like "Mirror", it is truly inspiring. Tarkovsky is in the .00000000000001% of directors. He is an absolute genius of film. The level of aesthetic skill in this film cannot be imitated. But just to see a film in which sarcasm and hip ennui are made vulnerable to beauty/silence is to feel elated and(in a fleeting way) reconciled.
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