In a recent university lecture I learnt about the Black Audio Film Collective, a group of African and Caribbean filmmakers that came together in Dalston in 1982 to bring awareness to the black and Asian experience in London. Being a Caribbean filmmaker based in East London with an interest in sound, this felt like God dropping the winning lottery ticket in my lap and I would be crazy not to cash out. I wanted to get in contact with them, but I thought it important to do some more research into the group and its individual members and so I started looking at interviews featuring one of the core founders, John Akomfrah. In an interview with Tate Modern, he mentioned his biggest inspiration for becoming a filmmaker – the 1975 Russian film Mirror, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Akomfrah describes it as the “border of cinema”, saying that it still functions as the limit of what cinema can be. Naturally, I was intrigued by this and immediately searched for the film online. It took me five days to complete one viewing. It is an extremely beautiful movie and really ahead of its time in terms of its cinematography and narrative structure, but it is one of the most difficult movies to understand.
The film explores the memories and dreams of the main character, Aleksei and therefore takes us through different timelines in the Soviet Union– pre-war 1935, during the war in the 1940s and post-war 1960s and ‘70s. The film constantly cuts back and forth between these timelines and the dreams to create a seemingly non-focused narrative. However, the film can be interpreted as a representation of our ‘stream of consciousness’. After all, we don’t think in a linear manner, so the film is a reflection of that. Speaking of reflections, many mirrors are prominently featured in the film. My interpretation is that the filmmaker actually sees himself in these images. After all, the film is deeply personal to Tarkovsky. It is loosely based on his own experience of moving to the countryside during wartime Russia. Andrei’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky is the writer and narrator of the poems that are recited throughout the film and his mother plays the aged Maria. Knowing this adds context to the dream-like sequences, as they are visualisations of Tarkovsky’s own dreams, and therefore meaning can only be given to these scenes based on the viewer’s own experiences. The most beautiful of these sequences happens near the end, when an unconscious Maria is floating above a bed as a white dove flies away. Again, it is difficult to find meaning in this image because the context is never explicitly given to us. However, this dream sequence happens when Aleksei is on his deathbed and white doves can represent peace and happiness in the home. So I interpret it as Aleksei wishing for his mother’s peace after he is gone.
A lot of the shots of the film look like they were pulled straight out of a painting. The shot of the family looking at their barn as it burns down and even the long take that leads up to it belong in a museum. Maria sitting on the fence outside her house, the dream sequence of the building collapsing around her as she is drenched, Aleksei running to his house in the middle of rainstorm; this film is a cinematographer’s fantasy.
I can tell why John Akomfrah takes a liking to this film, as he has a fascination with of the concept of ‘history vs. memory’. In other words, he is interested in uncovering the facts of a particular time or event while debunking people’s perceptions of it. Mirror is the amalgamation of that concept, as there are actual newsreels and footage of WWII mixed in with the narrative. I think it is the perfect way of showing the natural flow of information that runs through our minds– we dream, we take in the news and other media, we reminisce. Without knowing a single thing about Andrei Tarkovsky before watching this film, I feel like his close friend now. Mirror opens a door into his psyche and even puts my own stream of consciousness into perspective.
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