Arquivo

On his deathbed, a man remembers his past: his childhood, his mother, the war, personal moments, as well as things that reveal the history of Russia. The autobiographical fi lm The Mirror was born from a series of questions in dialogue form that Tarkovsky imagined directing to his mother, the most infl uential fi gure in his formative years. But the filmmaker’s father, the poet Arseni Tarkovsky (1907-1989), also has a strong presence in the fi lm, with readings of his poems in his own voice appearing in it. Initially, Tarkovsky had intended for his mother, Maria Ivanovna Vishyakova (1905-79), to play herself, but that role was eventually filled by the actress Margarida Therekhova. Despite the numerous script rewrites, the director would decide, along with co-scriptwriter Aleksandr Micharin, what exactly would be fi lmed a few hours before heading to the set, taking with him scribbled pieces of paper. The result was a large quantity of disconnected scenes and one of the most diffi cult editing processes in the history of cinema, taking an entire month to fi nish. The fi lmmaker’s mother hated the fi nal product and only came to accept it many years later. With respect to the fi lm itself, Micharin reminds us of a phrase he heard Tarkovsky say during their collaboration: “I can make something meaningful based on three elements alone: blood, culture, and history”. The screenwriter stated that “all three things were violated during the Proletkult (Proletariat Culture, 1917-1932) period in the former Soviet Union, when one intelligenstia would simply give way to another”, and that Tarkovsky was “the fi rst to try and bridge the gap between these two cultures”. “Tarkovsky reestablished the ties between the past and the present and inoculated the quality of the eternal into the cinematic culture,” said the fi lmmaker’s collaborat or.