Tarkovsky now gives us a mini-film within “Mirror,” a multipart meditation on war, death, faith and time. In form, it is similar to what David Lynch did in episode 8 of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” scenes that could stand on their own as a singular piece, while also fitting inside the broader structure of this exercise in sculpting in time.

He named his memoir that — Sculpting in Time — a book about his movies, but also about himself, but also one of the rare books of cinematic philosophy.

It is this segment of this film that displays the full power of Tarkovsky’s method. To recount it step by step would be foolish. Better to watch the film or read his notes — or peruse his treatment of “Mirror” and the wealth of documentary materials about it on the Criterion Collection 4K edition.

Instead of any of that, I want to return to the topic I’ve been circling lately, the power of the film director, and that quote from Benny Safdie that cinema is evil: it turns us into life’s spectators, disconnecting us from experience, settling into a spoon-fed reality with the all knowing, all powerful director at the core.

I rebel against this evil power of the director in numerous ways. I do see movies in theaters, but I must admit that it’s not my favorite style of viewing. Sitting for long lengths in one place is uncomfortable for me. The recliners that some theaters have help, but even then I shift around often.

But it goes beyond that. I don’t like being forced to watch a movie the way a director intended. I like how Netflix, AppleTV, YouTube and the Criterion Channel allow me to change the speed of the film. YouTube goes all the way up to 3X speed, making some massive epics that were previous out of react for me possible to absorb. You can also slow down scenes, very useful as a tool for my scene by scene analyses.

Even when I watch at standard speed, I like to find different ways to take control of the movie watching experience. I will frequently pause films to get up and walk around. Sometimes I’ll create “movie pairings” and will watch films 20-30 minutes at a time and then switch to another movie … back and forth between them until they are both complete.

All of these techniques have the effect of making movies more like novels, something I can experience at my leisure. They become my stories, not the director’s. When I own the BluRays of movies, they feel even more mine than before. This makes me feel that no streaming service can take away the films that are most important to me.

This segment of “Mirror” rewards my kind of watching. The centerpiece segment, the only true narrative part of it, is centered on a shooting range for teenaged boys during World War II. A weary instructor teaches the boys the basics of military drills, especially shooting. It’s a depressing exercise — a war that has taken the lives of so many that the country felt obliged to dip into youth to fill its ranks. It’s the subject of Tarkovsky’s first film “Ivan’s Childhood” as well.

The hook for this episode was Alexi describing his wartime experiences and that red-red haired girlfriend with the chapped lips. But the camera spends no time on Alexi. Instead it focuses on a boy whose parents both died during the siege of Leningrad. The kid’s a fuckup … he shoots at the trees instead of targets, doesn’t know the most simple military commands such as about-face, and carries around with him a grenade that may or may not be live … and then throws it onto the training ground, putting everyone at risk.

The instructor heroically dives for it and refastens the pin. The boy says it was just a training grenade — but given that he took it from the battlegrounds of Leningrad, who knows.

This is the little story, but it’s supplemented with newsreel footage of the Soviet army crossing a lake during the war, footage that apparently Tarkovsky found in archives and had never been shown publicly before. Everyone in this platoon would end up dead within days of the crossing, something Tarkovsky doesn’t tell us, but hints at in another poem from Tarkovsky’s father that drifts from a denial of death to the power of faith and the immutability of time.

We get a winter scene that matches Bruegel’s famous celebration of winter play, and that orphan boy again, receiving a blessing in the form of a bird that lands on his head. I have no idea how Tarkovsky captured this image on film, it is magic.

And then there’s this other newsreel segment that focuses on a Soviet-China border dispute in the 1970s. It’s interesting that Tarkovsky brings conflict back to present day not by focusing on conflicts with the U.S., but with China. This was a common fear in the 1970s, especially after Nixon’s opening to China.

For Tarkovsky, China seemed like an exotic, non-Christian threat to the Russian way of life in a way that the United States did not. His ferocious images of red book waving Chinese mobs, superimposed with shots of hydrogen bombs exploding, weren’t the slightest bit subtle, but the Soviet censors had no issues with the newsreel’s inclusion.

Throughout this cinematic essay about the horrors of war and the risks everyone could feel, Tarkovsky is back to his extremely Christian point of view. But I can’t help but think that the Tolstoy view of warfare wasn’t far from Tarkovsky’s worldview either.

Tarkovsky did not believe that violence is a form of Christian purification, as many Catholic filmmakers (including Scorsese) have embraced. Tarkovsky never celebrated violence in his films and after “Ivan’s Childhood,” he included very little hand to hand combat in his movies.

For this, I see him as a visionary worthy studying and emulating. In very different ways, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky created a new cinema where conflict did not require bloodshed.

These are my cinematic gods and while I still refuse to give them full power over my gaze, I am happy to follow their path to human and spiritual growth.