Mirror

“Mirror” saves its most puzzling segment for the last. As noted previously, one reason why this film is so psychologically rich is that it avoids psychoanalytic language. Tarkovsky navigates the terrain of his unconscious without attaching labels to it — so we are free to associate these images with religion, culture

It becomes impossible to decipher “Mirror” at this point. The camera opens in black and white on the face of a man who seems like something out of an impressionistic silent movie. He stands beside Maroussia, who is levitating. As if that isn’t ethereal enough, there’s a voice

It’s hard enough to write about “Mirror” by itself. It reaches a new level of complexity when Tarkovsky decides to pay tribute to Swedish cinematic master Ingmar Bergman and his 1966 classic “Persona.” I wrote a bit about “Persona” in essay 7 of this series, but only scratched the

I now reach the point in “Mirror” where I feel not only my descriptive powers fail me, but my observational ones as well. It’s a series of three scenes stacked on top of one another, the first in color, the second in black and white, the third again in

There are probably 25 reasonable candidates for the best movie ever made, it all depends on your tastes. But three of those candidates circle each other in interesting ways. Federico Fellini’s 1963 film “8 1/2” is a movie about making a movie, but even more than that, it’

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