Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Mirror
1975 · Andrei Tarkovsky · Mirror on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice when the film switches from color to black and white. (light)
Rerberg shoots the childhood dacha scenes in cooler black and white while color carries warmer, candlelit interiors, giving each register its own emotional temperature.
Payoff: The film sorts memory from dream by texture alone, never by a title card.
Watch for wind moving through a field for no story reason. (setting)
Tarkovsky holds on a burning barn, rain through a broken ceiling, fog lifting off a field, images that never trigger a plot event.
Payoff: These images are not clues to solve. They are simply given to you to feel. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations. Deleuze calls an image released from any action a pure optical situation, and Tarkovsky's wind and fire are exactly that.
Notice the same actress playing both the mother and the wife. (performance)
Margarita Terekhova plays Masha and Natalia across different decades, and the film never marks which woman you are looking at in a given scene.
Payoff: Present and memory fold into one face, so you feel the conflation instead of being told about it. In the reading: crystal-image (hyalosign). Deleuze calls a point where present and memory become indistinguishable a crystal-image, and one face playing two women is that crystal made literal.
Listen for the narrator's voice. His face never appears. (sound)
Alexei tells much of the film in voice-over, but Tarkovsky never once shows his adult face on screen.
Payoff: He exists as a presence moving through time rather than a body you can locate in space.
Follow what connects one scene to the next, not the plot. (cutting)
Feiginova cuts on rhyme, a texture or color or gesture echoing across scenes, rather than on cause and effect.
Payoff: The film is edited the way a memory actually drifts, not the way a story is normally told.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the same face returning in different decades, and let the wind in the field mean nothing but itself.