r children. The narrator, or perhaps Tarkovsky himself, is trying to appease his guilty with indifference and scorn conscience with the memories of his childhood and attempts to relive or even incarnate the experiences of his past. The problems of the past are reflected and repeated in the present. Remembering Proust, Tarkovsky describes the effect of finishing Mirror: Childhood memories which for years had given me no peace suddenly vanished, as if they had melted away, and at last I stopped dreaming about the house where I had lived so many years before . As all of Tarkovskys films, Zerkalo is hard to be tied to any particular culture, it is universal, global in its meaning and message it conveys and yet fully comprehendible only by someone who experienced the described reality of pre-war Soviet times of Stalins repressions and the war itself. The film opens with a prologue that shows life footage of a boy being treated from stuttering. In the end of the prologue, the treated patient says, I can speak now; the entire essence of Zerkalo as the remembrances of a man who recalls the most important moments in his life, a man dying and acquiring a conscience. is presented in this short sequence. This little sequel is symbolic of the authors desire to be able to speak freely of the truth that is being uncovered in front of the narrators eyes. And as a miraculously cured boy suddenly discovers his ability to talk, the author unveils and admits the truth of his life to himself. Zerkalo incorporates three time schemes, one changing the other, that together constitute an autobiography of the artist, and a biography of two Soviet generations within a wide-ranging context of Russian, European, and world history, linked together subjectively by dreams, memory, time, and art itself. The short sequences from the pre-war years are being replaced by the more modern ones, i.e. 1970s times, which are in turn suddenly replaced by the director w...
