The multiple reflection of the same people traveling through time in various mirrors is a center motif of the film. Mirrors here become the instruments of a magnificent time machine that is capable of juxtaposing the time and space of different generations; and yet the mirrors distort, refract, double and present in a new, more truthful or erroneous way the physical objects and human relationships in the film. The full understanding of the events that construct the story-line itself comes only by the end of the film, when the viewer is left with something more important, more valuable than a simple context: the time sequences and repetitions that construct what is known as life. Zerkalo is a clot of life, the images here should not be deciphered: they are to be perceived as they are. The further a viewer is from the content of a film, the closer he is; what people are looking for in cinema is a continuation of their lives, not a repetition. It is a dialogue between the past and present in which the narrator uses the memories and experiences of others, as well as his own, to enlarge his personal consciousness and free himself from his stifling egoism and self-centeredness. This is gauze of perception, an example cinematographic expressionism, where the feelings make up the essence of the film. Tarkovsky has revealed to the journalists that Zerkalo is an autobiographic depiction of the events, or rather of the situation of after-war Russia. This fills the film with the atmosphere of poignancy, but yet warmth, compassion and deepness. The senses of personal affliction and deep contemplation create an aura around the personages that all become brushstrokes of paint on the canvas of the great expression. The director takes us through different aspects of memorymemory as conscience and memory as guiltand then combines within the space of one final sequence two points in time : the tenuous barriers between dream and memory, past a...
