Rev Left Radio - "Mirror" by Andrei Tarkovsky: Time, Memory, and Aesthetic Contemplation

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Breht is a guest on Left of the Projector (along with Amanda Joy Moon). Together, with the host Evan, the three discuss Soviet Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Mirror" from 1975. This is our fourth episode focusing on the films of Tarkovsky. You can find all our other episodes on Tarkovsky's films HERE Left of the Projector: Subscribe: https://leftoftheprojector.com ⁠⁠Letterboxd⁠⁠: https://boxd.it/5T9O1 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: https://www.patreon.com/LeftoftheProjectorPod ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: https://www.instagram.com/leftoftheprojectorpod/ Amanda Joy Moon: ⁠⁠Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandajoymoon/ ⁠ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Support Rev Left Radio Follow Rev Left on IG 

Sit back in your seats, get something you eat. Watch this movie. Don't like to see it. Well, we'll let you hear the video. Thank you. Hello and welcome to Left of the Projector. I am your host, Evan, back again with another film discussion from the Left. This week on the show, we are going to be talking about the 1975 Tarka.

Tarkovsky film that continues our series on the works of Ando Tarkovsky. And with me to discuss, as per usual, I have Brett from Rev Left Radio and I have Amanda. Thank you both for continuing to come back for more from the Tarkovsky catalog. It's a journey. Absolutely. Happy to be here. Yes. So I think, I know like in a couple other ones, maybe the last time we kind of did a, you know,

kind of a icebreaker on kind of other artists or other directors and things. But I think maybe for this one, we should jump right in. And kind of my first question. And again, this film came out in 1975. It is one of the later films from Tarkovsky. Or actually, I guess it's not later. It's I guess it's right in the middle. I lied.

It's 1975. It's his fourth feature film. It came out before Stalker. but it's after the film before this was Solaris. When I watched this movie, I was just saying before we started recording, is that more than any of the other ones we've done, Ivan's Childhood, Stalker, Solaris, I couldn't help but just be immersed in sort of pausing at moments to take some notes and also just like for my own personal sort of self-reflection.

I'm just kind of curious, as you were watching this, maybe during and then maybe immediately after kind of what it felt like watching this because to me it just has this um it's very disorienting it's a non-linear story that's very autobiographical for under tarkaski it's there are scenes that kind of don't fit the previous one it kind of jumps around different time period so i'm curious how uh it kind of just it made you made you feel well disorienting is is like a good good one um i parts i had trouble kind of figure out like who was character i think they like reused actors for different timelines so it was kind of like jumping around that and of course i'm looking up who's on the cast who it's mainly like the female protagonist is uh lorisa

turkaska and his wife um it felt deeply deeply personal um i feel like all his films have a deep connection to his own personal story. I also couldn't help but feel like that it was the Yvonne's childhood that he wanted to make initially because, you know, he didn't write that screenplay. He just kind of came in as a last selection and, you know, with half the budget, good, had free range of the storyline. But I feel like this is like him having the ability to, like make the film that he wanted to make to begin with. And maybe perhaps it has a reflection

of him being a more mature artist, more mature filmmaker, screenplay, screenwriter, you know. So, yeah. Yeah. So for me, yeah, it was, I guess, yeah, disorienting is, I guess, one way to say it just because there is, it's intellectually impenetrable, meaning that if, if you try, as we all try, I think immediately and automatically to do, which is to understand it intellectually to try to get a logical grasp on it, to try to have an analytical lens through which to understand it, it's going to frustrate you. And in that way, it's, you know, I compare it to you know, in Zen Buddhism, a Zen koan, which is meant inherently to not be logical. And it's supposed to exhaust your attempt to use logic to comprehend, right? In Zen Buddhism, they want you to

have direct experience, not filter experience through conceptualization. And so there's a way in which, you know, spirituality and art are always interlinked, but that this film, not because Tarkovsky's intending it to be anything like a Zen Kohan, but just because that's, for me, an association I make, it's something that you just have to drop, your attempt to intellectually comprehend it, and you just have to, you know, let it wash over you. You just have to have it as an emotional experience. And I think once you do that, the disorientation sort of subsides a bit, and you can kind of engage with it on its own level, which is, you know, it's not linear. It's not logical. It's, it's ephemeral. It is a movie ultimately about dreams and memories. And when you think about your own memories and your

own dreams, those aren't linear, those aren't logical, those aren't intellectual. Those are snippets of experience. And so I, I experienced it kind of in that way. Once you kind of, if you kind of let go of trying to understand the story in this way that you're normally meant to kind of follow a story, I think you get more out of it. And one of the first sort of themes or kind of ideas that I kind of thought

maybe worth talking about, and this comes up in one of the very opening scenes of the film when the doctor is sort of crossing the field and entering this sort of countryside sort of manner that the characters are living at. And it just felt like the idea of time was a big piece of it and the doctor, one of his quotes when he's walking through, he says, you know, don't, we don't, people don't trust the nature within us. We don't stop to reflect on things.

And I'm curious how maybe that, you know, you took that as, it feels very important to me anyway, that kind of opens a film with the concept of nature and, you know, not being able to kind of understand and reflect on things. And this kind of entire film is kind of a reflection. of one's memories, one's dreams, as you said, Brett, all these different components of sort of our psyche or our sort of personalities. All these different things are kind of interconnected and he brings in nature as this, you know, this central component. So I don't know how you took that and if you thought that was kind of an important jumping off point for kind of the rest of the film. Yeah, sure. I can start on that one. But yeah, so the time is definitely a huge aspect of this.

And the film itself is sort of indicative of how we perceive and feel time. And when we as human beings look back over our lives, you know, time and our memories are deeply intertwined, right? And we know that time speeds up or slows down depending on during periods of life, the novelty in our lives. For instance, you know, one of the reasons that it feels like time is speeding up as we age is because our brain you know it remembers things that are novel and as we age and we see more and more things and you know things become more and more routine and nothing surprises us anymore novelty really goes down and down and down which is in contradistinction to our childhoods where everything is novel and so you know so many of us if we had anything like a decent childhood have sort of you know

happy memories of our childhood our childhood is very salient that's when some of our core memories were created and that's in part because of the novelty we experienced as a child. But the nature aspect is interesting as well because Tarkovsky is always using nature in like the most beautiful ways possible in his films. And here you saw the four elements used again and again and again. Those of wind, beautiful scenes, even with the doctor opening scene walking in through that pasture and then that big gust of wind comes. I wondered how they did that in real life and it turns out they used a helicopter.

to make that happen. But I thought that was beautiful. As well as fire is a reoccurring theme, whether it's the flame and the candle of the house that they visit, or it's the burning barn. Water is a constant theme throughout. And earth, of course, in the form specifically of vegetation is omnipresent. So, you know, using nature in this way, trying to embed the human being within nature, talking about how we're kind of disconnected from our own nature, I think they're all sort of interwoven concepts that Tarkovsky explores in many of his films. But to the, to the nature part and the beauty of it, this is one of the most beautiful films ever made. And, you know, I think IMDB has it as the number two most beautiful film of all time. So there's that beautiful aspect of, you know, if you just

put down your logical mind and experience it aesthetically, you get this amazing, gorgeous film with when every shot is like a, you know, it's like a painting in the mind of Tarkovsky. And so that also made it, you know, particularly beautiful. But yeah, time, I think time is a core theme in this film. I think that his use of showing time,

the jumping around in the timelines and stuff like that, I felt a lot of connection to this film for many reasons because I too had a kind of traumatic. fatherless, absolutely fatherless childhood. And also, I love that you touch on how time is perceived as we age. To get personal here, I'm six days away from turning 40 and I legitimately did not think I was going to make it to 18. So it's fucking bonkers that I get to be 40.

but that's another thing but the yeah I don't know I guess that's where I'm just going to go off with that well I kind of wanted to add something to that really quick there's a quote I think it's from it's from Tarkovsky himself that I found kind of speaking to Amanda's point about time and childhood he says and kind of speaking to how how you apprehend this film and all of his films he says we have forgotten how to relate emotionally to art we treat it like editors searching in it for that which the artist has supposedly hidden. It is actually much simpler than that. Otherwise, art would have no meaning. You have to be a child. Incidentally, children understand my films very well. And I haven't meant a single serious critic who could stand knee high to those children.

And so I think that that speaks again to this dropping of the intellectual, conceptual, analytical mind of an adult and trying to engage with something at the level of feeling, which we were much better at doing, I think, as children. And that kind of gets, covered up in part as a defense mechanism because life is hard and as part of the natural development of a human being as we age and get older. But I found that quote particularly interesting. Yeah, that kind of, I was just going to add to like the, both of kind of what you're talking about is this is kind of a theme for all of Tarkovsky's films. And that's interesting that, you know, kids can understand his films better. And I think what maybe makes that

possible and what he does so much differently than pretty much any filmmaker or especially modern filmmakers. There's, you know, obviously exceptions. But he shows life kind of as it's happening as opposed to, you know, of hiding the actual aspects of kind of human life. And just there are so many moments in the film and in so many of his films where you just see people just doing very simple tasks, but it's shot beautifully. And it fits just perfectly into the structure. The ones I'm thinking of in particular is when the boy, I think it's like it's when Alexi is very small. He's waiting for his mother at that house near the end of the film. And he's just sitting in a chair and the mirror shot of him slowly fading in. And then it reverses where it's just

showing his face slowly, you know, coming in. And it's just, it's a very simple shot of just a boy, but it's so much more than just that. And yeah, I don't know. That that one scene in particular was just remarkable for me. Torgowski's use of children is very much in his belief that children are, I think there's a documentary that his son made that came out in 2019, where he's talking about, Tchaikovsky's talking about how children are wise. You know, like they, they, just the, the wisdom of children and how he intentionally uses children to tell his stories for that reason. There is a couple ways I want to go here. One, I want to make another point about memory, because the way that the film, you know, is nonlinear, and that's one of the aspects of it, and it's kind of hard to follow.

And people have historically, throughout many decades of this film being released, you know, people would get up and walk out of the theater. People would find it incomprehensible. Even some of the Soviet higher-up bureaucracies that overlooked film production were kind of baffled by it. And even some of the domestic disputes, they would call, like, bourgeois, you know, this, this, idea that these families being sort of broken in some ways is like a bourgeois thing that isn't helpful to the building up of socialism, which is all kind of interesting historically. But there is this way in which our memory works. And it's kind of tied to free association more broadly, thinking about the structure of this film. Because a lot of the times when he's going

between dreams and memories, jumping through space and time, something in the previous memory will spark the next scene. So they seem utterly unrelated. Sometimes. they're shot in monochrome color or sepia tone um you know they jump forward and backwards throughout time but they're very often a seed in one of the scenes that that is taken up in the next and if you think about if you just sat back and started thinking of memories that you have in your life you'll come up with one and then you're thinking about that that will spark a second one and then you start thinking about that and that sparks a third one and none of those memories are related none of those are structured chronologically in time they are just sort of

of free associative about how the mind works when it is remembering. And so insofar as you could capture that on film, I think Tarkovsky does, you know, does just that. But the other thing I wanted to say is kind of speaking to what we're talking about with regards to children and intellectually apprehending the film. There's this famous story I came across. I don't know how famous it is in the world of Tarkovsky fans. But, you know, this story is basically you have a bunch of intellectuals and and film critics and like film students in a room, you know, watching this film when it comes out. And the house cleaner is there in the background also kind of watching the film. And then the movie ends and the critics and, you know, the intellectuals there, they're arguing over

what it means. They're, they're having their different analyses of the, of the film. And the house cleaner kind of, you know, not educated to the level of these intellectuals or anything like that steps in and says, you know, I'm paraphrasing here. But more or less that the film is pretty simple to understand. It is a guy on his deathbed looking back over his life, reminiscing on his life, seeing how he treated those that he was closest to and loved the most, and wanting in some way shape or form to atone for those, you know, those quote unquote sins, if you were. And there's something simplistic about that. And that gets at it in much clearer and direct a way than high felon. film theory that tries to wrestle with it at this abstract analytical level because at the end of the day it is kind of like that and and i said in our last episode i believe on a tarkovsky film that you know tarkovsky can be seen in this tradition of russian artists like tolstoy and dostoievsky we could also include pushkin and chekhov um but tolstoy in

particular i read um and all these people are mentioned in his films like explicitly name dropped in his films so it's clear he has a deep and you know connection to them historically culturally and artistically. But one of the books that I read of Tolstoy's was death of Ivan Iliage, which I highly recommend. It's very much a story of somebody different than this story, like the person in that book is a high achiever, ambitious, but that became his entire life such that, you know, the meaningful relationships in his life were left to sort of diminish and deteriorate and he was always looking for the next thing. And he didn't live his life in anything like a meaningful way. And he didn't pay attention to the things that were

most important. And on his deathbed, he's having a sort of existential crisis, you know, about that and the lack of relationships that he has, even by people who are supposed to be in his family and ostensibly should have those close bonds with them. He didn't put in the work in his life to cultivate those relationships. And so he's kind of suffering and going into an existential crisis as he as he fades out. And you don't know that that's what's happening in this film until one of the very final scenes where the narrator, who you never see his face, but it's... is a sort of a stand-in for Tarkovsky himself, you know, but, you know, not exactly, but sort of, that he's on his deathbed. And we realize that the film that we've been watching is

his memories and dreams. It's him looking over his life, free associating on his deathbed, the memories of his own life. And there's a tragic, a tragedy inherent in those memories because they're often very like sort of dark and dismal and not a lot of you know lollipops and rainbows as it were but I felt that was a deeply Tolstoyan if that's the word attempt to grapple with that existential meaning at the end of life but again in the novel you know more or less what's happening the whole time and in this film you really don't know until you get to that scene if you can even piece it together like the house cleaner so easily did, but that the film critics and the intellectuals, you know, struggled to do.

Yeah, I like that you bring up that house cleaner because also in that documentary that his son made, he was talking about, I think it was Yvonne's childhood. And he's like, I don't want, I'm not a philosopher. I'm an artist. So to analyze this film philosophically is not my intention. You should analyze it from an artistic perspective. And that's essentially, but I think that that's, it's kind funny because we do analyze it. We can't help it. We can't help ourselves. We're, we're, we're, we are, yeah, that is our, how we think about things. But I think it's just funny. Just simply the him and the house cleaner probably have a lot more in common in that perspective, respect, like in that conversation. So, yeah. Well, that kind of reminds me. I don't

remember, it may have been the very first episode we did, I think, at least on one of them, where in his, in his, in Tarkovsky's biography that he wrote, he has a lot of anecdotes about people who've like sent him letters and talk to him. And he often gets letters of people who really like his films and, you know, obviously some that don't like his film, but it sends, I remember there

several that he would receive that were from very, you know, working class people to saying that they, you know, I walked in this movie, I've seen it multiple times, you know, I think he appreciated those kind of people seeing his films and really understanding it as opposed to

critics, you know, just trying to dissect it, you know, in ways like those that you were talking about in that anecdote or that story of it. And so sorry, Andre, we are here doing the thing you don't like about your movie. But the thing you both said, Amanda, kind of led me to, you know, as we are analyzing this and talking about it from a dialectical sort of lens of it, It led me to briefly kind of read through, I didn't read every single word, of Joseph Stalin's dialectical and historical materialism from 1938. And he brings in the idea of nature and these different things. And I'll just, this is kind of one of the very first lines and then a quote later on from that work that kind of maybe fits in here. It kind of fits into the briefly piece we're talking about of trusting of nature and just maybe how we,

analyze this film in a way that isn't doing it a disservice. We're not, we're still trying to understand it from our own perspective and understand, you know, how it might make us feel what it means to, means to watch it. But I'll just kind of throw these two quotes and then maybe see what you, what you think. So contrary to metaphysics, dialectics does not regard nature as an accidental amount, agglomeration of things, a phenomenon, unconnected with, isolated from, and independent of each other, but as a connected and integral whole, in which things phenomena are organically connected with, dependent on, and determined by each other. And contrary to metaphysics, dialectist does not regard nature as an accidental. Oh, wait, that's the same,

that's the same quote. It is the same one. I'll cut that out. So I put the same quote twice. So, to me, since I read it this morning and I'm trying to piece this together, I'm still kind of coming up with my thoughts. I'm wondering if you see a connection to dialectical materialism and historical materialism and how this film that's ostensibly not political. I don't think Tarkovsky was intending to make a political film at all. but in some ways it may have done so accidentally as we'll maybe talk about some of the bits and reels from historical references from World War II and other areas as I think we'll get to

but yeah I'll just throw it out to see what that with the dialectical aspect I think you know there's different ways you could take that but certainly with all of his films and this one particularly there is this embedded within nature aspect to it but even in all of his films I mean, Solaris with the floating grass underwater, you know, every film that he makes, there's these distinct, gorgeous scenes focused on nature itself and one of those four elements that we mentioned earlier. And it's very clear that the entirety of the human experience occurs as embedded within that, embedded within history and embedded within nature.

And that does stand in contrast to a certain way of analyzing the world, which could be, you know, maybe metaphysical or just too overly scientific, which is, which perceives the world as something separate from ourselves, something that, therefore, because it is separate, is meant to be dominated, meant to be controlled, meant to be, you know, pushed into the molds and shapes and forms that best suit us as something outside of it that that depends. on it that needs it but is not identical with it. And I think that's so much of the problems with regards to humanity's relationship with the natural world is this profound intuitive sense that we are somehow outside of it, that we are somehow separate from it, that we've been put into it and we have to manage it or fight against it, push back against it, beat it into submission, but that it's fundamentally not us. And I think, I mean, what is more natural than you know then death itself and a film about the living organism dying and looking back over its time and the way in which that those memories are all embedded deeply

profoundly within the natural world whether he's intending it or not I think it does have that that element of refusal to separate right a refusal to be seen as separate but it's also as I said you know refusing to see the human being as separate from history so we have have a film which is not political at all. Tarkovsky is interested in the individual and deeply personal experience. What's more profoundly individual and personal than one's dreams and memories, right? There is no collective struggle here. There is no political theme that he's not saying anything about politics, but the human being is embedded within political history. So when the personal individual is recounting dreams and memories. It is inexorably intertwined with the,

in particular, history of Russia and more broadly the history of Europe that is marked, especially in the 20th century, by these political, economic, social upheavals culminating into, you know, two world wars. And there's even a shot, you know, the shots of the Spanish Civil War, the shots of Mao's Redguard, the shots of Hitler's corpse. You know, in the rubble was a fascinating little snapshot. These are not given to us as political commentary. They're given to us as the images that are not only stuck in the head of the individual protagonist or the person that we're following, but is really stuck in the head of Russians, right? And Europeans more broadly and humans more broadly, but he's speaking from, you know, Soviet Russia. And so,

it's the Russian culture, the Russian intellectuals, the Russian artists, the Russian historical experience that he's getting at. And when I talked earlier about the house cleaner, for instance, you know, and I think it was Amanda that made a great point about Tarkovsky, or maybe it was Evan, both of you maybe said in different ways, that Tarkovsky has a particular appreciation of regular working people. I think Evan was talking about the letters that he received from regular working people, that they got it much more than the critics, right? And so, than the abstract intellectuals, it's in part, I think, and I think he makes this explicit because the regular working people of Russia have a more intuitive, direct comprehension of the Russian character, culture, and history that an intellectual who sees it through the categories of various abstract ideologies or sees his films through the abstract conceptualization of film theory or whatever, they're separated from it in a way that, you know, And not to be derogatory at all, but simpler people simply are not as alienated from that reality as the intellectual is. And I think Tarkovsky's films over and over and over again frustrate the intellectual, although there's no denying that Tarkovsky is in one way or another an intellectual. He's engaged. All of his films are engaged in art, poetry, philosophy, history, literature, high music. There's no doubt that Tarkovsky was something like an intellectual, but first and foremost, he was an artist.

And he wanted art to be very separate from that. So, yeah, you know, the individual is embedded within his historical context and embedded within his natural context. And I think those things come out. I don't know if that's exactly what you were trying to get at, Evan, but that's what sparked in my mind. No, no, that's, that's, that's a good, that's, yeah, that's really interesting. And it's, it's, the usage of the historical footage, which shows like, I've never seen that before. And I, I'm a history major. I have a freaking degree in history.

I have never seen like that footage before and it's the contrast you know because it shows the Red Guard it shows the Spanish Civil War with Stalin's Niños that another podcast mentions that I'm going to buy that book as soon as possible but the contrast of like these people they're just they're everyday people

they're simple they're not they're not political they're just trying to survive and to cope with it and just that yeah that contrast of like this life here in the countryside and then revolution like happening all around as well as war and it's not to be overlooked how much war has impacted individuals in the Soviet Union in Russia I mean they're not you know there there's also survivors of these things the so-called civil war after the october revolution and then you know um world war two where millions of them were sacrificed for the war

to to stop fascism within europe which it never actually happened but it was a good try um but that the the soviet union i i think about this like the soviet union the people and the individuals were never the same. And there's a lot of mention of shell shock throughout the film. There's a scene there where the boys are like learning how to shoot guns. And one of them is not very good. And, you know, and the instructor's like, well, I'm going to send for your parents. And they make fun of him. And they're like, ha ha, ha, your parents died in Leningrad. Like, you know, ha, poor, you know, look at you. Your parents are dead. But that was unfortunately a very common theme. uh post world war two uh but yeah it's not to be overlooked how how it shaped the soviet mind the the

the unaddressed trauma um and yeah it just it changed them entirely yeah and wreaking havoc on their personal relationships right the father having to leave the mother having to do it all by herself now the whole war is i mean the whole world is in uproar right everything is is is up in the air bombs dropping over every major city in Europe but they're tucked away in the countryside still deeply impacted their family is still being you know sort of torn apart by just the absence of the father um and the the uncertainty whether or not the father will ever return um but they're fundamentally sort of outside of the main chaos but in inevitably impacted by it and you also saw that that whole theme and that exploration of how the world war two has you know brutally

impacted the Russian consciousness in Ivan's childhood as well, where some of these themes aren't sort of picked up and taken even further, right? The themes of children in the context of brutal fucking war. That's the whole thing with Ivan's childhood, but it's certainly mentioned here because Tarkovsky, insofar as this is a semi-autobiography of Tarkovsky wrestling with his own life and his own history, you know, he was a child. He was born in like, what, 1935. So his entire childhood is marked by one of the worst, most brutal wars in human history. And that affects not only him and his personal relationships, but the entire society. And the way that we know that it's an autobiographical film is in part because it's not made

explicit. You have to do some research to find this out, but that his parents are both in the film. His mom plays the old woman. You know, the younger version of that actress is, is both. his mom and his wife at different times in the film, right? This goes back to Amanda's point about individual characters playing multiple roles. But when the mom is depicted in her older age, that is Tarkovsky's actual mom. And the poetry being read throughout the film, his dad, I think his name was Anse, Tarkovsky, was a famous Russian poet and Soviet poet. And so his dad is actually reading his own poems in the film. So both Tarkovsky's mom and Tarkovsky's mom and Tarkovsky's dad are in the film without that being made overly obvious. You could watch

this film not having that background knowledge and have no clue, but I think that speaks to the very intimate nature of this film, that this film is Tarkovsky's most personal, most intimate film, and he made sure to include both of his parents in really profound ways in the film as well. And I think it's kind of interesting, too, that, you know, although he wouldn't suffer from lung cancer and die from lung cancer until many years after I mean he didn't film stalker which is essentially what caused the cancer and everybody that was part of that film I think until like 1979 was that stocker was it 76 I get those numbers mixed up it is kind of like a sendoff to his family too like almost like he's art like making this beautiful film that is essentially like

his long goodbye or an obituary in some sense making amends. I mean, you mentioned earlier about like, you know, how not having, basically not having time to harness or nourish these relationships with our familial. So, yeah, I think it's, his mind, I will never fully fully understand. Maybe I'm just coming from too philosophical. Maybe I need to get a little more spiritual. I don't know, but. So it's interesting.

So in 1972, when they were filming Solaris, apparently during that time he wrote in his journal, that's, you know, like his own personal, I guess where he was just self-reflection. It doesn't exactly, not clear whether that's available for people to read or just some of these quotes have been released. But apparently he was already preparing and thinking about creating what he referred to as the most important work of my life, and that being the film mirror. So he was already kind of preparing that film. And that was in 1972 when he had only had made, he was making stalker and he only had made Ivan's childhood and Andrei Rubilev. So, you know, this again is 10 years into his career, but he already feels this connection to what this does.

And then amazingly, after this, he then goes around and makes stalker, which is also just incredible in its own right. So it just, you know, just as you said, thinking about what he can create from all of this is just, is fascinating. but the other area I wanted to hit on, and maybe this, it kind of touches on two of the things that kind of stem from that materialist conversation. And that being the trauma that you mentioned Amanda that all, maybe all people in the Soviet Union and Russia had from World War II. And then also just the trauma that's kind of talked about within the film, you know, from your parents. You know, like one of the conversations you see early on is of the, the, the narrator, you know, talking to his mother on the phone. The mother tells of a friend from

work that had recently died or died that day. And I think there's a line soon after that where he was talking to his now maybe ex-wife of, you know, I don't know why I always fight with my mother and why I can't, you know, get along with her. And he clearly has this lifelong sort of difficult relationship with her. And this has got me thinking of my own personal life and just the idea of how do you kind of view the trauma of your past and as and as a reflection of your present and that's kind of a that's a maybe that's a tough question but i'm happy to also to ask you know an answer for myself but i'm curious if that uh how that how you view that you know i mean you mentioned amanda like kind of your own personal experience of you know growing up

without a father and thinking like you know you might not make it past 18, and here you are at almost on the precipice of age 40. And so how these traumas of our past can, you know, shape us, reflect, you know, our current situations. And I know, Brett, you have kids. I have kids as well. And so how that kind of might play into that as well, because it's kind of this generational thing. Like, okay, I've experienced this trauma as a child. Like, do you, me personally, I consciously think about how I can stop that sort of of cycle of trauma on my own children and how I can prevent that kind of from just being a generational thing.

Yeah. Well, I guess, like, one thing to acknowledge about trauma, in a personal sense is that it absolutely fucking breaks you. And what you can do after that, you know, it's not just based on will, you know, it's based on material conditions. it's based on support. For me personally, I had a very strange childhood. With a single mom, I was in an extremely abusive household, like physically, emotionally.

I was in foster care. I think that there was just a point when I was like 17, about to age out of foster care. I was like, you know, like this person, this woman, this mom, that I, I, I, I, honestly haven't spoken to in like 13 years has taken so much from me and I will never ever live a single day in my life where another person will take anything else from me and you know I probably haven't done that in the best way I'm not a super like connected with family person mostly just because my mom is still around and kind of uses that as a bargaining chip. It's like oh, you either are with her or you're with me.

And so I just kind of like hands off it. You know, I'm like, eh, let people just in my family just decide if they want to kick it with me or not. I'm going to be fine. It's probably not the healthiest. But it does absolutely break you down. And if you are lucky, you will find a way through and hopefully up, but not all of us are. So there's that for knowledge.

Yeah. So I can get kind of vulnerable here because I think no matter how good or bad your childhood was, just the enormity of life is so overwhelming, whether you register that consciously as a child or not. And as a child, you're so under-equipped emotionally to deal with the enormity of life that I think nobody really escapes childhood without something like trauma. Trauma itself is an interesting word, right? Trauma is not a word that's going to be used. post-World War II in any of these countries, trauma is something that develops, you know, decades later through the development of psychiatry. And there's hints to it, we call it, shell shock, PTSD now. Certainly trauma existed whether or not we had a name for it and whether or not everyday people talked about their experiences in terms of trauma. But, you know, to think about people at that time not having the therapeutic language that we take for granted today to try to work through their own experiences, I think is interesting.

My grandma and grandpa, who I'm very close to, they lost a child. She was, I believe, five years old. My mom was in the car. Both my grandparents were in the car. It was a terrible car accident. There was some road work that had no signs up and ended up the five-year-old, you know, her name was Dion, that she ended up dying in a brutal, horrific way. And my grandma and my mom almost lost their lives. They were in ICU, you know, touch and go for many, many days.

they both ultimately survived, but my grandma would only tell me decades later about how that trauma was, you know, she's living in the 70s in rural Iowa. There's no such thing as going to therapy. There's no such thing as going on YouTube and trying to figure out how do I work through my trauma? You know, there's there's nothing. There's people around you. Most of them, the older generation, still shell-shocked from fucking World War II themselves, not exactly, you know, bastions of open communication and dealing with trauma. So she just said, like, you know, for a decade of her life, it was just grinding depression and misery and just being completely lost in life and having no recourse, no attempt, no ability to even try to address it or heal in any way. And in my own life, you know, because Evan, you asked, how does trauma kind of shape the person that you become? And I think it shapes, it shapes all of us, those hard, emotional experiences as children when we're the least equipped to deal with them. them, they are, they are kept in our bodies and in our subconscious and they go on to shape us. You know, I sometimes think, and you can take this too far. You can try to make sense of your present too much through the lens of your past to the point where it's really just kind of projecting things onto things and making connections that might not really exist. And this may

be an instance of that. But for a while, I had a very, my dad got married and divorced like five or six times. So I had a parade of stepmoms and, you know, women that he didn't even marry. but that were just in my life for periods of time and disappeared. So one of them was in my life for a while and she was incredibly authoritarian. And my dad worked long hours. My dad was super laid back and fun and chill, but he was gone all the time. And, you know, she was an authoritarian corporeal punishment, you know, really over the top punishments. And I'm eight, nine years old, right? And I'm a pretty good fucking kid. I'm not a hard kid to deal with, but was punished severely to the point where I developed a stutter. And it was clear to me looking back that those two things are connected because when my dad eventually divorced her and she was no longer in my life, my stutter cleared up. But it was it was clearly this brutal impact that I had under an authoritarian that, you know, does that shape my lifelong rebellion against such? You know, I've never been okay with people imposing anything on other people.

I've found ways throughout my entire adolescent and adult life to rebel against everything that other people took for granted. And sometimes I wonder if there's a connection there between the little me being crushed under an authoritarian and then me growing up to just absolutely reject all of that and being a rebel in every fucking way that life offered me. So I don't know. And if that's the case, well, then maybe it was kind of worth it. Who knows? But yeah, I could keep going deep with things and trauma shaping me, but I'll leave it at that and kind of get your guys' thoughts on your own trauma and how that shaped you. Yeah, I mean, and from my perspective, well, I wouldn't say I had a growing up as a, you know, a father. There was no ever any, like, physical abuse. And I think sometimes people will, I've heard this written or seen videos about this saying, like, oh, if you weren't like abused physically, like, were you really, like, is it really that bad, you know, that kind of thing. And I think the answer is that it can be, you know, like there is the idea of emotional abuse and the, you know, just, uh, breaking you down through you know whether it's yelling at you or just being cruel to you and you know as a as a child my father was very much that kind of person never never would you know

wouldn't strike me but the way he would talk to me about things and the way that he would you know talk down to me and all these different things i think definitely shaped my you know um way that i would see myself you know like a feeling you know the feeling of inadequacy of you know in school and you know since then and you know to to to the point of like even this podcast sometimes I'll tell like friends I'm like you know like should I even be doing this like this this you know this is terrible like why do I even bother and all these kind of things and I have to people have to tell me like oh you know you should do it and so I think that there are these events and things that happen as children that do shape us but I consciously once you can I think once you can

almost consciously understand that this that there was this I don't know trend or this this line or maybe it's not, you know, completely linear. But to now, it's easier to comprehend it and, you know, maybe find words for it, read books. You know, you can go to therapy if you can and understand these things and treat the people around you like in a different way. So I try hard to make sure that the way that I am with, you know, my own family isn't, isn't the same. And there's other areas that I could probably discuss. But that's probably the one where as I was watching this, I was thinking, like, you know, can I blame my parents for kind of the trauma? And I think in some ways you can.

And then the other line that was very striking at some point, I can't recall which characters said it, but they said that words cannot express or express emotion. And I think that that's something that was a trauma for me was being unable to express emotion verbally through words because my family also was very much not like, you know, know, not a family of them would like hug each other and like say they love you and these kind of things. And so it kind of made those, as I was watching it, I was thinking about how the, the narrator, you know, probably wishes that he had those kind of emotions and the ability to express emotion because it doesn't seem like there was ever any moments where any, any characters

are really expressing any emotion to one another. And so that was, it was a. And there's probably, I mean, in all cultures for sure, there's versions of that, especially just generationally, that generation of humanity. I mean, in America is the same thing, right? These were not known to be people that were super open and touchy-feely and, you know, opening up about their emotions and all of that. And that's a very new sort of development. And so you can see how so many things that go unsaid, experiences that are, you know, traumatizing, that they just are unresolved and that people carry those forward through generations. And as I become a parent, a parent of three kids, two young boys, knowing how fucking challenging it is, knowing all the stress on your back,

the economy, where are things going to go politically in the world? What are the future of my kids going to be like? You know, the day-to-day grind of just trying to completely abandon any sense of like, this is, and this is not for all parents, but in my experience of being a parent is really just subordinating my desire completely to my children's, you know, 24-7 from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, I am catering to their often petulant demands and desires. Indeed. And so, you know, there's compassion for kids 100%. I like you, Evan, I'm trying break certain cycles, come from a family of addiction. I don't do that. You know, I tell my kids every day a million times. I love them. I show deep physical affection to all my kids, but especially

boys who might not have gotten that, you know, just to be loved and held and kissed and told that you are loved. Um, but also I'm, I'm flawed as well, you know, I'll have my, my uglier moments. I'll yell. I'll, you know, I'll never hit or anything like that, of course, but, but I also feel a compassion for parents. Like, this whole fucking thing is so goddamn hard. And that probably speaks to something within the communist, you know, movement where we understand the social nature of child rearing. And, you know, it takes a village is more than just a cliche. Um, being embedded within broad communities is really important and in this film they're cut off completely they're out in rural areas far far away from even their nearest neighbor and so you know not knowing anything there's no instant news real they

don't even know what's happening on the war front if they're you know father and husbands even coming home and that can be kind of traumatizing and isolating in itself and in the modern capitalist era even in huge cities there's incredible alienation there's the nuclear family the the disintegration of more communal bonds and extended family that occurs. And so one of the things that this might provoke is just this realization of how important community is and how important it is to try to create a society where children can be raised not just by one or two people, but by broader networks of extended family, neighborhood communities, et cetera. Because if that one or two people who are raising the kids are themselves broken. I mean, you know, it's almost like,

can you blame them for not being perfect parents? Can you blame them for carrying over their unresolved traumas, you know, going forward, especially for those generations that didn't even have words like trauma or generational trauma, even in their awareness? And so for me, it just overfills with compassion on both ends of that and trying to think about a society that would mitigate against that very common sort of, you know, problem in our, in our development and our social relations. At the core of it, parents, our parents, you as parents, you're still people, you're still learning. No one, you know, has a kid and is like, I know what to do. I know exactly what to do. I think about my really good friend from school. I went to go visit her in Oklahoma,

like a few years back. She had her first kid. It was three weeks after. after she had her kid. I'm surprised. She even bothered entertaining me. That is like such a short period of time. And she's holding her child, her first child. She's had another kid since then. And she looks at me and she goes, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Absolutely. That feeling never goes away. No, no matter how many kids you have, no matter how many years go by. Yeah. That's a universal thing, I think, for sure. And you're like, oh, I got to keep you alive. All right. And put you out in the world eventually, you know. And I, as a non-parent, I, I, I see you. I, I respect it. I chose not to do it. But I like, I have so much compassion and admiration for those that do do it, especially considering our conditions now, even in the Imperial Corps. There's just so, so much unintended. participated stuff, the flow of information, the, you know, just, just unaddressed, uh, trauma, I guess.

Yeah. So, uh, so thanks for doing the good work, guys. Uh, that actually, so the, like, sort of, I don't know this, we kind of already just talked about this, but that made me think of, like, do, do you think that, like, as humans, specifically thinking of people who live, like, imperial core. United States. Like, is it this, and again, this is speaking as like a white man saying this. So I don't necessarily think this is maybe a question for me to answer per se or maybe for any of us, but just this is something I was thinking of is, do we have just like this trauma baked in to us, given especially that we are a nation that was founded on a genocide committing currently another genocide with a lot of genocides in between? You know, like we are disconnected from that. Like there's lots of people in this country who don't even realize what's going on in Gaza, which is partly hard to believe, but I can understand that people are looking inward. They're very

individualistic. That's just the kind of life that many people have to live because they're just trying to survive. So I don't know. Maybe this is the, I don't really know where I'm going with this, but. Yeah, I think there is something, I mean, you know, perhaps all cultures have this to differing degrees, but there is a sense in which America in particular, is it feels like we're constantly running from our own history, constantly running from our own present, constantly seeking to lose ourselves in meaningless distraction and ambition and the pursuit of wealth and status and fame. And the entire cultural zeitgeist of the United States is this frenetic, frantic forward tilt where, you know, we very well could be going off a

fucking cliff but we're going as fast and as hard as we can and that produces you know culture that produces some aspects of uniqueness that other peoples will look at us and say you know americans have this quality or that quality but ultimately i think there's this this deep rot at the core of our society that's always been there and the vast majority of people i think use the relative material well being or the possibility of material well being as a flight from that rot that that that rot that not only sits within the center of our culture and our history but that we each participate in and is is sort of in the in the center of our own individual beings so there is something in the american cultural mindset that i think is

running and if if america just had to stop if this was even possible to stop to look inward I think it would destroy us because I think so much of the American psyche is built on this frantic running away. And this it is unwillingness to look, to stop and to look and to be still and to process. And that is true culturally at the collective level. And I think by virtue of being members of that collective culture, it's true to some extent on the individual level as well. Yeah. In our history, especially in our own generation, everything that is going on. abroad has always been over there you know any like I mean like I think COVID was probably the

first time that like people were really like oh something's happening elsewhere and then it happens here in a and like an absolutely devastating level I mean people will probably say 9-11 but you know but like it that this is something that we often would think I mean I thought it I remember I was sitting in my, my, I was going to be a counselor, so I was in my counseling 101 class and hearing about COVID. And I'm like, oh, you know, it's just like, you know, bird flu, just like mad cow. Like, that's all like elsewhere. Because we, we, we have built this wall here that in the imperial core, the shield at the cost, great cost of human life all around the world, of course, that those things can't possibly come home. And so we default to

that mode of comfort of like, I don't want to bother with this thing because who cares? Because it's never really mattered if I cared or not before, you know, in a way. So. Yeah, that's, that's really insightful. And that makes me think of, you mentioned 9-11. Now, that was certainly more localized than COVID. But the impact on the American psyche from coast to coast is worth ponder. And in fact, Bin Laden's strategy with 9-11 was precisely, I think, to play on that sense of isolation from events that Americans have because, you know, we have, we have Pearl Harbor, but that's still way off in the Pacific somewhere. And we're, it's not even this abstract fortress of being in the imperial core. It's just at some level peer geography that we happen to be with these two huge fucking oceans between us that really buttress a lot of those impacts. and for people around the rest of the world. And in this instance, people in Europe or Eurasia, you know, they're on top of each other. They, they're, all their major cities have been destroyed several times throughout history.

So the idea of Americans, because bin Laden's idea was like, you know, me striking at the world trade centers and the Pentagon or whatever isn't going to bring down America. But what it's going to do is provoke this rabid overreaction. And that's exactly what happened. And in some senses, we're still living in the wake of that rabbit overreaction where we just start invading multiple countries. There's this slow domestic decline of quality of life as the empire gets bigger and bigger. Trillions of dollars lost, millions of dead bodies because somebody brought down two financial towers in Manhattan. I don't want to downplay, you know, the trauma of people caught in and around those buildings or innocent people being attacked is never okay in my moral book. Um, but it does speak to what you're saying, which is America loses its fucking mind when anything strikes at home. And even in COVID, there is a deep sense of America losing its mind. Half the country just said it's not real. You know, like talk about refusing to look at reality to calm down for a second and look inward when something really disruptive came, came across our radar. A huge swathes of Americans just said, nope, it's not happening. It's not real. In fact, the solution is the real.

problem. The vaccine is actually the real threat. And that pathology spread, and you had these anti-vaccing, you know, anti-masking movements specifically around the Western world. But the epicenter of that pathology was really rooted in the United States. And that speaks to our libertarian distrust of all things government. But I think it also speaks to that psychological vulnerability where, you know, Americans are so isolated from the consequences of America's actions that once in a while when things do come home, Americans fucking lose their mind. And if you look at something like climate change, there's nowhere to hide. Oceans aren't protecting you from fucking climate change.

And so I think we're going to continue to see the American psyche be tested and in some spots broken by the intrusion of events into the personal lives of Americans who otherwise can look away. The reason why so many Americans don't even know about Palestine, they don't have to. Yeah. They're so far away from it. Yeah, their tax dollars, their labor literally pays for the slaughtering of fucking babies and innocent human beings. But they can just look away unaffected by it. And so much of American history is doing just that, especially after the empire's been built up and a certain level of security has been attained post, you know, civil war especially. And so, yeah, I think there's something deeply insightful about that. And it's funny that a conversation about a Russian talking about Russian experiences can, you know, and then provoke, you know, such deep thought about our own culture and our own history. And, you know, that's a, that's a function of really good art that it can, that, that, that just talking about Tarkovsky's autobiographical film, The Mirror, can spark a deep sociopolitical

conversation about American psychology. For sure. And that actually, so to like slightly, I think that's a good point that it, it's a, that's why I think this film maybe more, more than some of the other Tarkowski films that we've discussed, like, really has this reflection. And it's no coincidence, again, that the film is literally called mirror, because you can look at it through a mirror and see reflections in many different ways. And I guess to take it slightly back to the film, I mean, that's, again, the title, and that's kind of could be referring to the way that we reflect both ourselves

onto others, how we reflect to ourselves, the reflection of culture to other places. There's many different ways you could look at the term sort of mirror in this. I mean, there are obviously lots of scenes in the film with mirrors, the boy, the mother looking into the mirror. One of the most striking scenes, actually, it didn't have a mirror, was when she's washing her hair and she sort of lifts up and then the house starts crumbling, also just an incredible scene. But I'm wondering how you kind of look at this reflection.

In a way, it's very interconnected with trauma because these traumatic experiences are then a reflection of things that happen in the future. and how we look at ourselves, how we look at the world, how we can ignore so many things because it doesn't matter to us. So I guess there's lots of different ways you can kind of use and kind of talk about the mirror, whether it's very specifically of the use of the mirrors in the film or just generally. But I don't know how you perceive the mirror concept. I think for Tchaikovsky, for someone that makes films that has been criticized, throughout his whole career in the Soviet Union

because some of the films he did later on were not in the Soviet Union but his earlier films were criticized in the Soviet Union for having too individualistic of characters like not really like reaching the quota of or whatever the standard of like socialist realism he sure is hell makes films that really make you look at your entire

your whole community you know I don't feel like his films are individualistic. I think that they are very much. There is a certain individualism, but it's like individual within your own communities of how you impact those, how you contribute to them, how you exist in them.

That's just my tidbit about that. Yeah, the dialectic between the individual and the collective, I think, is kind of what you're gesturing towards. And I said earlier that it's a hyper individualist film and in some ways it is because it's so personal but I think I take Amanda's point very well that you know the individuals only made sense of in relation to the collective and that is always present in all of Tarkovsky's films right that that that's never washed away it can't be washed away but as for Evans question about the mirrors you know I think it's it speaks

volumes that the fact that in the deathbed scene this is what struck me the most about the using of mirrors in the in the film itself which is beautifully done But in the deathbed scene, there are mirrors all over the walls. So if you go and look at that scene where the doctor is kind of standing behind that little, you know, that little separator and his mom is sitting at the edge of the bed and you don't ever see the narrator's face, but you do see his body in this instance and he grabs the bird at the side of the bed, you know, all this provocative imagery. All along the walls are, like the whole wall is a bunch of mirrors. So clearly he's getting at something. I was reading about how he had a bunch of different names. for it including stuff like a redemption or um i think it was like a beautiful day you know a bunch

of different possibilities and he settled on mirror and there's lots of things right the mirror of your own culture the mirror of your own life but at you know at the end of his his life he is trying to make sense of his own life and that trying to make sense is looking into the mirror of who he was throughout life right his memories are about how he was shaped, how he treated those around him, his relationship with those around him, including and especially his mother and his wife. And, you know, he doesn't, the, the relationships are troubled, right? These are not relationships that are all wonderful and looking back with this warm nostalgia. There's a lot of coldness. There's a lot of fumbling of the relationships.

a lot of impenetrability between different people, you know, an inability to really understand the other. And so, you know, I think that is a huge part of the mirror is that Tarkovsky, insofar as this is a semi-autobiographical film, is holding up a mirror to his own life. And he's in his midlife, well, he doesn't know he's going to die later of cancer a couple, you know, a decade or two later. but from his age and midlife, it's not so much about his own death that's imminent, but it is about his parents' death that are becoming imminent, right? His parents at that time and his real life are elderly people. And so he is wrestling with the loss of his parents and his own relationship with his parents at the end of their lives, et cetera. And so I think that that's a huge part of it. And Mere, for me, it can mean a lot of different things and all

of you have made great points. But at the end of the day, Amir is Tarkovsky in some sense holding up Amir to his self and trying to understand his own life through this sort of autobiographical array of, you know, this collage of memories and dreams and the way that we all try to make sense of our lives, which is through, you know, our memories fundamentally. Our self is constructed through memories. If I took away all your memories of your entire life, your sense of, you would still feel as if you're an individual person, but you would not have a sense of self. You wouldn't know what are my preferences? How do I behave in the world? You wouldn't be able to make sense of yourself without your memories. And so when he's holding up that mirror to his own life,

the only way you can go is into your memories to make sense of yourself and it's, you know, and it's relationship with others through time. Yeah, I like that. And I, so just as an add a note, he apparently thought of the term the title mirror during the filming so i guess it was maybe using the mirrors throughout it and it just he had like an epiphany one day and and decided to use that but i also uh found it striking that they maybe this is what you meant brett is that when he's lying on his deathbed and there's all these mirrors you still don't see his face like you're almost like you want the big reveal like what what is what does this guy look like what who is he? Like, I want to, like, peer into his soul or some way. And then you don't get that

satisfaction, which is probably how almost any other film would be made, right? Like, you'd have a slow pan, as you see, like, his face, like, scraggly and beard and, you know, disheveled or whatever. And this, you don't, you don't get that satisfaction. And maybe that's partly, you know, it's obviously a choice, but that we don't ever always get to fully reflect on all these things. The best you can do is the memories. You have these, you have your own self-conscious, you have your own feelings. I mean, maybe he feels like he could be reincarnated because there are several scenes with birds, you know, the one where it's kind of landing on top of his head in the tree. And there's all these different, uh, moments like that.

And so I don't know. I have, uh, yeah, I don't know. Uh, a fun fact about that scene where you only see like his torso and then you see his hand grab the small bird. That is, uh, that is Andre there. And that's good. Oh, wow. I didn't know. I found it. I found a, I found a picture i'll send you guys the picture of it um yeah yeah you don't get that satisfaction because i think you're supposed to you're supposed to wonder um maybe maybe like that you know he doesn't show the face um because he wants you to you know see more of yourself in it you know if you put a face to it it's you're less likely i guess to see your own face in it which is the mirror yeah that's fascinating Yeah, the fact that at the deathbed scene, it's literally him laying in bed and literally his mom sitting at the edge of the bed.

Oh, man, that's, that's, so it's, yeah, that's definitely like pushes towards the autobiographical nature of the film. So, so deeply personal. And I, I feel like so grateful that people like him are willing to make these kinds of films because it's, it's a lot. It's a lot to put yourself out there so much for whatever criticism that may come. Amanda, yeah, Amanda, you just sparked a thought in my head just by saying what you just said right there, which, you know, we're talking about the deathbed scene. Then I thought about the very opening scene that seems disconnected from all the other scenes, which is this weird scene of a speech therapist helping a boy who is not, you know, not a character in the rest of the film, right? This is the only time we see this person. So it's not like, I don't even think it's a memory of his because he's portrayed by a different actor as a youth. But, you know, there's this speech therapist helping this young man work through his really intense stutter.

And so I don't know. This could just be me saying something on top of my head. But it feels like that is, if this is not a biographical film, then that opening scene feels like Tarkovsky struggling for him. his voice like you know he's going to get so personal he's going to dive so deeply into his own vulnerability and his own life and his own memories that you it's like a stuttering start like it's almost like a hesitant like i don't know how to quite get into this but he finds his voice and is able to delve into that yeah and i i love the lines that the doctor uses as she's describing putting on the tension in your hands and she says do not be afraid of your voice i don't know if this

the exact quote. Do not be afraid of, you will not be afraid of your voice. You will not be afraid of your words for now on. There you go. Wow. It's almost like a, kind of like maybe like a meditation, you know, as the intro, like, okay, here we go. We're going to get into this, you know? Oh man. That's that's super interesting. I was kind of, I hadn't thought of what that scene would mean because it also makes the next scene after it almost seems so wildly different as I mean, lots of the cuts in this are very kind of unexpected and time flipping. But yeah, I like the idea that it's him preparing his own voice. He has to almost go.

He has to be hypnotized, I guess, to go deep and delve into his own subconscious, to be able to then break out and have these memories. Like, the only way you can reach those memories is through, you know, this deep self-reflection. And Brett, you know, you mentioned how your authoritarian step-parent, like how you developed to stutter, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and it went away, you know, once, once, once that, that that force was no longer there, you know, you are no longer afraid of your words, you know, you are no longer afraid in your situation. Wow.

Yeah. Because my words were, would so often be the thing that would get me into, into trouble. Um, very innocent desires, like, I don't, I don't, I don't like this meal. Like, I can't eat this meal. You know, it's too dryer. It makes me gag or something. I'd be punished for it. So, yeah, that's fascinating.

But I think it's really cool that all three of us talking through this kind of came to that conclusion about the first scene without preparing for that. Because at first, I was really struggling to make sense of that scene in relation to the rest of the film because those characters never reappear. But I think we're on to something. And that goes with the nonlinear timeline, too, you know? So this is purely just a, this is less like a reflection on the film. But there's so many, you could, you know, you could probably talk about all. the incredible, beautiful scenes, but are there any scenes that we, that, like, stuck out to you that you haven't mentioned that just kind of, as you're watching, you know, like this, you know,

obviously, like, this scene's amazing. This scene is very beautiful. It's just, I also, like, you, Brett, I had to look up how he achieved the grass, meadow, like, wind. That was just, that was, that was just, it's incredible. I mean, and then the other, so I'll let you both go, but for me, the most incredible scene that would just kind of had me on the edge of my seat was, after the boy is reading through the journal kind of of the history of Russia from, I guess it was a perspective of the 1860s, I think. And the mother or the grandmother is sitting at the table and then she disappears. And you see the condensation on the table and it slowly is fading away. And it just like you're almost like, is it going to go now? Is it going to go now? And it just, I don't know. That scene was like I was transfixed on that. So of all the parts, parts of the movie that for some reason this very simple little little bit was just i don't know no that's that's so funny you say that because that's the exact scene that i had written down um for for myself because yeah he he this his mom leaves the house and he's alone he's alone in the house and then all

a sudden these two figures appear sitting in the in the sort of dining area and he just takes it for granted that they're there and then she's like somebody's at the door but even though nobody knocked he goes out that is his right yeah that's yeah the actress is his grandma but they both don't recognize each other so it's just sort of as disorienting dream like thing and then he goes back and then yeah that that the heat from the the cup of tea that had just disappeared off the table the heat residue is still there and slowly collapses in on itself and disintegrates as the score as the music sort of hits you with this haunting crescendo sound and I don't know exactly what to make of it is that the is that the evaporation of a

of a dream is that the evaporation of memories themselves. It's hard to get it down. But, you know, this is, again, trying to make an intellectual sense out of something that is so viscerally impactful. So that's definitely a huge scene. But the other thing that I wanted to mention is what struck me about the aesthetics of this film is, you know, completely divorced from the actual content and substance and background of the film. There are scenes that could be right at home in a horror film. there are um obviously there's the hitler's you know corpse thing but there's also when she's drenching her hair in the water and then her arms flail out is kind of like almost like a the ring as figure yeah um yeah and there's multiple scenes um you know in different ways that you could have just slotted into a horror film and they would have made perfect sense so aesthetically not substantively not content wise but aesthetically there's like this horror dimension that makes for incredibly striking scenes and is also like deeply fucking disturbing

Yeah, I think, I think for me, um, is a scene that I'm actually honestly most confused about. Um, I think I just need to do a re, a rewatch. Um, but the scene where the woman is floating, you know, where she's laying and her hair is kind of flat out as well. My whole thought is like, how did he do that? How did he do that in the 70s? Um, and she's talking about, she's talking to someone. I don't know if he's God or something where she's like, you, you only come when I'm sick or you're only here when I'm sick or something like that. And I think, I have to remember exactly. I think that they, that she said, I love you. I can't remember exactly. But if that is, uh, I feel bad for even like mentioning this because I don't have a full context of it. But I think she mentioned, she mentioned, she mentions or he mentions, I love you, which is the very first and last time you ever hear that verbal expression throughout the whole film. It's one of the final scene itself, but aesthetically, amazing.

I love when he uses the black and white. He uses the different ranges of black and white, you know, when you have the dream scene, like him as a small child running into the house in slow motion, but like a weird slow motion. It's like almost real time at the same time with the wind and then the rain coming down. Oh, amazing. But yeah, those, I guess those two scenes. I looked up the scene about the floating and I wasn't able. It was just like a quick look before and I wasn't able to figure out how he did it.

But that also is, that's again, like you said, Brett, that would be, could be in a horror movie, right? Like you changed the music and you change the tone of the film and all of a sudden that's, I don't know, like out of body. It could be like Exorcist Part 4. I don't know, whatever. It just, it's, yeah, that scene was, was very striking. And even to that, one of the other ones that maybe is kind of almost like a throwaway kind of bit is when they're at the very beginning talking about the fire. And at first you kind of just hear them talking about it in the house and everyone's running out to see the barn or whatever it is that's the, that's now on fire. And you see them all standing there, just watching it burn.

And I think you might hear, I have to watch it again, you might hear an animal making a sound. it sounded like an animal maybe that was inside and dies. And it's just that scene also is just visually just so striking that it's very simple. It's just a little cottage or whatever on fire. But it just the senses that it gives you is just it's. Yeah. And it seems like there's two fires. So you have like the scene where it's like the two small children, they're watching it.

Because she's like, oh, there's a fire. Don't, don't yell. So they go out there and they're watching it. And then there's like, I guess him as the older, I feel like this is like kind of the beginning of the time jumps where I was like, what the hell is going on? So he's like seemingly coming from that end of the house to the other end of the house and there's a fire there.

So that's a trip. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things. I missed a chance to catch this in the theaters maybe four or five months ago. It just didn't work out. It was playing a couple times. And this is one that I would love to see in the theater just because seeing it on the big screen to be able to just see all of these small things that are just magnify would be really cool.

Yeah, and to be totally lost in it, like, you know, the theater experience of everything is dark around you, there's no other distractions, and you're just, you're just, you know, being completely immersed in the, in this sense, the beauty of the aesthetic filmmaking itself, the sounds, the visual images. And people often say when you go and try to learn more about the film, people say over and over again, This is a film you need to watch on the biggest screen possible and the darkest room possible and give yourself over to it completely. You know, if you're checking your phone, if there's other things going on in the room, you're not going to be able to fall into it as much as you can if you really set the scene just right. Like that it's harder to do than the movie theater itself. That setting is wonderful.

So anybody listening, this is a classic film. If you ever get the chance at a local art film theater to go watch any of Tarkovsky's films, but particularly this one, I would absolutely jump out. Yeah, I did what you said, Brad, I think maybe when we did the very first one of these episodes was I literally left my phone across the room so I didn't have that temptation to just like pick it up and like look at it while you're doing it

because you do, when you're in the theater and you're doing that, you're not checking your phone, especially if, you know, unless like maybe, well, you shouldn't be anyway checking your phone. In the movie theater, you always may see some of those people doing that. But yeah, for anyone who hasn't seen this, you can watch it. it's uh if you have um it's almost 100% sure it's on youtube right it is free on youtube yeah i thought so well i think and it's crazy it only was really widely available within the

past four or five years i don't think it was on youtube until according to the wikipedia until 2020 or 2022 something like that which is surprising to me it also was just a film that wasn't widely released in in the soviet union when it came out it just wasn't a film that is easy to see. Now you can see it and you know, you can buy the like the Blu-ray and watch it that way if you have Criterion Channel. But if you just want to watch this movie, I would highly recommend

the hour and 42 minutes or so that this film runs. But yeah, any last thoughts on mirror? Any final reflections on the mirror? Yeah, I could say that yeah, this is just a beautiful film. Highly

encourage people to check it out. It is at the end of the day, this sort of collage of sequences of a wandering mind that you find the wandering mind is on his deathbed looking back over his life. It expresses contemplation and how contemplation feels. It expresses the phenomenology of memory and time in a really fascinating way. And it's just aesthetically a completely beautiful and striking film that anybody that has a serious interest in film and the history of film, this is a must, this is a must see and there's a there's a quote here that kind of sums up the story pretty well it was from one of the you know the the analytical films that i watched in the in the wake of the

film to try to get a better grasp on it so i'm not sure who the quote comes from but it says the hero of meir was a weak selfish man incapable of loving even those dearest to him for their sake alone looking for nothing in return he is only justified by the torment of soul which is sales him towards the end of his days as he realizes that he has no means of repaying the debt he owes to life. And I think if you're looking for something like what is the narrative thrust of the film, it is more or less that. But even that doesn't quite get at the depth and the beauty and the thought provoking and more than anything, the emotionally provocative nature of the film. So I highly encourage people to check it out.

Well said. Well said. I think if you are someone that are starting to wanting to dabble into film and film theory and cinematography or whatever, this is a masterpiece to start with, especially for older film, which tend to be really slow and boring. And this is, this is not any of that. It is a, it's a fucking masterpiece. peace. And as an aside to just as like a final note on just the legacy of this for anyone who doesn't know, the sight and sound has done with over regular. I think every 10 years, they come up with their 10 or maybe it's more 100, like most films you have to see before you die kind of thing. And I believe that in the most recent version of this mirror came up fourth, I think, in the list of those. And I think there's even a couple other within the 200 or whatever it is. It looks like it's actually something like that. There's another, I think that stalker also falls in here, but you really cannot go wrong with seeing mirror. Like, if you're going to watch a Tarkaski film, you know, each time I watch one of these, I think,

like could he even outdo himself or outdo the thing he did before? And this, I think, is probably the most visually stunning and striking movie you could maybe ever see. And movies that you see now by your favorite directsters like 2001 Space Odyssey, like those kind of films don't exist without movies like these.

Yeah. And if you really want to give yourself a little cultural enrichment, read Tolstoy's The Death of Ivanilic and then watch this film and just see it as like a sort of appreciation of Russian cultural production and the beauty of the artistic

and cultural Russian mind. I think there's there's a lot here for people who are interested in Russian history and culture in and of itself to get a lot out of. So I'd recommend that as well. And the one thing I will note that it said in the Wikipedia is that Christopher Nolan apparently cites mirror as the biggest influence on Oppenheimer. So that's just a little side note. Wow. Wow. Wow. Which is interesting. That's pretty high praise. I mean, you know, that one, whether you like the movie Oppenheimer or not, I think, just as a work of a film of, of that caliber-winning Best picture and all the awards to cite back to Mir, I think, is pretty cool. But yeah, Amanda and

Brett, as always, it's been a pleasure and an eye-opening and learning experience to talk to you about yet another Tarkovsky film. Yeah, amazing. Thank you guys. I love these so much. Yeah, it's always always a pleasure. I'd love to keep doing them. Maybe we move to a different director, or maybe we keep on with Tarkovsky, but I really enjoy these, almost seasonal at this point. It's really fun. Yeah. It would have been interesting if we had done them in like the films, like, based on kind of like the season that they fit to, it didn't really work out that way. There are a couple more Tarkovsky film, but I've actually been curious. So I haven't released this yet. I actually haven't recorded yet, but I'm going to be going on another podcast to talk about Eastern German cinema and kind of how it just kind of has like the history of it and talking about a few films. It would be really interesting to talk about, you know, whether it's just a single, film from that era and just kind of maybe even compare it to, you know, the Soviet kind of film industry and kind of how different they are. And I think there's a lot of similarities, a lot of

differences. So if we want to continue on the Tarkowski, I'm, you know, certainly happy. But just throwing that out there as a potential, you know, idea. And also open for any other suggestions. I think in one of our episodes, Brad, you mentioned some other films. I can't remember which one it was from the 60s. I have to go back and listen. I, I, I put it on my watch list at the time, but... I'm not sure, yeah. But I'm definitely down with moving into East German filmmaking. I haven't explored that at all, so that would be absolutely fascinating.

For those interested, we just released a whole episode on the German Revolution of 1918, 1919, to get a little of that prehistory. And then, yeah, maybe moving into East German cinematography could be a really cool next step for this little collab we got going. Yeah, I was going to say that episode was fascinating because I honestly had new, practically nothing about that period and it was like just just like hearing the timeline through the history was like oh my god i can't believe that i didn't like know about this all i really knew was about like rosa luxembourg and that's about it same yeah same before i started research absolutely but yeah so um thanks everyone for for listening and you can check out of course brett's uh rev left

and uh all of the content there and we'll either be bringing you a future tarkaski film or branching off into other eras, but for listeners, you can follow the show at left at theprojector.com, and we'll catch you next time. Peace.