Mirror Filming in the Historical and Artistic Context
Mirror is a manifestation of Tarkovisky hunted soul and his extensive search for truth, connection and spirituality as evidenced in the deep images that coherently define the imperfect human live irrespective of whether the experiences of life are ordinary or trivial. For example, throughout the film, there are image that echo the futility of our lives as evident in motifs of disconnect in life such as a neglected wife amusing a village doctor after he had lost his way, a custodial argument that appears between the narrator and his wife, and an intelligent man trying the patience of his instructor in the military (Petrei, 75-76).
In the deliberate attempt to make time incomprehensible, Tarkovisky uses the same actors in a bid to depict the two phases of the life of the narrator. Natasha (19-21) points out that in this light the fatherless boy efforts to reach out to his mother and at the same time the father definitely is unable to relate to his son. As a result, outdated world events newsreel is mixed together to offer what can be argued as the tonal shift as well as the environmental reference. The structure of the film Mirror therefore evolve through historical dimensions by the director using a host of flashbacks as well as flash forwards all constructed around chromatic changes.
The entire film contains recurring themes that succinctly reflect the pattern of alienation as well as the emotional isolation of the narrator which makes it to lack logical order and thus drawing out intuitive reaction from the audience. Arguably, the fact that the audience experiences truth in this film has an entirely intoxicating beauty that touches on the connection of the filmmaker with the fill in the historical sense (Tatario, 24-25).
The Mirror articulates the understanding that its filming in the whole cinematic approach helps the audience to experience time from history and the director Tarkovisky sculpt this time to make sure that the audience experiences the artistic beauty of the film and at the same time appreciates historical phenomenon. For example, the Mirror loosely mixes the memories of childhood together with the footage of the newsreel is an arguably no logical plot. Tarkovisky (57-58) asserts that the rhythmical combination of the contemporary scenes with footages and memories of childhood successfully brings out the loose visual flow which connects everything to the technique of stream of consciousness. In addition, the mixture of simple and complex structures forms the basis on which the Mirror is regarded as a masterpiece.
This film connects approaches of the theory of filming and the actual filmmaking in the history of Russian cinema. Scholars maintain that this leans more on the shared objective that drives both theory and the pragmatics of the filmmaking (Petrei, 89-90). The meditation of Tarkovisky on art exclusively borders the essence of cinema as a holy grail in theory of the soviet film. Mirror captures the philosophical grounding as the artistic medium that wholly reflects the heritage of soviet. Accordingly, the art of Tarkovisky filming does not lay in montage as evidenced with other Russian filmmakers because it amounts to partiality for editing giving this a basic element for cinema (Tarkovisky, 76-77). The art of filming that Tarkovisky exclusively used is the ability of the cinema to capture both time and existence.
The analysis of scene sequence in Mirror shows that time preceded and captivates the aesthetics of Tarkovisky. It is plausible to argue that this is not physical time that can be recorded via any form of measurement like a watch but rather a spatial and abstract element that narrows down to the creation of human intellect (Tarkovisky, 113-115).The durational aspect of Tarkoviskys filmmaking constructs the parallel between film theory and film making and therefore in Mirror, the director achieves a dream like beauty through adhering to his principle of time both in composition of his film as well as in the aesthetic narrative.
To succinctly understand the use of time in Tarkovisky film and his general principle of cinema, it becomes imperative to appreciate that time is a precondition for human spirit. As such, consciousness is tied to the human as well as to the physical time and thus, the consciousness realizes itself to the memory. Therefore, it becomes a consequence of time in the human mind and further introduces a new spectrum of time measured in the progression of events in space (Natasha, 61-62).
The fundamental gravity of memory and consciousness is found in Mirror through newsreel footages of the society crossing the Lake and as a consequence, this sequence in the scene of Tarkoviskys film does not become a literal memory of the narrator, his childhood memories and dreams but rather an actual footage that is documented and which Tarkovisky did not film himself (Petrei, 252-253). In addition, the images in Mirror are naturally placed in the scope of time and thereby they are historic and better understood in historical context. However, as Tarkovisky states himself that history is not time (Tarkovisky, 57), the entire sequence of scenes appears in an existing state of time original to the narrator.
In reality, the newsreel footage reveals nothing about the tragedy they describe forcing the audience to interpret in terms of disastrous event. As a result of the fact that the footage is a detailed memory of the past phenomenon and perception, Tarkovisky collected it and edited it attaching his own personal inner experiences of it and in this case, the audience must bring in their own memories of the disastrous and tragic scene in order to make connections to the film.
Petrei (297-299) underscores that Mirror is a basic encrypted chain of symbols that highlights the realism the breaking of time. However, the artistic elements is succinctly felt due to the film mirrors the musical theatre to an extent of stopping to be a work of cinema. Films of this nature employ codified abstractions to the extent that they create a big bridge between their thematic explorations and the lived experience thereby forming mere equations of ideologies. Such scientific constructions as evidenced in the Mirror augment the segmented temporality in favor of real time that is expressed in the conscious existence. The Mirror thus elicits a misinterpretation of the aspects of time that that tears the artistic filming from the film.
Mirror is constructed along the basis of the artists inner life and it formulates a schema for accomplishing this assertion by the obvious use of methodic movements of cinema. These techniques are used by Tarkovisky to represent the realism in his cinema. By the very nature of filming, cinema must extensively expose reality and as such, Mirror is directed under the guiding principle of realistic forms of external reality and the paternal processes of the artist (Tatario, 26-27). As a result, the memories, dreams, fantasies and hallucinations are paradigms of consciousness that become distinct to the soul and overly integrated into the cinematic existence in harmony with their appearance in reality. Along this realization, Tarkovisky sees that the reality of the screen are constructed in the exact way as the as the reality of the natural life. This makes the scenes of experiences as well as memory to become composite of dream like features of time pressure as well as fluid camera movement.
To recap, the Mirror portrays the emotions and thoughts of the narrator Alexei together with the world surrounding him. From the foregoing discussion, the film is structured in a discontinuous and non chronological plot that mixes up newsreel footages with childhood memories. It switches between three different times in history ranging form prewar time, war time and post wartime of the 1960 Russia. Its filming follows oblique proceedings of camera movements in a phenomenological approach thus making the audience to feel as if they are in the real time of the film and at the same time in the present moment. This is because, they are often piloting through the space in the same manner as if they are dreaming.
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