Tarkovsky thinks that the director's work is "sculpting in time": the creation of a complete "piece of time" made from a vast number of living truths, where anything unnecessarily is absolutely eliminated. " As the sculptor in matter creates a form, so the director, according to Tarkovsky, "from the indifference of the many times that surround us creates a unique, live-time film, guided by the idea of a future work".
The ideal movie, for Tarkovsky, would be an impossible shot of one man's life, every second, every minute, which would then be replaced in ninety minutes. In this, we can say, Utopian ideal is the idea that human life is unrepeatable and that every minute can become a material for an infinite number of films.
The film that best shows the director's idea of temporality is The Mirror (Zerkalo, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975). This is a autobiographical film that deals with the concept of time and memory. But instead of Prust's individual reminiscence, the center of the film is a collective reminiscence of history. The mirror is a film that does not have a plot, Tarkovsky invokes memories from childhood and tries to understand the present through mirrors used as a symbol. Naturally, time periods collide and personal memories encounter history. So even though the film is considered to be out plot, it might still be like this: a story about a man on a deathbed, remembering the most important moments of his own life.
The film, in fact, does not have a plot; It is constructed like a mosaic with every piece of life as a unique experience or experience in the life of the protagonist, the life of the earth and the history of the world. Some events are real, referring to documentaries, others reconstructed on the basis of memories and photographs, and there are both fictional and created for the story. The past, the present and the future are woven into each other, as are reality, memory and dream. The film has its own internal logic, and it is the logic of the dream.
The opening scene is unique in The Mirror because it appears before the introductory titles. It contains two shots, the first one being relatively short compared to the other. They are filmed in a documentary manner and appear on the television that the boy watches. The boy stutters, which emphasizes the fragmentation of the language, but as we see at the very end of the film, the boy will say "I can speak". In addition to the meanings of stuttering as emotional (non) expression, and ultimate liberation in the end, Tarkovsky here begins the idea that permeates the entire film, that is, no form of communication is capable of recording the essence that lies within us. He tries to use the film as a means of expressing something that can't be expressed and avoids the error of his father, Arseny (Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky, 1907-1989) poet, who was fully expressed in words.
The opening scene of a boy who stammers ends with a sudden transition to a landscape that represents the author's memory of childhood, in that shot we see a young woman, Marisja, who plays the director's mother, who sees and watches something in the distance. It gives the impression that she is waiting for someone. The camera is slowly approaching from the rear, but it's bypassing her and stops on a man in the background. We assume that he is the one she is waiting for, but we find out that he is a foreigner, and that creates the dynamics of unpredictability, saspens, and we understand how the film moves towards the dark absence of a father. With this long shot, which is continuous, without a cut, Tarkovsky tries to create a so-called direct sense of time, ie, trying to overcome the image-movement that represents an indirect display of time and creates an time-image. With these long shots , Tarkovsky demonstrates his style of sculpting in time, by letting the scenes freely "run" as time images.
The use of the time course of nature, especially the wind in the starting scene is of primary importance in the Mirror. It demonstrates how Tarkovsky manages to suppress the drama action at the audio-visual level, allowing the idea of time to emerge from the narratives and go out of the screen. Under "going out of the screen," Tarkovsky assumes that the film is pre-empted beyond the limits of its sound images, creating ideas and thoughts that are not consciously set by the director, and in this way allow the viewer to grasp the understanding of what he sees.
In the following scenes, we see a house that burns and a phone call that serves as a trigger for the reminiscence of the protagonist, a binder between an adult Alexei and his memories of childhood. Between scenes of a phone call and a burning house there is a scene of washing hair, that serve as a hanging bridge between, and this gives the shape of a fragmentary reminiscence to the entire film. But that does not mean that this scene was set up only for the "fragmentary reminiscence" because it was not necessary to work. The main reason why these dream scenes function as a whole is due to the relationship between the tone and the balance, the poeticity they build, resembling the impressionistic image that moves.
The most famous scene in the Mirror is certainly the scene in which a woman is floating over the bed. Tarkovsky when asked the question - why even in two of his films he has this scene - he replied: "Just because the scene has incredible power. When I conceive a person in the air, it pleases me, fills me with emotions. If a fool would ask me why in my last film people would levitate in the air, I would answer: it's magic. If this question posed some poetic sensitivity and intelligence to me, I would say that for these characters love did not represent the same thing as for the author Betty Blue. For me, love is a supreme manifestation of mutual understanding and it can not be shown as a sexual act. Everyone says that if there is no love on the movie, it's because of censorship. In reality, it's not love shown on the screen, but a sexual act. Sexual act is something unique for each couple, if it is put into the movie, it becomes the opposite. "
The film slowly rotates thematically to death, ie. according to the value of life itself, and the viewer feels the true beauty of Aleksey's precious and fragile memories as they finally set themselves in a "proper" trace and slowly disappear. Although death only eventually opened up explicitly as a theme, it subtly closes everything before it through the feeling that life is unknown to us.