Andrei Tarkovsky’s surreal THE MIRROR will be screening for free at Mid-Manhattan Library
THE MIRROR (ZERKALO) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
Mid-Manhattan Library
455 Fifth Ave. at 40th St.
Wednesday, March 13, free, 7:00
www.nypl.org
www.kino.com
”Words can’t really express a person’s emotions. They’re too inert.” So says Andrei Tarkovsky in his dream-filled, surreal classic The Mirror, which features long scenes with little or no dialogue. Tarkovsky turns the mirror on himself and his childhood to tell the fragmented and disjointed story of WWII-era Russia through his own personal experiences with his family. Tarkovsky was obsessed with film as art, and this nonlinear film, which shifts back and forth between color and black-and-white, is his poetic masterpiece; he even includes his father’s (Arseny Tarkovsky) poems read over shots that are crafted as if paintings. Many of the actors (which include his mother, Maria Vishnyakova, and his wife, Larisa Tarkovskaya, in addition to Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, and Anatoli Solonitsyn) play several roles; have fun trying to figure out who is who and what exactly is going on at any one moment. The Mirror is screening for free March 13 at the Mid-Manhattan Library as part of the series “Three Auteurs of World Cinema,” which began with six films by Wong Kar-wai and continues with Tarkovsky’s Stalker and The Sacrifice before presenting eight works by Federico Fellini beginning April 10 with I Vitteloni.