The Secrets of Symbols and Memory in Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Mirror’ with Ksenia Golubovich

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1974) is a film-essay. How was this film created through Tarkovsky’s new method of “cards” and a kind of deliberate “montage of fragments”? The film quite literally lays siege to our sense of reality and authenticity. Like a mirror — the first “truthful” image we have of ourselves — it is composed of several layers of documentary material, each unlike the other.

Newsreel footage of world events, the real voices of the director’s parents, and the “unreal” voice of Innokenty Smoktunovsky, indelibly associated in Russian culture with the figure of Hamlet. Scenes of Soviet life combine their elements in such a way that they seem to pass into the reality of masterpieces by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Vermeer, suspended between the reality of documented fact and the factuality of art. There are also non-professional performers appearing alongside actors.

The absence of the author’s “body” within the film itself becomes a meaningful and tangible presence of his restless spirit. And just before the end — the hand of Tarkovsky himself: the only part of the invisible author’s body that we are shown.

All this — and much more — resembles the sharp edges of a shattered mirror, which the film gathers piece by piece into a lucid utterance, a kind of answer-riddle: “I simply wanted to be happy…”

What is the enigma of this film, lying upon its constantly shifting surface? Why did it originally bear the title The White Day, and how did it transform into Mirror? How, indeed, can the personal history of a twentieth-century individual be told at all? These and other questions will be explored by Ksenia Golubovich.

When: Thursday, 28 May, 18:30-20:00 (BST)

Language: English

Format: Online via Zoom

Tickets: £5 – Standard, free – CamRuSS Members and Students

Video recording access is included with ticket purchase.

Video recording only: £5, free – CamRuSS Members

Please book via AllEvents

Ksenia Golubovich is a writer, literary critic, translator and cultural scholar. She graduated from the Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology at Moscow State University and undertook an internship at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in Philology, specialising in Shakespeare studies and English Modernism. Her doctoral dissertation examined the poetry of W. B. Yeats, and she has translated poetry and prose by Yeats, Bruce Chatwin, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Dylan Thomas. She is the author of studies on Olga Sedakova (“Postmodernism in Paradise”, 2022) and Merab Mamardashvili (“Encounters in an Unknown Homeland”, 2021). From 2016 to 2020 she chaired the A. M. Pyatigorsky Prize for the Philosophical Essay. She has also created and taught courses on “Literature and Contemporary Art” and “Cinema and Contemporary Art”. She teaches Poetry and Art at the Moscow School of New Cinema.

Ksenia is the author of a trilogy devoted to the end of the twentieth century: The Fulfilment of Wishes, Serbian Parables, and The Russian Daughter of an English Writer.

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