Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky (review)

In December, 2006, thirty years had passed since the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky died of cancer in French exile, shortly after having completed his seventh feature film, The Sacrifice, in Sweden. The present volume is one of many works being written on the subject of Tarkovsky's life work, and this book is a strong indication of the continuing interest in and the difficult challenges posed by his films.

This collection of essays, each contribution unique in approach and quality, helps us to think the question of how Tarkovsky relates his search for the Absolute within the materiality of the cinematographical image. The title of the volume, Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, does not merely refer to the director's most popular film, The Mirror. The implication of a region behind the mirror rather suggests the possibility of reflecting on film beyond the dualistic conception of a world and its representation. Thus it can be understood as the underlying project of the book to try to think how that third space that is neither world nor representation can be thought.

Gunnlaugur A. Jónsson and Thorkell Á. Óttarsson have grouped the thirteen essays into two parts, the first of which deals with "film theories" and the second with "theological themes." While the editors rightly claim that discussing theological motifs in Tarkovsky's oeuvre has been "seriously neglected" (2), it can simultaneously be argued that the separation between the religious aspects and the theory of cinematographical representation derived from Tarkovsky misleadingly abstracts from the uniqueness of Tarkovsky's work and the significance of his theological insights.

Sean Martin introduces the subject by analyzing the "Role of Autobiography and Lived Experiences" in Tarkovsky's films, claiming that from the very outset of Tarkovsky's work we can identify variations of autobiographical elements in different layers.

Benjamin Halligan's "On Tarkovsky's Aesthetic Strategies" sets off with the provocative subheading "Against Bazin." Are we not, he asks, mistaken to make a Bazinian out of Tarkovsky while basing our claim on his most important technique, the long take and its capacity to fixate the constant flux of time? For Bazin, the power and innovation of cinema lies in its capibility to re-present objects in their temporal and spacial continuity. While I think what Halligan claims for Tarkovsky's films is correct, namely, that they are struggling with the dialectics of cinematographical realism, the extent to which André Bazin was himself unaware of the "ambiguity of reality" (Bazin on Italian Neorealism), of the ruptures in time and space that even the long take entails (and which any representation cannot and must not avoid), remains debatable. However, Halligan's discussion of Tarkovsky's "anti-materialist" version of the cinematographical image allows us to discover the ambiguous status of the movie image, somewhere between representational realism and transcendental mysticism. As an example, one could add that Tarkovsky sometimes uses the long take and its inherent dynamics of movement and temporality in a highly manipulative way. In his later films, he allows the characters to disappear off-screen, reappearing on screen at another point in space, thus creating a rupture that is not to be explained within the "knowable parameters" of the "objective" world.

Paul Johnson wishes to broaden the discussion of Tarkovsky (which he finds to be predominantly focused on the individual) by exploring the relationship between "Subjectivity and Sociality." He concludes his examination of three "key stages: survival, resistance, and resolution" in Andrej Rublev, Solaris and The Sacrifice by stating that, if Tarkovsky's art of "self hermeneutics" "communicates as a message to the individual then it respects that this message is mediated by the cultural context in which both are situated" (77).

In his paper, "'Sculpting the Time Image': An exploration of Tarkovsky's film theory from a Deleuzian Perspective," Terence McSweeney rightly points out that in both the director's as well as the French philosopher...