Mirror

Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror, completed in 1974 and released in 1975, was understood at the time to be a deeply autobiographical film, but Soviet critics struggled to extract a clear message from it. The official cultural authorities classified it as a third-category release, severely limiting cinema bookings; Tarkovsky later said this was the film that finally convinced him he would have to leave the Soviet Union. Mirror sits in the highest tier of every Sight & Sound poll, currently at number 31 in the 2022 critics' chart.

A dying poet, never seen on screen, drifts between layered memories of his wartime childhood, fragments of newsreel footage covering forty years of twentieth-century history (the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Soviet border war, the rise of the atom bomb), and dreams of his mother as a young woman. The mother is played both as a young woman and as the poet's estranged ex-wife by Margarita Terekhova, in a doubling that anchors the film's central theme: the impossibility of distinguishing one's mother from one's lover, one's childhood from the country one grew up in. Anatoly Solonitsyn, the doctor in the field, is among Tarkovsky's most reliable collaborators.

The film has no plot in any conventional sense; it is organised by the rhythms of memory itself, with documentary, dream, and lived experience functioning as equal classes of image. Mirror is the most-cited Tarkovsky film among working filmmakers — Béla Tarr, Carlos Reygadas, Apichatpong Weerasethakul have all named it as foundational.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film that proved cinema could function the way memory functions, with the same density and the same unresolved emotion. Few works in the medium are so completely irreducible to summary.