Tarkovsky’s Mirror

Discursive Fragmentation as Stuttering

Abstract

Mirror (1975), Andrei Tarkovsky’s third feature film, is deemed his most personal work. Its poetic unfolding is by many accounts marginally narrative in that it tells a story as an assemblage of temporally disjointed discursive fragments that undermines conventional modes of narrative continuity. The vignettes are, for the most part, dramatisations of the protagonist’s memories of childhood events, dreams, fantasies and day-dreams articulated through a temporal logic that requires an unconventional spatialisation of the narrative to render it coherent. In its analytical constellation, we discern a repetitive dynamic of empathic identification as a strategy of engagement with the viewer. We identify the iterative travail of the film’s protagonist as a stuttering that mirrors the individual’s faltering struggle to find a voice as expression of a collective identity.