The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Andrei Tarkovsky · a film · 1975 · about an hour and three quarters · written with Aleksandr Misharin · in Russian, as Zerkalo
Mode
Autobiographical memory film without a plot; family chronicle, confession and newsreel of a century in one structure
Mythos
The son who seeks the mother in the wife and repeats the father; the house of origin visited by fire, water and wind; the woman waiting at the edge of the world; the road not taken
Phase
Nearly forty years held at once: a summer before the war, the war years and the early 1970s, interleaved without titles or dates, from a stammerer’s cure to a field where two mothers stand
Presentation
Feature film, about an hour and three quarters, in Russian with brief Spanish; colour, black and white and tinted monochrome; Georgi Rerberg’s camera, Eduard Artemyev’s score with Bach, the director’s father reading his own poems, archival newsreel cut into the fiction
Register
From the wind in the field to the fear in the printing house; long takes paced to breathing; rain, fire and falling plaster as matter; the voice of a narrator who is not shown
Scale
One consciousness; three generations of a family; half a century of a nation
Governing Proposition
A man who is never seen, divorced and ill, remembers his mother in a country summer before the war, in the war years and in his own present, and finds the mother’s face in his wife’s. The wager of the film is that a life is not told forward but returned to, that a man knows himself only through the women he has failed, and that a family’s history and a nation’s can be one memory, held by one consciousness in one form.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a television. The narrator’s son switches it on, and on the screen, in the manner of a documentary, a young man who stammers is treated by a hypnotist. At the end of the session he says, clearly, “Ya mogu govorit’”: “I can speak”. Only then does the title come. The scene is never explained and never returned to. It is the film’s licence: a man who could not speak is cured, and the confession that follows could not have been made until now.
Zerkalo (Mirror) was made by Andrei Tarkovsky at Mosfilm from a screenplay he wrote with Aleksandr Misharin, and released in the Soviet Union in 1975. Georgi Rerberg photographed it, Nikolai Dvigubsky designed it and Eduard Artemyev wrote its music. The poems heard in it are by Arseny Tarkovsky, the director’s father, read by himself. It is in Russian, with brief Spanish, and it moves between colour, black and white and a tinted monochrome. There is no plot to summarise. There are three times, interleaved without titles or dates: a country summer before the war, the father gone; the war years, with evacuation, a military instructor and the father’s brief return; and the present of the early 1970s, in which the narrator is divorced and ill.
The narrator, Alexei, is a voice, Innokenty Smoktunovsky’s, and at the end a hand; he is never shown. Margarita Terekhova plays his mother, Maria, in the 1930s and 1940s, and his wife, Natalia, in the present. Ignat Daniltsev plays Alexei as a boy and Ignat, Alexei’s son. In old age the mother is played by Maria Vishnyakova, the director’s own mother. Oleg Yankovsky is the father, Anatoly Solonitsyn a passing stranger, Alla Demidova a woman called Lisa. The film’s first fact is its casting: to the man remembering, his mother and his wife have one face, and his son is himself.
Movement II
Before the war, in the country, the mother sits on a fence at the edge of a field, waiting for a man who does not come. A stranger passing by stops to talk with her and sits on the fence, and he falls from it. He walks away across the field and turns back, and a wind crosses the whole field behind him, bending it, and he goes on. Nothing has happened. A woman has waited, a man has passed, and the land has moved. Solonitsyn is on the screen for minutes, and the stranger stays in the memory: the road the mother did not take.
One evening the barn burns in a downpour, and the boy watches from the house: fire and rain held together in one long shot. Fire, water and wind come to this house again and again, across all three times, and the house is the house of origin, the place memory returns to. The particulars are few and exact: a jar of milk, the rain, the field. The father is the reason the mother waits, and the film never says why he is gone.
In monochrome, the mother washes her hair, bent over a basin, and as she rises the ceiling comes down around her, water and plaster falling slowly through the room. The film gives the image no frame, of dream or of memory, and needs none. Across the film Arseny Tarkovsky, the director’s father, reads his own poems, so that a father’s voice is heard over a childhood from which a father is absent. The film lays the two together and lets neither explain the other.
Movement III
The mother works at a printing house. One day she runs through the rain to it, afraid that she has let an error pass in a proof, and searches the sheets. The film names neither the error nor the text, and needs no name to say whose displeasure the house fears. It runs on terror of a single misprint. History enters this family twice in the same form, as the father’s absence for reasons never told and as this fear, and the film shows both without a speech.
In the present the narrator speaks with Natalia, his former wife, about their son. Natalia has the mother’s face, and the narrator says so. The man who has left his wife repeats the father who left his mother, and the man who will not visit his old mother is the boy who could not comfort her. He is heard from off screen, and the rooms hold mirrors in which the faces of others are seen and his own is not. The audience stands where he stands, looking.
Two passages of the present stand apart. In a Spanish émigré household, exiles remember a lost home; the link to the rest, exile and a home lost, is real and thin, and it is staged stiffly. And the son reads aloud Pushkin’s letter to Chaadaev on the destiny of Russia for a woman who then vanishes, leaving on the table a ring of moisture from her cup, which fades as one watches. The letter states in the voice of an essay what the rest of the film shows; the fading ring is the film at its finest, a trace of presence going out.
Movement IV
In the war years a military instructor drills boys, among them the orphan Asafiev, and the episode turns on a grenade. The state that the printing house feels as fear is here a drill, and a boy with no parents is being made ready for a war. The film does not argue it. It gives the instructor, the orphan and the grenade, and moves on.
Newsreel is cut into the fiction across the film, and its centre is the Red Army crossing Lake Sivash: men wading shallow water with their loads, for what seems without end, while Arseny Tarkovsky reads his poem. The footage is archival, and the film takes it as the narrator’s own memory, with the same weight as the barn. Here image, poem and remembered war become one memory, the private war and the nation’s. Elsewhere the newsreel of crowds and wars far away stands beside the fiction more than it enters it.
A boy climbs a snowy hill, and the frame composes itself after Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow; a bird settles on his head. The father comes back, briefly. Leonardo, Bruegel, Pushkin and Bach enter the film as quoted art, and it borrows some of their depth along with their images. In the man who remembers, what was seen and what was looked at in a book lie side by side.
Movement V
The mother takes the boy to the house of a doctor’s wife, to sell her earrings. It is the visit in which the boy sees what poverty costs her. A cockerel is killed. And the mother is seen lifted above a bed, levitating, in an image near the Annunciation. The film gives it no explanation, as it gives none to anything it remembers, and the particulars stay particular: earrings, a bird, a bed.
The narrator is seen at last, in part: a man in bed, ill, and a hand that lets a bird go. The film began with a man who could not speak and was cured, and it closes its present with a dying man releasing a bird; the cure and the release are one act of speech at last. What he has confessed is the film itself: his mother, his wife, his son, his country and his century, given in the order memory gives them, not the order in which they happened.
Then the last field. The young parents are there, the young woman in the grass; the old mother, played by the director’s own mother, leads the children across the field, and the opening chorus of Bach’s St John Passion rises. Two mothers, the young woman and the old one, stand in one landscape. In the fifty-one years since, the film has been returned to again and again, and it has not settled: whose memory a scene is, what the printing house feared, who the woman in the Pushkin scene was. What has lasted is a form in which a man who is never seen remembers his mother and finds her face in his wife’s, and a field where all three times stand at once.
Act III · The Twelve
The test presses hard on a film of episodes joined by memory rather than plot, and the answer is mixed. The prologue is required: a stammerer cured to say that he can speak is the licence for a confession that could not be made until now. The fence and the stranger, the barn fire, the printing house and the earrings visit are required, each a stage of the mother’s life alone. The newsreel of Sivash is required, because it makes a private memory a nation’s. What holds the axis lowest: the Spanish household, joined to the rest really but thinly; the Pushkin reading, which states a thesis the film elsewhere shows; and an order of association under which some parts could have stood elsewhere.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a man knows himself only through the women he has failed, and the failure repeats down the generations. The father who left the mother is followed by the son who has left his wife, and the boy who could not comfort his mother is the man who will not visit her. The casting shows it rather than says it: the wife has the mother’s face, and the narrator says so. A second truth comes in image: history enters a family as absence and fear. A third: memory is a form of conscience, not a record. Held well below the top because much of the power is mood, wind, rain and a house, and mood ranks below meaning even where image carries the meaning fully, as it does only in the best passages.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation is frequent and high, and of several kinds. The wind that bends the whole field after the stranger turns back; the barn burning in a downpour while the boy watches from the house; the ceiling coming down in a slow fall of water and plaster as the mother rinses her hair; the soldiers wading Sivash as if without end, under Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem; the boy on the snowy hill and the bird that settles on his head; the mother lifted above a bed; breath fading from a polished table; and the last field, the young woman in the grass, the old woman with the children, the St John Passion rising. Few films rise so often or so far. Held from the very top by the flat ground between the summits, the Spanish household and the Pushkin reading.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth is built, and the building is the casting: one woman as mother and wife, one boy as son and as the self, so that the old pattern of the son who seeks the mother in the wife and repeats the father is the film’s structure, not its allusion. The house is the house of origin, visited by fire, water and wind. The mother at the fence is a woman waiting at the edge of the world for a man who does not come; the levitation lifts her into an image near the Annunciation; the stranger who turns back is the road not taken. The particular stays particular: earrings, a cockerel, a proof sheet, a jar of milk. Held well below the top because part of the archetypal load is carried by the art the film quotes, Leonardo, Bruegel and Bach, and the myth of Russia in the Pushkin letter is stated, not built.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the memory film of the fifteen years before: Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), Fellini’s 8½ (1963), the work of Resnais, and Tarkovsky’s own Ivan’s Childhood (1962), whose dreams opened the door. The turn goes further than any of them: a feature with no plot and no visible protagonist; three time levels joined by association; one actress in two roles and one boy in two; the director’s mother in the film, his father reading his own poems, newsreel taken as the narrator’s own memory. The stake was real and was paid: inside the studio and the state committee the film was criticised as obscure and private, and it counted against its maker in the years before he left. Held from the top because Resnais and Fellini had proved the path’s first stretch, and the film extends it rather than opens it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Substitute a linear biography and the film stops knowing what it knows: that a remembered mother and a present wife are one face to the man who looks; that a newsreel of soldiers wading a lake is as much his memory as the barn; that a life is not told forward but returned to. The form is the knowledge. The doubled casting says in image what a novel would need a sentence to say. The shifts between colour and monochrome mark kinds of remembering, not dates. The narrator kept off screen puts the audience in his place. Held a step from the top because the form’s demand is not always repaid: on a first viewing the doubled roles confuse more than they reveal, and some joins lean on knowledge from outside the film, the director’s life and his father’s poems.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise, across fifty-one years of critical writing and of viewers’ return, and viewers commonly report a film that changes each time. It yields on both levels. Formally: the order of the sequences, the rhymes of fire, water and wind across the three time levels, the breath fading from the table and the ring of the cup, the mirrors that hold faces the unseen narrator cannot show. Semantically: whose memory a given scene is, the narrator’s or his mother’s; what the error in the printing house was; who the woman in the Pushkin scene is. These questions have stayed open without exhausting the film. Held a little below the top because part of the return is decipherment, fixing who and when, rather than deepening.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Released in 1975, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is high: a demonstration that a narrative film could be organised by memory and association alone, with the self as structure rather than character, and that private recollection and public newsreel could share one grammar. That is a reorganisation of possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: slow to reach the West, the film’s form, a remembered childhood of fragments as the structure of a feature, runs on through art cinema, most openly in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (8.8) of 2011. The discounts: much of the reach belongs to Tarkovsky’s work as a whole rather than to this film; it stayed within art cinema; and the delay was long.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the film survives whole, in its one cut; restorations have repaired image and sound, and nothing that made the work is lost. Presence: fifty-one years, continuous since its first years in repertory, on home video and in teaching, and held high by critics and directors; but charged at the start, by a narrow life at home, on the usual account, and a long delay abroad, and still a cinephile’s presence, narrower than a widely seen film’s. Fabric: Soviet colour stock and post-synchronised sound of their period, a small charge; a present framed as memory dates little. A tenth below the usual figure for its age, and below Stalker, at 8.7 on this axis, four years younger and wider in presence beyond cinema, and Andrei Rublev, at 8.9.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. Georgi Rerberg’s photography: the field and the wind, the barn fire held in a long shot through rain, interiors where light moves across walls and mirrors, the passage from colour to monochrome without strain. The long takes are paced to breathing. The sound is built: Eduard Artemyev’s electronic tones folded into rain, wind and clocks, so that the score is hardly heard as music, and Bach placed twice, each time where he carries most. The cutting holds three time levels without a title or a date. Terekhova’s two women are distinct in carriage and alike in face; Solonitsyn’s stranger lasts minutes and stays. The costs: post-synchronised dialogue that shows in places, the Spanish household staged stiffly, the Pushkin reading static where it means to be strange.
Score: 9.1 / 10
One law: the logic of remembered time, in which past and present, private and public, are present at once to one consciousness. Take the two most distant elements, the newsreel of foreign crowds and distant wars and the mother washing her hair under a falling ceiling. Both obey the law: they are what the narrator’s century and his childhood put into him, given with the same weight and the same lack of explanation. The hypnotist and the dying man’s bird obey it too: the prologue’s cure and the closing release of the bird are one act of speech at last. The strain: the Pushkin letter speaks in the voice of an essay, a thesis on Russia the rest of the film never states, and the Spanish household is joined by theme more than by memory.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a film of under two hours holds. Consciousness, in the narrator’s memory and its guilt; the family, across three generations, two marriages ended and a child between them; the state, in the printing house’s fear, the military instructor and the evacuation; history, in half a century of newsreel; labour, in the mother’s work at the press and the selling of the earrings; art, in Leonardo, Bruegel, Pushkin, Bach and the father’s poems; the natural order, in field, wind, rain and fire; the sacred, in the Passion, the levitation and the visitor who vanishes. They are held through one consciousness, and that holds the axis down: history comes largely as newsreel set beside the fiction, juxtaposed more than entered, and the state is felt as fear but never seen at work.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 9.2, then The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.1, and The Swerve and The Living Form at 9.0. Elevation of many kinds, from the wind in the field to the last field and the Passion; fifty-one years of return that leave its questions open; a making of camera, sound and cutting that holds three times without a title; a turn past every memory film before it; and a form in which one face in two times is the knowledge.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2, then The Encompassed at 8.3. The prologue, the fence, the barn, the printing house, the earrings and Sivash are required, but the Spanish household and the Pushkin reading are joined thinly and some parts could have stood elsewhere; and the many orders the film holds come through one consciousness, history largely as newsreel set beside the fiction and the state felt as fear but never seen at work. Above them, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.5: a disclosure carried in large part by mood, and a myth part carried by the art the film quotes, with the myth of Russia stated rather than built. Then The Imperishable at 8.6: a whole survival with a narrow start and a cinephile’s presence.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, The Imperishable at 8.6 clears it by one tenth, and The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep stand on it at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it covers falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.7 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Zerkalo (Mirror) as released by Mosfilm in the Soviet Union in 1975, its one cut and its only text, from the stammerer’s cure to the last field: directed by Andrei Tarkovsky from a screenplay by Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Misharin, photographed by Georgi Rerberg, designed by Nikolai Dvigubsky, with music by Eduard Artemyev and recorded music by Bach, Pergolesi and Purcell, and with poems written and read by Arseny Tarkovsky; in colour, black and white and tinted monochrome. No competing version exists; restorations are repair. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Russian film; the English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, and nothing here is charged to a subtitle. One line is quoted, the cured stammerer’s, where its words are certain; all other speech is described. The three times, the casting, the set pieces and the placing of Bach are held with confidence; the exact order of the middle sequences and which poem falls under which image are not, and nothing here rests on them. The account that the film was distributed narrowly at home is given as the usual one. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact running time and frame ratio, the identity of most of the newsreel passages, the placing of the other recorded music, the script’s earlier title and planned frame, the history of the cut and its editing, the critical literature on the film and its places in polls, are not given.