The Mirror
aka Zerkalo
Screening: Wednesday 14 September, 8pm at Creation
Soviet Union
1975
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Writers: Aleksandr Misharin and Andrei Tarkovsky
Mother/Natalya: Margarita Terekhova
Ignat, Alyosha (Aleksei): Ignat Daniltsev
Nadezha (Wealthy woman): Larisa Tarkovskaya
Lisa, Mother's friend at printing house: Alla Demidova
Forensic doctor/Pedestrian: Anatoli Solonitsyn
Nanny/Neighbour/Strange woman at the tea table: Tamara Ogorodnikova
Military trainer: Yuri Nazarov
Father: Oleg Yankovsky
Aleksei age 5: Filipp Yankovsky
Yuri Zhary: Yuri Sventisov
Narrator (voice): Innokenti Smoktunovsky
Narrator (poetry): Arseni Tarkovsky
In Russian / Spanish with English Subtitles
Black and White, Colour
108 min
35mm
Greg Malcolm Saves the Music!
 At the last minute Christchurch experimental musician Greg Malcolm has accepted
the challenge to perform a live soundtrack to Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece The Mirror. A well
respected performer, and experienced hand at live film soundtracks, Greg's main instrument
is a special guitar with multiple outputs that has pick-ups at various strange points on the
guitar that create a variety of rich sounds out of that one instrument. At the same time,
he plays two guitars with his feet - one of which creates percussion sounds, the other of
which creates "ambient" noises.
Andrei Tarkovsky
is widely heralded as the best Soviet filmmaker of the past three decades. He
made only seven films in his career and is perhaps best-known (because of a
recent Steven Soderbergh remake) for his third film, Solaris
(1972). But Tarkovsky called Solaris his weakest film; rather it is the
follow-up to Solaris, a
film known in English as The Mirror (1975), that can be described as
the film that most likely fulfilled Tarkovsky’s
desire to pour his soul into his work.
International
journal Senses of Cinema says
of The Mirror that it
is “a non-narrative, stream of consciousness autobiographical film-poem that
blends scenes of childhood memory with newsreel footage and contemporary scenes
examining the narrator’s relationships with his mother, his ex-wife and his
son. The dreamlike intensity of the childhood scenes in particular is so
hypnotic that questions of the film’s alleged impenetrability dissolve under
the impact of moment after moment of the most visually stunning, rhythmically
captivating film-making imaginable. . . . If ever a film embodied the concept of
cinema as a recreation of the human thought process, Mirror is it. Not
only is it Tarkovsky’s
masterpiece, but it is one of the high points in the development of modern
cinema.”
Links:
The soundtrack of the
film comprised original work by Soviet composer Eduard Artemyev and, most
prominently, J. S. Bach. Just what Greg Malcolm will have in store for us is
anyone’s guess…
Preceded by the short film:
Big City Blues
USA / Netherlands
1962
Director: Van der Linden
Language: English
Colour
Sound Mix: Stereo
20 min
An Oscar Nominee in 1962, this film is an experimental study of violence. A young girl
takes a boy's white rabbit and escapes to an empty building / construction site, where
she is chased by two drunks. The boy searches for the rabbit, while hearing the the
sound of a trumpet played by one of the drunks
For this evening the film will be screened a live electronic soundtrack
performed by Christchurch act Faux.
Big City Blues at IMDB
This evening of film and music is a fund-raising event so
that Filmsoc can continue to have our screenings at Rialto, and we're asking $8
for members, $12 for non-members. Hope to see you there!
Due to circumstances beyond our control the Shocking Pinks will not be performing at this screening. Don't ask.
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