In Sculpting in Time, his exquisite paean to the soul-nourishing ineffability of artistic creation, Russian cinematic maestro Andrei Tarkovsky promises and then interrogates his art form’s relation to the world.Cinema, he informs us, moves beyond abstraction and engages the real in all its remarkable tangibility. Yet for all its adeptness and flexibility – indeed, because of it – film cannot really see the world as it is.It, like memory, is too distant from the thickness of reality, but also too close, a paradox that marks cinema as more and less than reality, a way of existing that is so touched by reality, so open to it, that it cannot ever distance itself enough to name reality as such. It is torn between feeling out reality in all its hyper-presence and holding back from it like a specter.

This tension, it seems, is cinema’s gift to us. In a world of unclarifiable external forces, acknowledging and reckoning with the complexity of the world around us often feels like an act of condemnation, dooming us to a fatal enmeshment in systems that limit and violate us. Threatened by the world, we produce either illusions of mastery over it or prophecies of surrender to it. This seems to be Tarkovsky’s critique, in his writing, of symbols: they abstract and attempt to master reality, and they posit control as the only alternative to evaporating the self into the world. In between diffusing into the pure immediacy of reality’s flux and, conversely, stopping it in a congealed concept, Mirror instead sees our lives as, to use one of its own metaphors, an impression on a pane of glass fading away. And it sees cinema as the form of our lives. Cinema is not really the mirror of reality, but the process of the ghostly touch leaving its mark and then letting go as it is displaced into the ether of an often ephemeral existence. And cinema, like life, is the act of watching itself come and go, engage with the world enough to stain it and color it anew and then acknowledge and grapple with the eventual invisibility of that interaction. Reckoning with the world not as a cosmic choreography we control but a lived encounter with an experiential symphony, Tarkovsky’s film invites us to see and feel the external in all its unmediated glory and ravishing awe rather than impress dogmatic meaning upon it. However, it also lets us know that symbolizing as an incomplete act of understanding and naming reality is part of this flow, not only a break from it. For this director, with significant spiritual acumen, nature is both a cavernous catalyst of possibility and a diaphanous fabric suffusing all existence. It surrounds us, legitimizing and potentializing our own efforts to exist, and to suffer its existence. Cinema’s capacity to renew our contract with the world, to see it in a new way or expose an alternative aspect of what we might otherwise pass by unthinkingly, bestows upon us a capacity to explore the world generously and expansively, to feel gossamer threads of relation across time and space. Cinema cannot see the world, truly, because it is with the world. While cinema, like all art, abstracts us from the world, it also returns us to it because that abstraction is our ability, as humans, to create with that world. If Siegfried Kracauer once called cinema the “redemption of physical reality,” Tarkovsky is one of physical reality’s most sensitive and receptive prophets. He treats film as the closest thing we have to genuine grace.

Perhaps Mirror unlocks the paradox of art’s distance and closeness to the world – of our distance and closeness to the world – by locating a world where tactility and abstraction, experiential and ideological reality, are not contradictory but mutually, even necessarily, constitutive. The contradictions in Tarkovsky’s cinematic elegies might best be taken as a statement of the symbiosis of the two states. If the wonderfully supple introduction of Mirror allows us to infuse water/fire/wind/mirrors with symbolic significance, it also asks us to sit with these symbols, to experience their fluctuations and duration, to acclimatize to their motile elusiveness. Tarkovsky introduces natural elements (water, for instance) to multiple and contradictory contexts so that their meaning is multiplied and fragmented, rendered restless with a sense of amorphous suggestiveness. Mirror’s opening, to take one example, suggests not that symbols or intellectual/ideological meanings are inapt but that they are simply not complete on their own, that they must not be replacements for a more immediate/sensory/perceptual viewing of the world. Tarkovsky’s capacity to infuse the material with the heavenly and the hallucinatory becomes not a contradiction but a recognition of duality, dialecticism, simultaneity. If Tarkovsky’s cinema is “transcendent,” as it is often described, it locates transcendence – the possibility of the audience mentally permeating beyond the screen and discovering something metaphysical, intangible, even ideological – through the conduit of tactile materiality, the canvas of the physical and perceivable.

An early sequence begins with a camera track onto what we initially expect to be the back of a woman, Tarkovsky engendering a conversation between, or a vortex of, the internal and external, the human mind and nature. The track navigates past the surrounding foliage that seems to frame the scene for us as if centering the woman and asserting her prominence, feinting toward an imaginative paean to forlorn solitude. However, the tracking motion actually resists focus on her corporeal form, moving past her to emphasize the wide vista she is presumably looking at, at one point balancing the woman and the vista in the frame, favoring neither, before finally ceding ground to nature. In asking humankind to emerge “from the state of placid ignorance (to be) thrown out into the vastness of the earth, hostile and inexplicable”  in an attempt to prime people for “the agonising process of human self-knowledge,” as Tarkovsky himself writes, the director produces a cinema that is not insularly focused on the individual in the frame, or on nature alone, but on a kind of spiritual resonance achieved through everyday feats of human curiosity.

When a man walks up to the woman in the same lengthy take, the lensing, without cutting, subtly racks so that the two people, now in conversation, are the focal point, with the outer world somewhat abstracted. The man is not shown arriving from somewhere or leaving to anywhere specific – he seems to emanate from nature, to corporealize from the field. He speaks on the life of the trees, noting “they don’t run about, like us who are rushing, fussing, uttering banalities,” bemoaning the crisis of modernity that engenders a lack of  “time to stop and think.” Nature accrues a metaphysical wealth, particularly when he comments that  “we don’t trust the nature … inside us,” appreciating the world not simply as a graspable external reality but something ambiguously,  unplaceably moving between person and ecosystem. The man’s comments are not unmotivated, nor are they entirely abstract. In fact, the shift in their conversation – from the subject of the woman’s husband to the topic of nature – is predicated on the man sitting on the wood fence with the woman, the fence then cracking and toppling as the two people tumble to the ground. The woman gets up immediately, but the other man looks around before noting “I fell and found strange things here – roots, bushes, has it ever occurred to you that plants can feel, know, even contemplate.” This imperfection, this human fallibility rooted in acts of luxuriant stumbling, seems to be the essence of the connection between the material world and the metaphysical/mental one. Nature allows for metaphysical rumination, but it also exhibits a material presence that can dismantle plans, rituals, conversations, or even entirely abstract views of nature. As Tarkovsky himself writes, “to speak of the infinite, (the artist) shows the finite,” inscribing not only the materiality of cinema but of the earth with a beauty that allows it to exceed its material constraints. Tarkovsky adds “I should like to hope that (my film) has never been a flat illustration of what was happening on the screen (but instead) felt as a kind of emotional aura around the objects shown.” The aura, it seems, is contingent to the physical representation, to the object, to touching the ground and being confronted with a tactility that sublimates abstraction to a pervasive physicality. Tarkovsky here tethers the quotidian with the sublime, discovering a beguiling, teeming universe in the pause between the fence and the floor. Accepting nature’s wonder physically, being receptive to its mysteries, engenders rumination emotionally, intellectually, mentally.

Tarkovsky’s universe, then, is less transcendental than celestial. When the man stops to turn around to feel his ear for blood, whatever fazes him is temporary, yet as he walks further, a breeze begins to blow toward past him and toward the viewer, the tall grass almost toppling over in the breeze. The breeze seems to ask him to stop and notice his wound even longer, a prophetic shiver of disquietingly apparitional sentience. The film seems to make a claim on us. Because we view the man as the gust emanates toward the lens, nature’s relation to the characters seems ancillary to nature’s demands on the film audience, an earthly purgative demanding a kind of perspectival piety: acknowledge nature’s danger, feel its force, recognize its fluctuating energies, rather than simply pontificating abstractly about its beauty. Throughout this scene, which is balanced by echoing images of the man wandering up and leaving, the focal point shifts from nature subsuming the man (when he walks up initially, he is diminutive in the frame) to a conversation between the two people to nature reasserting itself. This shift is visually enacted in the focus of the lens shifting, racking focus between the characters and the natural world. When we cut back to the woman after the man leaves, nature is again out of focus, but her unmoving visage confronts the semi-abstract nature glimmering in the backward, as if an indeterminate half-presence vying for attention. Nature clarifies as a fully-formed, in-focus self before dissipating into an amorphous, suggestive, liquid truth within the same scene, exalting the porous over the congealed. In writing, Tarkovsky argues against a kind of artistic abstraction, framing “the painter’s sickly allegorical tendentiousness hanging over the form” as a kind of blasphemous pall “overshadowing all the purely painterly qualities of the picture.” Yet he is obviously indebted to a consideration of reality that exceeds mere depiction, as evidenced by the diaphanous lensing that does mutate the façade of nature by channeling it through an artistic prism. This early scene, the fallibility of the man falling onto the ground so that he may enlighten his mind, provides an avenue for reconciling the contradictions in Tarkovsky’s writing, of articulating the transcendent in the particular.

Much as with the wind, the film’s relationship to the other elements – fire and water most overtly, but also the material reality of the film screen itself – are similarly multivalent, paradoxically physical and metaphysical. In the middle of a famous long take around a house that eventually threads us toward a billowing fire, the camera pans to a mirror reflecting an open doorframe abstracted slightly through the warping glass. The lens then focuses – we confront space actively, temporally, processually. The camera pans 180 degrees to follow another child walking away from the mirror toward the doorframe, only for the camera to follow him outside to reveal the fire in unmediated earnestness. Seeing the doorframe through a mirror might suggest that the mirror presents an image of a world that can be entered– through the door, an outside world with access to nature – but one that is merely a reflection/mirage of that world still withheld from us. This reverberates with both the notion of memory (the film depicts memories of the past, accessible but never completely so) and cinema (a mediated reflection of the world that can perceive, but is not, the world). Tarkovsky himself writes “breaking off contact with fact and with time … makes for preciousness,” seemingly precluding symbols/metaphors/etc as affectation, but he is obviously willing to invite interior readings that extrapolate beyond the visible world: “what you see in the frame … is a pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity.” This is a vision of eternity that is also inextricably perceptual, visual, tactile, spontaneously arising like so many other potentialities from the indeterminacy of viewing the materiality being confronted.

When the famous long take discovers a fire wreaking havoc on the family’s barn, the family between the camera and the fire are stilled, as if in awe, aware of nature’s power, while the camera is placed underneath overhead wood beams, as if hiding while water drips down in front of it, the elements in conversation. The fire is framed, glimpsed with the black borders of the wood as if looking into an otherworld that is only a few feet away from us. What matters is not how it started, rationally, but its presence, its indeterminacy. While this fire is more concrete than the ghostly red glimmers reflected by the mirror a few seconds before, the echoing of the doorframe and the mirror frame still suggests that this is but a filmic perspective of fire, not fire that the audience is confronting in the flesh. Contrarily, it also suggests that fire in the flesh is not something often confronted directly – its mystique is that it is often untouchable without harm, only viewable – so fire contained in a frame/mirror is somewhat accurate to the reality of the untamed beast that is fire. That we cannot easily experience it in all its earthen glory is paradoxically conditioned on its earthen properties, so it cannot only be read as tactile presence or metaphysical symbol permissive of interpretation. The two, mutually, mesmerizingly, define each other.

Soon enough, we watch the woman from the opening walk to a well as if to acquire water to extinguish the flame, but instead she drinks it and washes her face, replenished by a nature not as a passive recipient to the world but a dynamic participant with it. While nature is imagined as a thoroughly violating entity, there is something about the clarification of formerly invisible forces in Tarkovsky’s universe that is not a stressful distortion of material or psychic faculties but a kind of redemptive reprieve from the impulse to control an ecosystem. Within the shot, Tarkovsky tethers nature’s restorative and life-affirming qualities and a destructive capacity that is beautiful and oddly pacifying. The characters watch in stillness, taking in the sight of the fire and accepting nature, rather than attempting to still it through the open thrust of physical confrontation. When we cut to a woman wetting her hair, the camera tracks back as water emanates from the ceiling echoing the water dripping off her hair, the ceiling caving in, again questioning whether water has any one intrinsic meaning, whether it can be exclusively equated with nourishment and contrasted to fire’s destructive capabilities. Multiple constellations of meaning emerge, from water’s cleansing, life-affirming valences to its potential to overtake and drown, but the liquidity of migratory significances that do not coagulate seems the most important point. If “the poetics of cinema, … material substances such as we tread every day, is resistant to symbolism,” as Tarkovsky writes, the water inveigles symbolism insofar as it refuses to be defined purely as one symbol, inviting a panoply of interpretations but demanding none. Nature in Tarkovsky’s cinema wanders a more errant path than we want it to.

Tarkovsky’s cinema thus puts the material contingencies of the world in dialogue with the human mind not as an omnivorous realm of unrestrained, anything-goes interpretation but a flexible, discursive region with blurry borders between object and the image the mind draws of it, between seeing and thinking, propagating suggestive possibilities rather than doctrinal edicts. As the ceiling crumbles with the weight of the water, the camera pans to the left to reveal a mirror, the woman’s reflection now visible as she walks to the right. Again, she is abstracted partly by the mirror, water rushing down it and warping her countenance. Here, the water can be destructive – in that it disrupts her image in the mirror – or creative – in that it seems to mold the material of the mirror, itself molding the material of the woman’s image, to engender a new reality. But it is primarily, or more generally, active, motile, mutably unknowable and ultimately unplaceable. The two reflective surfaces (mirror, water) engage in a visual pas de deux while also warping one another. Subsisting on the idea that water is simply reflective alone will not do; one should instead observe the interactions of earthly materials, even catalyze these interactions so as to observe them, and divine multiple constellations of meaning from the volatile marriage. The physicality of the water – its amorphous ability to simultaneously, paradoxically, reflect and warp an image as well as its endless self-reconstitution and susceptibility to other forces – conditions an incalculable mass of imaginative possibilities, but it does not “equal” any one thing. Time, as everywhere in Tarkovsky, is also key here: the act of sitting with and observing fire/water rather than rapidly shuttling through edits preserves the possibility of migration in meaning within time, noticing fire and water flicker or drip and defy stability. If a series of cuts might “mark” each new shot with a new meaning, as some scholars (Tarkovsky included) accuse of Sergei Eisenstein, the long take invites meaning to shift without markers. Images become irreducible to a-temporal ideas linked linearly in a sequence; they must be felt out in the moment. The symbol, for Tarkovsky, is not a linear signifier so much as a site of paradox and contradiction where classical dichotomies corrode.

Speaking of which, Tarkovsky’s nominal contradictions – interested in observing reality and warping/creating it – manifest not only in in his treatment of the natural elements but the physicality of time itself. Much has been written – by no less an authority than Tarkovsky himself – on the durational movement of lived time in his films. Yet, at the same time, the film also intersperses these lengthy and durational moments discordantly and non-linearly. This warped time is immediately apparent soon after the dripping mirror when the image of the woman transforms into her elder self when she looks at a second mirror (suggesting film’s ability to rework one’s identity and mold or abolish time rather than simply observe it). The desire to exist within time, to acclimatize to time, is shot-through with fractures and ellipses in the temporal continuity of the film. The inability to locate durational time is not necessarily a failure for Tarkovsky though.  He does, after all, argue that great art “contradicts its own logical system,” ultimately reminding that art need not be hermetically sealed into any one conception of time, nor should “experiencing time” suggest only one way to engage this experience. Objectivity is not one cohesive view but a “diversity of personal interpretations,” through which “some sort of relatively objective assessment emerges.” Or rather, a total commitment to a certain view of time or nature would be insufficiently perceptive and ultimately incomplete; shaper perception arrives from being subjected to confronting contradiction, reconciling the irreconcilable. Tarkovsky writes “man correlates himself with the world, racked with longing to … become one with the ideal which lies outside him,” following that the unattainability of this “becoming” is the source of human creativity. One cannot completely connect to the world without changing the world, renewing it in a creative, subjective aspect, rendering it revisable and thus incomplete. Understanding is not a fixed destination with an endpoint, but a rebellion against endpoints. Searching for the absolute is to realize that the absolute is indeterminate, to aggravate the potential for an absolute altogether. Much like the water dripping over the mirror visually warping the image – establishing a space of perpetual transformation and transition between faux-stable visual states – time returns cinema to its liminal registers.  Tarkovskian transcendence, then, is not ultimately a question of mastery – rendering the fact of time, space, water, fire, et.c crystalline and transparent through laying out an illusion of complete accessibility. Instead, transcendence entails an appreciation of impermanence, of new interpretation gleamed not from objectivity but the ambiguity of every image’s, every concept’s, shadows, its state of constant restlessness, alterity, and porous permeability.

The question of symbolic status is but one manifestation of a much larger and more immanent question about the duality and multiplicity of interpretation Tarkovksy animates in his films and writing, opting less to pursue a dictatorial meaning than to invite possibilities that are crucially both observational and imaginative, material and abstract. The central mistake of a filmmaker – or possibly a person, for Tarkovsky – would not be to favor one or the other but to be bound to either, to not see one as the partner of the other. Tarkovsky writes “If time appears in cinema in the form of fact, the fact is given in the form of simple, direct observation” and, conversely, that through “the creative human spirit … man does not merely discover, but creates.” Through this potential paradox, “direct observation” of nature or time may not necessitate being trapped within nature and time so much as unlocking them as conduits for experimentation, finding the mystical texture of fire or the iridescent caliber of water. To the extent that all cinema can be seen in some form as emblematic of the tension between probing the world and extending or abstracting it, the ostensible contradictions in Tarkovksy’s film may illuminate not only concerns in Tarkovsky’s cinema but in all cinema, all art with one eye observing the world and one transforming it. Or, to quote Tarkovsky quoting Leo Tolstoy: “The artistic image cannot be one-sided: in order justly to be called truthful, it has to unite within itself dialectically contradictory phenomena.”

Materiality, for Tarkovsky, is not exclusively a tactile and visible object, a chair with corporeal limits and a demarcated self, nor is it a fundamental abstraction that can encompass everything. Much like Karl Marx himself, Tarkovsky returns us to the dialectic between materiality and meaning that exists not as an escape from material reality but as an expressive result of material reality, as a return to materiality in its deepest form. Materiality is, in fact, open to a fundamental dynamism of thought and interpretation that defeats and dissembles rigidity, unleashing the exultant powers of the mind and imagination working through the limits of a material world by and through materiality itself. Tarkovsky finds not only the materiality in the spiritual and incorporeal, but the incorporeality, the spiritually, the transcendence, in the material.  He imagines a world in which the seen and the unseen ultimately converge in harmonious, rapturous liberation, a world in which he might inherit the wind.

Score: 10/10