Title of the film: The Mirror (Zerkalo / Зеркало)
Year : 1975
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Country: USSR (Mosfilm)
Cinematographer: Gueorgui Rerberg (replaced Vadim Youssov, Tarkovsky's regular collaborator, who withdrew due to "artistic differences")
Art direction: Nikolai Dvigbsky
Music: Édouard Artemiev
Editing: Lioudmila Feiguinova
Cameras: ARRI, Mitchell BNCR
Format: 35mm, alternating color / black and white / sepia
Film duration: 108 minutes
Set design: an exact reconstruction of Tarkovsky's childhood dacha, based on photographs and memories
The dacha. End of the day. Maria (Margarita Terekhova) walks toward the house, an old wooden izba, an exact replica of the one where Tarkovsky grew up. The camera follows her slowly, then stops under the porch awning. Drops of water fall from a beam. The camera lingers on these drops for a moment, not long, just long enough for you to hear them, for time to settle. Then it begins to move. It moves through the dark interior of the house. Bottles fall from a shelf. The camera doesn't rush toward the source of the noise; it drifts, floats, as if searching for something without knowing what. And suddenly, in the reflection of a mirror hanging on the wall, a blurry image appears. Orange and yellow. Flames. The barn outside is on fire. The camera completes its movement outward: Maria, her two children, and a neighbor stand in the frame, small, helpless figures, between the well (the water) and the barn (the fire). The shot ends there. The barn is burning. Nobody can do anything.
Why this scene is iconic
Tarkovsky doesn't show you a fire. He makes you experience the time it takes for a memory to resurface. The scene begins with drops of water, moves through a house in the twilight, discovers the fire by accident in a mirror's reflection, and ends with three figures standing before a blaze. Each stage of the camera movement replicates the mechanics of memory: first a sensory detail (the water, the sound), then a drift without apparent direction, then the brutal revelation, the memory surging forth, intact, burning. The fire doesn't arrive in a dramatic cut. It appears blurred in a mirror. You sense it before you see it. And when the camera finally leaves the house and shows it to you in full frame, the shock is twofold: the shock of the fire, and the shock of understanding that all this camera movement—the drops, the bottles, the mirror—mimicking the very process by which a man, forty years later, remembers the night the barn burned down.
How they filmed it
Technical information about the filming of The Mirror is scarce; Tarkovsky spoke of a philosophy of time, not of dolly tracks. What we know comes mainly from his book Sculpting in Time and the supplements in the Criterion edition.
Georgy Rerberg replaced Vadim Yusov, the cinematographer on all of Tarkovsky's previous films (Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris). Yusov withdrew due to creative differences, suggesting that Tarkovsky's vision for The Mirror was so radical that it exceeded the bounds of their earlier collaboration. The Criterion Channel includes a television documentary about Rerberg that sheds light on his working methods.
The dacha, the wooden house where much of the film takes place, was entirely reconstructed from photographs and memories of Tarkovsky's childhood home. It's not a studio set: it's a physical replica, built outdoors, with the same dimensions, the same corners, the same textures as the original. Tarkovsky wanted the camera to be able to move within a real space, not a simulated one. The burning barn is a real barn that is actually burning; there are no special effects, no post-production. The fire is filmed live.
The scene's composition relies on depth of field. The final image, with Maria and the children in the foreground and the burning barn in the background, is a shot with total depth of field, where three planes of action coexist: the water droplets (foreground), the characters (medium shot), and the burning barn (background). Water and fire are within the same frame. Tarkovsky systematically places his characters between these two elements; in the following shot, Maria sits on the well's edge (water) facing the barn (fire), washing her face. The duality of water and fire is the visual obsession of The Mirror, and indeed of all of Tarkovsky's films: it reappears in Stalker, Nostalghia, and The Sacrifice, where another house burns in an even longer tracking shot.
Editing the film was a nightmare. Tarkovsky struggled for months to find a structure, fearing the film would never hold together. The final version runs to 108 minutes, the shortest of his entire feature filmography. The film alternates between color (childhood memories), black and white (scenes of the Stalinist Terror, such as the printing press sequence), and sepia (archival footage). These stock changes are not indicated; they sometimes occur within the same sequence, as if memory itself were changing texture.
What to observe when reviewing it
The raindrops under the awning (beginning of the shot) Before the fire, there is water. Tarkovsky almost always begins his long takes with a natural element: water, wind, changing light. These seconds of waiting are not filler. It is the time it takes for memory to begin.
The mirror in the house (~in the middle of the shot) The burning barn first appears as a blurry reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall. The image is orange, indistinct, almost abstract. For a second or two, you don't know what you're looking at. Then the focus shifts and you understand. This is the central device of the film: everything is seen through reflection, indirectly, indirectly.
The final composition: water / figures / fire. Maria and the children are at the center of the frame, between the well and the barn. The water is in front of them, the fire is behind. They are caught between the two fundamental elements of Tarkovsky's cinema. It's not a shot, it's a painting.
Did you know that?
Christopher Nolan cited The Mirror as a direct influence on the cinematography of Oppenheimer (2023), a film that also deals with memory, guilt, and fire. Tarkovsky rebuilt his childhood home for that film, then burned it down on camera. Eleven years later, in The Sacrifice (1986), his last film, he would do exactly the same thing: build a house and burn it down in a six-minute, uncut take. As if the burning house were the central motif of his entire filmmaking career, the memory he couldn't stop returning.
The Mirror is the most intimate film in this collection and the furthest removed from the usual notion of a "spectacular long take." Where Goodfellas dazzles you and Children of Men terrifies you, The Mirror hypnotizes you. Rerberg's camera doesn't follow a character, doesn't traverse a spectacular setting, doesn't defy physics. It drifts through a house like a ghost, and that's precisely what it is. The film is seen through the eyes of a dying man (Alexei, never shown as an adult) who remembers his mother, his childhood, the wind in the buckwheat fields. The camera is his memory. The long take is the time it takes for a memory to form.
This approach places The Mirror within a lineage that runs throughout the collection: Profession: Reporter (1975) , the camera that abandons the dying; Son of Saul (2015) , the camera that refuses to leave the living; Code Unknown (2000) , the camera that observes without judging; The Mirror, the camera that remembers.
Sources
Andrei Tarkovsky - Sculpting in Time (1986)
Cineaste Magazine - review of the Criterion edition of The Mirror (2021)
Senses of Cinema - "Mirror (1975)" (analysis, 2017)
Offscreen - "A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky's Theory of Time-Pressure" (wind and barn analysis)
Taste of Cinema - "The 10 Best Scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky Films"
Classic Art Films - "Mirror, The (1975)"
Immanent Terrain - "The Mirror, Time and the Crystal-Image" (analysis of the burning barn)
This Week in New York - "Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: The Mirror"
Wikipedia - Mirror (1975 film)
ShotOnWhat - The Mirror (1975), technical specifications
Criterion Collection - Blu-ray special edition (documentary on Rerberg, Misharin interview)
Also read:
Solaris (1972) sequence shot https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/solaris - The other Tarkovsky in the collection: the same camera drifting in a space haunted by memory, the same duality of water and light, but in a space station rather than a dacha
The long take and viewer psychology https://www.plan-sequences.com/blog-plan-sequences/plan-sequence-psychologie-spectateur - Why a camera drifting without apparent direction reproduces the mechanics of memory better than any classically edited flashback
