Mirror (1975) Waxes Poetic on the Criterion Collection

The Criterion Collection released Mirror to Blu-ray on July 6, 2021. Andrei Tarkovsky directed the film starring Margarita Terekhova, Filipp Yankovskiy, and Ignat Daniltsev.

‘Mirror’ Criterion Synopsis

A subtly ravishing passage through the halls of time and memory, this sublime reflection on twentieth-century Russian history by Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker) is as much a poem composed in images, or a hypnagogic hallucination, as it is a work of cinema. In a richly textured collage of varying film stocks and newsreel footage, the recollections of a dying poet flash before our eyes, his dreams mingling with scenes of childhood, wartime, and marriage, all imbued with the mystical power of a trance. Largely dismissed by Soviet critics on its release because of its elusive narrative structure, Mirror has since taken its place as one of the director’s most renowned and influential works, a stunning personal statement from an artist transmitting his innermost thoughts and feelings directly from psyche to screen.

Special Features

• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Andrei Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer, a 2019 documentary about the director by his son Andrei A. Tarkovsky
• The Dream in the Mirror, a new documentary by Louise Milne and Seán Martin
• New interview with composer Eduard Artemyev
• Islands: Georgy Rerberg, a 2007 documentary about the cinematographer
• Archival interviews with Tarkovsky and screenwriter Alexander Misharin
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by critic Carmen Gray and, for the Blu-ray, the 1968 film proposal and literary script by Tarkovsky and Misharin that they ultimately developed into

Mirror New cover design by Nessim Higson