On Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975) and whether films can legitimately be about the filmmaker's memory.

Mirror is Tarkovsky's most personal film and his most resistant to conventional description. It interleaves sequences from three different time periods — wartime, post-war, and present — with newsreel footage and passages that read as memory or dream rather than event. The central figure is a dying man, never seen on screen, whose voice we hear.

The film is based on Tarkovsky's own biography: the country house, the mother, the father who left (the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, whose work is read on the soundtrack). It is both a personal document and a meditation on whether cinema can capture the quality of memory rather than its content.

The answer Mirror arrives at is tentative but affirmative. Memory, the film suggests, is not a linear archive but a non-linear presence: the past is not over, it is weight that the present carries. The formal fragmentation of Mirror is not obscurity for its own sake — it's an honest representation of how the mind holds time.

This is a film that you grow into rather than understand on first encounter.