Celebrating half a century of the life of the film, the course will examine Mirror not merely as a memoir on celluloid, but as the director’s rigorous artistic and creative effort to locate and restore his ground of life. By navigating the fluid boundaries between memories, dreams, reality, and history, participants will see how Tarkovsky uses cinematic contemplation to transform personal existence into a universal spiritual inquiry, especially in a time of heightened bureaucratic materialism of erstwhile USSR.
The course would delve into the creative evolution of the film, with the references of Tarkovsky’s own script and diary entries. This transition from raw memory to structured image and fluid sensations offers a rare window into the alchemy of Tarkovsky’s creative process, dissolving the boundaries between lived experience and cinematic form.
Ultimately, the course would underscore Tarkovsky’s belief that without memory, without yearning for the memory, without the conscious engagement with the traces of the lost time, human beings tend to lose their ground of ethical existence, making Mirror an essential human document for preservation of the possibility of ethical becoming of the self.
Auroville Film Institute 