If it were necessary to single out one film from the filmography of Andrei Tarkovsky (Yurievets, 1932 – Paris, 1986) that encapsulates the filmmaker's principal qualities, that work would be The Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975). An autobiographical tale with a poetic tone, the film owes much of its relevance to the way it vividly evokes, in the eyes of very different types of viewers throughout the world, the profound emotion that a memory from the past stirred in its author. As one might imagine, The Mirror shares many aspects with the literary cycle In Search of Lost Time . Marcel Proust's magnum opus was always a touchstone for Tarkovsky and even served as a formal inspiration for this particular film. Back in 1977, discussing the evolution of the initial idea from which a film is born, Tarkovsky explained to his students—he was teaching an advanced course in cinematography in Moscow—that the origin of The Mirror lay in a recurring dream that had obsessed him for years. The director himself acknowledged that the film was born from a dream in which he returned, again and again, to his childhood home… and with it to the past that this old dacha seemed to hold within its walls.

The exhibition Andrei Tarkovsky and The Mirror: Study of a Dream seeks to explore one of the most complex creative processes imaginable: the endeavor to reach what has been lost in the past, a journey as desired as it is impossible. The project is based on an in-depth study of the documentary archives of the Andrei Tarkovsky International Institute in Florence related to The Mirror . Among these archives, which include production photographs, the filmmaker's notebooks, images, sketches, and manuscripts of all kinds, the analysis of a series of recently discovered recordings by the filmmaker stands out. These are the Andrei Tarkovsky Film Lessons , old sound recordings currently being studied by the exhibition's curator, José Manuel Mouriño , in collaboration with the Tarkovsky Institute and the Elías Querejeta Film School in San Sebastián.

Image: © Andrei Tarkovsky International Institute