Join Amazon Prime and get unlimited Free One-Day Delivery. Already a member? Sign in.

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
   
More Buying Choices
13 new from £6.92

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Mirror [DVD] [1974]
 
See larger image
 

Mirror [DVD] [1974]

DVD ~ Anatoly Solonitsyn
4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
RRP: £19.99
Price: £11.88 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £8.11 (41%)
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Want guaranteed delivery by Tuesday, July 7? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details
13 new from £6.92
Learn about Lovefilm
Amazon's choice for DVD rental.
With a 14 day FREE trial. Learn more

Frequently Bought Together

Mirror [DVD] [1974] + Stalker [DVD] [1979] + Solaris [DVD] [1972]
Total RRP: £67.97
Price For All Three: £28.84

Show availability and shipping details


What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Mirror [DVD] [1974]
73% buy the item featured on this page:
Mirror [DVD] [1974] 4.4 out of 5 stars (20)
£11.88
Stalker [DVD] [1979]
12% buy
Stalker [DVD] [1979] 4.4 out of 5 stars (38)
£7.98
Solaris [DVD] [1972]
9% buy
Solaris [DVD] [1972] 4.1 out of 5 stars (34)
£8.98
The Sacrifice [DVD] [1986]
3% buy
The Sacrifice [DVD] [1986] 3.8 out of 5 stars (15)
£14.58

Product details

  • Actors: Anatoly Solonitsyn, Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev
  • Directors: Andrei Tarkovsky
  • Format: Black & White, Colour, Full Screen, PAL
  • Language Russian
  • Subtitles: English
  • Region: All Regions
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: U
  • Studio: Artificial Eye
  • DVD Release Date: 29 Jul 2002
  • Run Time: 102 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B000069JC8
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 9,278 in DVD (See Bestsellers in DVD)

Reviews

DVD Description
DVD Specialist Features:

Interviews with composer Eduard Artemyev, scriptwriter Aleksandr Misharin, Grigory Yavlinsky
Documentaries "Memory" and on Anatloy Solinitsyn & Innokenty Smoktunovsky
Stills Gallery
Trailers

Colour and B&W
Russian with English subtitles
Picture Format: 4:3
Dolby Digital 5.1

Synopsis
With THE MIRROR, legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky crafts perhaps his most profound and compelling film. What started off for Tarkovsky as a planned series of interviews with his own mother evolved into a lyrical and complex circular meditation on love, loyalty, memory, and history. Time shifts and generations merge as a single extraordinary actress (Margarita Terekhova) plays the narrator's former wife as well as his mother. Tarkovsky's memories as well as those of his mother are intermingled as a dark, sumptuous, and dreamlike pre-World War II Russia is evoked, accompanied throughout by the voice of Tarkovsky's father reading his own elegiac poetry. The spectacle of nature and its ubiquitous and ever-shifting presence is captured by Tarkovsky's camera as if by magic--the family cabin nestled deep in the verdant woods, a barn on fire in the middle of a gentle rainstorm, a gigantic wind enveloping a man as he walks through a wheat field--all creating indelible images with deep if mysterious emotional resonance. As the timeline shifts between the narrator's generation and his mother's, newsreel footage of Russian wars, triumphs, and disasters are juxtaposed with imagined scenes from the past, present, and future, crafting a silently lucid cinematic panopticon of memory, history, and nature.

See all Reviews


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Stalker [DVD] [1979]

Stalker [DVD] [1979]

DVD ~ Anatoli Solonitsyn
4.4 out of 5 stars (38)  £7.98
Solaris [DVD] [1972]

Solaris [DVD] [1972]

DVD ~ Natalya Bondarchuk
4.1 out of 5 stars (34)  £8.98
The Sacrifice [DVD] [1986]

The Sacrifice [DVD] [1986]

DVD ~ Erland Josephson
3.8 out of 5 stars (15)  £14.58
Ivan's Childhood [1962] [DVD]

Ivan's Childhood [1962] [DVD]

DVD ~ Nikolai Burlyayev
4.4 out of 5 stars (9)  £19.59
Last Year In Marienbad [DVD] [1961]

Last Year In Marienbad [DVD] [1961]

DVD ~ Delphine Seyrig
4.0 out of 5 stars (10)  £5.87
Explore similar items

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
Check the boxes next to the tags you consider relevant or enter your own tags in the field below

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

 

Customer Reviews

20 Reviews
5 star:
 (12)
4 star:
 (6)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.4 out of 5 stars (20 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Images to invoke emotion., 4 Nov 2006
By Nathan Merchant (Northern Hemisphere) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This is definitely one of the best films I've seen by this director, and I'd just like to highlight one aspect of Tarkovsky's technique for those reviewers who found the film enjoyable but felt that the meaning of it went straight over their heads.

Tarkovsky doesn't use symbolism. He recognises that to attach symbolic meaning to what is seen limits it to only one interpretation - a representation of what is symbolised. Real world events don't have symbolic meaning in themselves, and so Tarkovsky uses pure images which invoke emotions in the viewer, as opposed to a framework of symbols which amount to some hidden meaning behind his films.

This is what makes his films such a joy to watch, all of the beautiful cinematography is there to be appreciated in itself. There is nothing superficial about this, quite the opposite. Tarkovsky's films are accessible to everyone (maybe he was a real communist!), not just aloof art house enthusiasts.

I would also highly recommend 'Stalker' to anyone who is getting into Tarkovsky.
Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Have a good look ..., 16 Aug 2002
The Mirror is one of the most accessible Tarkovsky's films. I can recommend viewers to start with this film before progressing to other Tarkovsky's oeuvre.

Many critics consider Mirror Tarkovsky's autobiography, but it is unquestionably more than that. The film has visual beauty, social pathos, thoughts on the role of Russia in the Western civilization, existential questions and a place for magic in everyday life. I would not like to give detailed examples here: viewing will be less interesting, and part of the wonder of the film is to find these and many other clues on one's own. If the viewer goes on to other Tarkovsky's output, he will be rewarded by many shots and purvasive themes that "travel" from one film to the next and thus constitute undeniable signature of this director.

One very important point I would like to discuss is Tarkovsky's views on Russia. Perhaps, these can be the least understood by Western viewer who enjoy the film while still loosing historical and philosiphical context of Tarkovsky's thinking. Tarkovsky followed Pushkin's contention that Russia played a historical role in the destiny of Western Civilization by stopping Tatar-Mongol aggression from reaching the Western Europe. While havindg stopped the aggression, Russia was broken under its force and had to develop its own unique way of life. In Tarkovsky's opinion, this unique role did not stop with and did not depend on the communist ideology prevailing in Russia at the time. This is a clue for a documentary part in the film where Russian soldiers try to hold a crowd of Maoist Chinese from crossing the Russian border. By the way, documentaries were used by Tarkovsky not as a modernist tool, but as an opportunity to express himself where other means would be disallowed by the USSR regime (this is a response to Mr. Tashiro comment on these documentaries). For example, there is another documentary episode that serves to express a nostalgic feeling for the foreign land (Spain in that case) by Spanish communist refugees to the USSR. Feelings like that were not allowed to be publicly expressed at the time, so documentary was a special tool. Having said all this, the film transcends its own idelology (if you find this ideology unpalatable).

I have certain sympathy with those viewers who would criticise Tarkovsky for somewhat didactic quality of his art. Tarkovsky's films are pushing its spiritual content as well as his view of good and wrong on the viewer directly and without subtlety. One thing to remember though is that his films (and Mirror is no exception) are a lot greater than the sum of ideological / philosophical parts.

Have a good look then...

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect, except for the translation, 31 Mar 2004
By A Customer
I've watched my VHS copy of 'Mirror' around ten times and thought I 'knew' the film well enough. But the DVD is a revelation. The different film stocks and treatments -- washed-out colour, sepia, black & white, newsreel -- and Tarkovsky's pared-down images come through crisper than ever.

The sound is the real bonus, though. 'Mirror' mightn't have been recorded in 5:1 surround, but the new audio track reveals a side of the film I didn't even know existed: a deep, almost physiological soundtrack of eerie music and painstakingly placed effects that heightens the oneiric atmosphere by several notches and which was totally lost on VHS. I know there was cross-pollination of ideas between Tarkovsky and Kubrick, and aurally 'Mirror' now appears as a more subtle, subliminal version of '2001'. Unfortunately the closing (opening!) chorus from Bach's St John Passion still sounds distorted; but even that has its charm.

So I now have even greater admiration for what was already the finest film ever made about childhood and memory. Tarkovsky plays and plays on a handful of heart-stoppingly beautiful images, the sort we all have from our earliest youth -- luminous, sublime, terrifying, warming, sad -- the ones we can neither let go of nor fathom. The sense of desperately clinging to something that has lost all meaning is also brilliantly transferred into a series of acerbic, yet necessarily (for the time) oblique political comments. It is probably the most aesthetic film I have ever seen, in the sense of pure consciousness delighting in itself. (Do I pass the Tarkovsky-Fan Waffle Test?)

The only minor quibble is the new translation, which was done by a Russian, seemingly with a Russian-English dictionary. I'm sure it's faithful to the original, but it is sometimes grammatically obtuse and frequently unidiomatic. I don't know why Artificial Eye couldn't reuse the translation on the VHS version. It may be more serious a problem for those who don't already know 'Mirror', but please don't let it put you off one of the most profound artistic experiences you could have on film or elsewhere.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A magnificent masterpiece
MIRROR- Tarkovsky (DVD)
A magnific masterpiece

Mirror is my favorite film, the best one I have ever seen, the one I like more. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Nora Gluckmann

4.0 out of 5 stars transcendental
For some reason this film has a special and unique meaning for me, personally. It is not something that one could 'put one's finger on' and perhaps that is part of the wonder of... Read more
Published 9 months ago by spiritus

4.0 out of 5 stars Mirror on DVD
The DVD from Artificial Eye has, I think, a good transfer. I watched it on a projector and it was no problem. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Markus Gossas

1.0 out of 5 stars Self-indulgent and unbelievably boring.
I bought this film, having read the glowing reviews, for my Russian wife and her parents to watch and also because I have a particular interest in the soviet culture and people,... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Honest John

5.0 out of 5 stars dream pinnacle of image making
mirror is beyond anything you have ever seen. in it tarkovsky breaks all the rules of filmaking including some no one even suspected existed and fashions a baffling,... Read more
Published 19 months ago by S. Egan

3.0 out of 5 stars This is a very difficult film
The glowing reviews of The Mirror encouraged me to see this film but I found it way above my head. It is beautifully photographed and acted but there in no linearity or... Read more
Published on 6 Aug 2006 by Dr. R. G. Bullock

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply a Devine Masterpiece of Poetry in Cinema
Once said by Tarkovsky to be closest to his own vision of cinema Mirror is a loosely autobiographical reconstruction of key scenes in Tarkovsky's life with her mother's voice... Read more
Published on 4 Jun 2006 by Dara Dehghan

4.0 out of 5 stars intriguing and beautiful
This film was utterly surreal and I felt that it was working on a totally different level which I couldn't comprehend. Read more
Published on 28 April 2006 by Autumn Child

4.0 out of 5 stars Stylised , idealised childhood memories
"Mirror" is a film that probably requires several viewings to appreciate it properly. It is an autobiographical film with a non-linear narrative, based mainly on the... Read more
Published on 31 Dec 2005 by L. Davidson

5.0 out of 5 stars public health warning
ought to be called 'dream' because once seen never forgotten, it enters the subconscious like a warm flood and stays forever
wholly and stunningly beautiful and seen... Read more
Published on 8 Dec 2005 by H. Thompson

Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

 Beta (What's this?)
This product's forum (0 discussions)
  Discussion Replies Latest Post
  No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
  [Cancel]


Active discussions in related forums
   
Related forums
  • drama  (107 discussions)


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Look for similar items by subject






i.e., each product must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...

Feedback


The Body Shop

The Body Shop - Vitamin C Skin Boost
Protect and boost your glow with The Body Shop Vitamin C Skin Boost.

Shop The Body Shop

 

Make A Wish

Get what you want with an Amazon.co.uk Wish List Make sure you always get what you want with an Amazon.co.uk Wish List.

More info on Wish Lists

 

Up to 50% off Dental Care

Braun Oral-B Professional Care 6000 Rechargeable Toothbrush - Pack of 2
Put a sparkle in your smile with up to 50% off selected Oral-B and Philips rechargeable toothbrushes.

Up to 50% off power toothbrushes

 

Treat Someone

Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificates--available in any amount from £5 to £500 With an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate, you can get them what they want (even if you don't know what that is).

Learn more about Gift Certificates

 
Ad

Where's My Stuff?

Delivery and Returns

Need Help?

Your Recent History

  (What's this?)
You have no recently viewed items or searches.

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.

Look to the right column to find helpful suggestions for your shopping session.

Continue Shopping: Top Sellers

amazon.co.uk Amazon Home
International Sites:  United States  |  Germany  |  France  |  Japan  |  Canada  |  China
Business Programs: Sell on Amazon  |  Fulfilment by Amazon  |  Join Associates  |  Join Advantage
Customer Service  |  Help  |  View Basket  |  Your Account
About Amazon.co.uk  |  Careers at Amazon
Conditions of Use & Sale |  Privacy Notice  © 1996-2009, Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates