Mirror () is a 1975 Russian drama film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It is loosely autobiographical, unconventionally structured, and incorporates poems composed and read by the director's father, Arseny Tarkovsky. The film features Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Alla Demidova, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky's wife Larisa Tarkovskaya and his mother Maria Vishnyakova. Innokenty Smoktunovsky provides voiceover and Eduard Artemyev the incidental music and sound effects. Mirror is structured in the form of a nonlinear narrative, with its main concept dating back to 1964 and undergoing multiple scripted versions by Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Misharin. It unfolds around memories recalled by a dying poet of key moments in his life and in Soviet culture. The film combines contemporary scenes with childhood memories, dreams, and newsreel footage. Its cinematography slips between color, black-and-white, and sepia. The film's loose flow of oneiric images has been compared with the stream of consciousness technique associated with modernist literature. Mirror initially polarized critics and audiences, with many finding its narrative incomprehensible. Since its release, it has been reappraised as one of the greatest films of all time, as well as Tarkovsky's magnum opus. It has especially found favor with many Russians, for whom it remains their most beloved of Tarkovsky's works. Plot Structure and content Mirror depicts the thoughts, emotions and memories of Aleksei, or Alyosha (Ignat Daniltsev), and the world around him as a child, adolescent, and 40-year-old. The adult Aleksei is only briefly glimpsed, but is present as a voice-over in some scenes including substantial dialogue. The film's structure is discontinuous and nonchronological, without a conventional plot, and combines incidents, dreams, memories, and newsreel footage. The film switches among three different time frames: prewar (1935), wartime (1940s), and postwar (1960s or '70s). Mirror draws heavily on Tarkovsky's own childhood. Memories such as the evacuation from Moscow to the countryside during the war, a withdrawn father and his own mother, who worked as a proofreader at a printing press, feature prominently. Synopsis The film opens with Aleksei's adolescent son Ignat switching on a television and watching the examination of a man with a stutter by a physician who finally manages to make her patient say without disruption: "I can talk". After the opening titles, a scene is set in the countryside during prewar times in which Aleksei's mother Maria, also called Masha and Marusya, speaks with a doctor who chances to be passing by. The exterior and interior