(01:16:01-01:17:47) the screen suddenly changes from black-and-white to color by showing the mother, a focal image, walking into the dacha where she tenderly talks to the child Alexei, and then gracefully ambles outside the dacha. The warm color screen, whose lucidity increases visuospatial reality navigating time through the space of nostalgic childhood with the conscientious effort, is accompanied by the middle-aged Alexei’s voice-over which recounts,

I keep seeing one and the same dream. It seems to make me return to the place, poignantly dear to my heart. . . . Each time I try to enter it, something prevents me from doing that. I see this dream again and again. And when I see those walls made of logs and the dark entrance, even in my dream I become aware that I’m only dreaming it. And the overwhelming joy is clouded by anticipation of awakening.

Before the voice-over says, “Each time I try to enter it, something prevents me from doing that,” the child Alexei immediately conceals a broken mirror from his mother’s sight. The hiding gesture implies that the “broken mirror” is a symbolic topos that underscores the narrative of the film to reveal the child’s Oedipal anxiety suppressed from his deepest affection and remorse for his mother. What we have perceived from the speech is the narrator’s repeated obsession with his dream of childhood, the primary cause of which is linked to a strengthening bond with the mother, an angel guarding the family without the paternal support. The symbolic “broken mirror” brings to light a disrupted complex of dream narrative that contributes to decode the child Alexei’s self formation attached to his mother’s recognition.

the mirror (1975) dir. tarkovsky

Columbus before the Queen, Emanuel Leutze, 1843

Rituals