Tillich and Tarkovsky

Tillich’s Typology of Anxiety

To demonstrate how Mirror can be read as a thorough investigation of the nature of anxiety, it will be necessary to first briefly provide a theoretical account of anxiety. I provide such an account by drawing on the work of existential theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich.

In his book The Courage to Be (1952/2000), Tillich defined anxiety as a state involving two primary qualities: (a) the individual becomes aware of her potential “non-being” and (b) the individual experiences fear but lacks a concrete object on which to focus her fear. The first quality of anxiety implies that the individual has become aware of the potential for her “being”—understood by Tillich to be her sense of personal existence in reality—to be lost or partly lost; in short, for her personal existence to become decoupled from the external reality in which it is immersed. This means that for Tillich, all anxiety is ultimately grounded in the individual’s awareness of her impending mortality. All temporary losses of self in experiences of partial nonbeing would not be threatening in the absence of the guaranteed total and irreversible state of nonbeing we all approach.

The second quality of anxiety implies that, as the emotional experience of anxiety begins, it initially launches the individual into a state of cognitive confusion. In a true state of fear, the individual appraises a concrete object in the world that induces terror and revulsion. The individual acts in response to this object, and typically is immediately aware of how she should respond to it (for instance, by fleeing the scene). In contrast, in a state of anxiety, the individual experiences the sudden possibility of nonbeing, manifest as a surge of emotion, but struggles—at first in vain—to find an object to which she can attach the emotion. According to Tillich, all anxiety strives to become fear; the normative individual cannot bear to remain in a state of objectless anxiety for long. Thus, an initial state of anxiety, if it does not dissipate or fade as a result of some change in the individual’s immediate circumstances, will eventually become concretized and attached to some object. The individual will find a reason for her anxiety; her potential nonbeing, her awareness of death, will be projected onto an object.

For Tillich, there are three primary types of anxiety, each of which threatens a particular aspect of an individual’s consciousness with its own potential nonbeing or negation. The individual’s understanding of reality as meaningful is threatened by the anxiety of emptiness, which, when concretized into an object of fear, is experienced as meaninglessness. Emptiness is experienced as a sense of doubt about the significance, purpose, or validity of one’s endeavors and beliefs about reality. If sustained, this doubt transforms itself into a despairing sense of meaninglessness, a feeling that the world is chaotic and human endeavors are pointless. The individual’s understanding of herself as a person of value is threatened by the anxiety of guilt, which, when concretized into an object of fear, is experienced as condemnation. Guilt is experienced as a sense that the person’s actions may have fallen short of her internalized standards or rules of conduct, or her goals for herself. If sustained in the absence of contradicting evidence, this state of apprehension will turn into a condemnation of the self, a judgment of the self as lacking in value.

The anxieties of emptiness and guilt are grounded in the ultimate, third type: the anxiety of fate, which, when concretized into an object of fear, is experienced as the primary terror of death. Although for Tillich the awareness of death lurks behind and gives emotional power to all anxiety, personal experiences of emptiness and guilt can seem removed from the threat of death in the consciousness of the individual. But at times the individual encounters the fear of death directly, when she contemplates the arbitrariness and contingency of all human existence (which Tillich calls “fate”). Each individual is born at a particular time and place, and accidents of history and birth contribute a great deal to the shape of our personalities and the course of our lives. Our lives, seemingly so significant and purposeful, could just as well have happened very differently; there is no ultimate determining purpose to the course of our lives. Contemplating the contingent—meaning the haphazard or “illogical”—nature of human life can open a void for the individual to focused awareness of the reality that, ultimately, life is a futile process, bound to end.

I believe that the first three quarters of Mirror can be interpreted as a series of sequences in which an initial state of anxiety experienced on the part of one or more of its characters (a state that generates a corresponding feeling of confusion and perhaps even a kind of mild anxiety in its audience) is eventually resolved through the presentation of a concrete object of fear. The anxiety of emptiness gives way to a cinematic depiction of ultimate meaninglessness; a state of guilt anxiety is resolved in an act of condemnation; and a meditation on the contingency of human fate is followed by a meditation on the fact of death. Furthermore, the transition from objectless anxiety to the concrete fear-object is heralded in each instance by the appearance of an event or figure symbolizing mortality. This suggests an intuitive understanding on Tarkovsky’s part of Tillich’s assertion that awareness of death (“ultimate nonbeing”) lies in the back of all anxiety.

These transitions in the film’s content from a temporary, objectless emotional tenor of vague anxiety to the presentation of a focal, threatening object are “mirrored” by the reactions of the audience. As each new emotional sequence in the film ushers in a new state of vague anxiety—often associated with a drastic and unexplained shift in the narrative’s setting, and even occasionally with an unorthodox shift in the type of film being used (black-and-white, stock footage)—the audience flounders in an attempt to keep pace with Tarkovsky’s meaning. Just as the characters in the film search (perhaps subconsciously) for concrete objects on which to focus their anxiety, the viewer searches for some kind of clear emotional meaning in the portentous atmosphere of each transition to a new setting and type of depicted anxiety. As the initial tone of anxiety is channeled into an object of fear, the viewer is given a means by which to interpret what she has been seeing and feeling; she is suddenly justified in her sense of unease about the jarring nature of the film’s transitions and depicted events. In effect, a series of small emotional climaxes throughout the film keeps the viewer anchored in a narrative that is otherwise characterized by the very hallmarks of anxiety: objectless, ambiguous, disorienting, and colored often by the shadow of death.

Experiences of Anxiety in Mirror

The present reading of the film divides Mirror into four main parts. Each of the first three parts of the film examines a different aspect of anxiety as discussed by Tillich. The fourth part does not dwell on anxiety but rather adopts a somewhat more hopeful tone, illustrating the sources of what Tillich calls the “courage to be”: the mental and spiritual capacity to continue living, despite an awareness of the possibility of nonbeing and the ubiquity of existential threats.

In the first part of Mirror, the narrator’s mother is approached by a stranger who is intended to be at first mistaken for the mother’s absent husband (an interpretation encouraged by the opening comments from the narrator about watching the road for his father). In reality, however, the traveling figure is only a wayward doctor who has “taken everything” in a suitcase but “forgotten the key.” The mother expresses doubt and skepticism about the intentions of this man, who, having revealed himself to be something other than what he appeared to be at first (her husband), continues to exude an aura of hidden intent, as if he is not to be trusted. In a passing remark, the mother compares him to a character from Chekhov’s short story “Ward No. 6,” a doctor who is driven to insanity.

For his own part, the doctor seems to care little about the mother’s suspicions of him. Instead, he is preoccupied by an existential soliloquy, into which he is literally propelled with the collapse of a fence on which he and the mother are sitting. This symbolic fall sends the doctor into a state of intense reflection, which ultimately leads him to express his doubts about the meaning of human behavior. In his monologue, the doctor compares humans, who are always “rushing around and speaking in platitudes,” to plants, which appear steadfast and content. According to the doctor, the problem with humans is that we “doubt” and make too much “haste.” After his monologue, the doctor quickly departs, abandoning his original plan to obtain a means of opening the enigmatic suitcase. As he walks back the way he came, Tarkovsky captures in a long shot an unexpected burst of powerful wind flooding the landscape. The image seems to hallow the doctor’s visit with a strange significance, and highlights the isolation of the doctor as a lone figure in a stretching country landscape, as well as the distance between the doctor and the mother.

This initial sequence captures the anxiety of emptiness on two levels. Within the narrative of the film, doubt about the doctor’s identity and intentions is escalated by his monologue into a general state of doubt about the meaning of human activity. With little expository preparation, the viewer is suddenly asked in the opening minutes of the film to question the general nature of social existence, and told furthermore that, as a human, she “doesn’t trust [her] inner nature.” This brings us to the second level on which the sequence attempts to capture the essence of this type of anxiety. It is not only the case that the characters in the scene (the doctor in particular) express a strong sense of doubt and potential anxiety; in addition, the audience members viewing the scene cannot help but feel a vague sense of unease and disorientation. The scene is strange and presented with almost no narrative background: in medias res, the viewer struggles to discover who these characters are, their relation to and intentions toward each other, and the significance of the doctor’s reflective remarks, as well as the remarkable, transitory gust of wind that coincides with his departure. Tarkovsky heightens the ambiguity of the scene by repeating the shot of the wind blowing immediately after it is first shown, a very unusual cinematic technique.

The tone of emptiness anxiety established by this scene carries through the following series of shots of the narrator’s childhood country home, accompanied as they are by a spoken poem (by Arseni Tarkovsky) about a youthful romance, which seemed at first to imbue all mundane objects with intense meaning but was nevertheless followed by “Fate . . . like a madman brandishing a razor.” In the next, transitional sequence, the threat of mortality makes an initial, subtle appearance in the film in the form of a burning home next door to the narrator’s house, in which, as an unidentified character shouts, someone may be “burning to death.” This brief appearance of the threat of mortality on screen heralds the concretization of the initial tone of emptiness anxiety in the film into a concrete object of fear, specifically the fear of meaninglessness. The doctor’s state of emptiness is elevated to the threat of meaninglessness in the first black-and-white dream sequence that follows the fire scene.

After the fire, we are presented with a hauntingly beautiful black-and-white image of the wilderness. This shot is followed by a sequence in which we first see the narrator’s father, who steps away from the camera to reveal the mother washing her hair in a basin. In an uncanny image, her hair hangs long and wet in front of her face, so that she is unrecognizable. Suddenly, the old country house begins to collapse from within, rain and pieces of masonry falling slowly to the ground. In this surreal dreamscape, the audience is left completely disoriented; the anxiety of emptiness in the scene with the traveler has become the concrete threat of a meaningless, chaotic world in which even one’s own mother appears as a terrifying apparition. At the conclusion of the scene, the first prominent shot of a mirror in the film displays a reflection of the young mother transfigured into an old woman (played by Tarkovsky’s own mother Maria). Mortality is seen to lurk behind the threat of meaninglessness.

We are temporarily relieved from the disorientation of this sequence by a return to the current reality of the narrator’s life. In a phone call with his mother, the narrator mentions the long-past fire and his father’s departure from the family home. His mother, in turn, informs him that Liza—a coworker from her days as an employee at a printing press—has passed away. The introduction by the mother of Liza’s character signals the beginning of the second part of Mirror.

After the phone conversation scene, the second major part of the film begins with a black-and-white image of the mother as a young woman rushing to her old place of work (a large printshop). Her disconcerted expression and frantic movements make it clear that the mother is distraught about something. Through snippets of dialogue exchanged with coworkers (and sometimes drowned out by the drone of printing machines in the background, which reinforces the confusion of the scene), it becomes evident that the mother is afraid she has made an error in the editing and censoring of a recently printed publication. The mother is seized by the anxiety of guilt—she is afraid that she may have committed a grave mistake.

After rushing through several rooms of the printing house, the mother obtains a copy of the publication in question and proceeds away from her superiors and coworkers down a long hall. She is followed by Liza, whom the audience knows to be recently deceased in the present time of the film’s emerging temporal narrative. In this second part of the film, Liza—resurrected in memory—is the symbol of mortality that will mark the transition from the scene’s initial uncertain state of guilt anxiety to its concretization in the form of the mother’s condemnation.

Specifically, after reaching another room at the end of the hall the mother sits down to read the publication and check for any sign of an irredeemable error on her part. Finding none, she begins to laugh and cry with relief. It appears that her guilt-related anxiety was groundless. However, no sooner does she begin to take comfort in this outcome than Liza begins to speak hostilely toward her. Unsure of her meaning at first, the mother asks Liza repeatedly to explain until the latter finally erupts in an unexpected tirade of condemnation of her behavior. She accuses the mother of being selfish, of being insincere, and of driving her husband away from her. The mother’s guilt anxiety is given concrete form as she is harshly (and, from the viewer’s perspective, seemingly without warrant) condemned by (mortal) Liza. The uncertain air of possible condemnation that followed the mother as tracking shots showed her frantic movements through the printing house is rendered tangible and released through Liza’s attack. After her condemnation of the mother, Liza’s symbolic connection to the ultimate threat of mortality is reinforced when she strangely quotes the opening line of Dante’s Inferno: “Passing life’s halfway mark, I lost my way in a dark wood.” Total nonbeing lends power to the anxiety of guilt just as it does to that of emptiness.

Having explored the anxieties of emptiness and guilt in the first two parts of the film, Tarkovsky turns almost immediately to an extended treatment of the most fundamental category of anxiety identified by Tillich: the anxiety of fate (or temporal–historical contingency) and death. We are momentarily confused as the actress who has been playing the mother now adopts the role of Natalia (the narrator’s ex-wife) in the “present time” of the narrative. But no sooner have we become accustomed to this blatant expectancy violation than we are launched into a sequence, unprecedented by what has occurred in the film so far, during which its content “opens up” into a wide sociohistorical dimension. In its first two parts, Mirror is a very personal film, and its only allusions to the broader world beyond the inner lives of its primary players remain within the national borders of Russia (characters quoting Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, for example). Its third part begins, however, with the sudden appearance of a string of Spanish characters who are apparently visiting the narrator but whose presence remains otherwise unexplained.

The Spanish men and women are dramatic characters who speak a foreign tongue and engage in flamboyant demonstrations of alternate cultural practices. Their preliminary incarnation of the cultural “Other” gives way to a mesmerizing sequence of edited historical footage, depicting bullfighting and what appear to be areas of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Here, Tarkovsky abandons all pretense of conventional narrative to immerse the viewer in the experience of fate anxiety. Images of worlds other than our own and the chaos inflicted by international conflict combine to generate a sense of unease about the major role played by accidents of history in shaping our lives. The sudden depth of the sense of time manifest in the film’s content imparts a feeling of historical insignificance in the viewer, and images of children who are presumably now old remind her that time is fleeting and whole cultural eras doomed to vanish, leaving perhaps little more than traces of their existence on celluloid.

This first montage of stock footage in the film is followed by one of its strangest sequences, one which further forces the viewer to contemplate the anxiety of fate. Back in “present time,” the narrator’s son Ignat is gripped by a sense of déjà vu—a cognitive experience of the arbitrariness and repetitive nature of circumstance and time. He is then asked by a bizarre older woman to read aloud a letter from Pushkin, in which the author struggles to come to grips with the overwhelming forces of history and embrace his cultural heritage. At the conclusion of the letter, Pushkin explicitly states that he would not trade his time and place for any other. It is the very contemplation of such an (im)possibility, according to Tillich, which generates the anxiety of fate.

At this point, the vague anxiety of fate that has been building in the film is set on a path toward emotional concretization in the form of a third symbolic appearance of mortality. The episode with Ignat is interrupted, first by the “accidental” arrival of the old woman (who can be understood to stand for the death of the mother) and then by a phone call from his father. In the course of the phone call, a story about love during wartime for a girl with chapped lips turns into a short episode about an (actually false) near-death experience, during which children training to be soldiers see their drill instructor throw himself onto what in the end is a dummy grenade. This confrontation with the possibility of personal death heralds the transition from the emotional tone of fate anxiety to its concretization in the form of death itself.

An image of the smiling red-haired girl with blood on her lips is followed by more stock footage, this time depicting a troop of soldiers attempting to ford a large river. ¹ Arseni Tarkovsky reads a poem about fear of death and the pursuit of immortality, which ends with the metaphor of life pulling us all forward like threads. At the poem’s conclusion, Tarkovsky presents the darkest footage in the film: disturbing images of tanks, gunfire, rockets, desperate people crying in trenches, and eventually a series of nuclear explosions. The anxiety of fate, which has accumulated since the sudden expansion of the film’s historical awareness, is now rendered concrete as the viewer stares at the ultimate fear-object: the collective death of humanity.

Thus, the first three parts of Mirror can be seen as meditations on each type of anxiety identified by Tillich. In each part, an initial state of objectless unease, corresponding to a particular species of anxiety experienced by the protagonists, and confusion on the part of the viewer, is concretized (after the appearance of a symbol of death) through the presentation of a clear fear-object, a justification for and means of interpreting the building state of anxiety. The doctor’s feeling of emptiness anxiety is concretized, after the fire, in the threat of meaninglessness implied by the dream of the uncanny mother. The mother’s anxiety about her possible guilt is concretized in her condemnation by Liza, whom the audience knows to be deceased. And a growing sense of fate anxiety, attached to images of foreign cultures and historical footage of times of upheaval, is concretized after an anecdotal near-death experience in symbols of collective mortality.

Mirror and the Courage to Be

In writing The Courage to Be, Tillich was not exclusively—or even primarily—interested in analyzing the experience of existential threat. Rather, he developed a typology of anxiety to illuminate the positive side of the human condition—how it is that, in spite of the imminence of nonbeing and the myriad threats we encounter, most individuals still find the “courage to be,” the strength to live each day and pursue their personal goals. Just as it would be inaccurate to characterize Tillich as only concerned with the threatening aspects of human life, so too would it be wrong to say that Mirror is only a film about the anxieties and terrors that plague us as individuals and collectivities. In his work, Tarkovsky also pays homage to those quiet reservoirs of psychological resilience that arm the individual in her struggle against the sources of nonbeing. Indeed, although the first three parts of Mirror may be read as explorations of the different faces of anxiety, the fourth and final portion of the film can be understood as a sustained meditation on the ideas and types of experiences that allow us to cope with the reality of existential threat.

Tillich (1952/2000) proposes that the individual’s primary wellspring of strength in the face of anxiety is what he calls absolute faith: an intellectual and experiential state characterized by conviction about the ultimate worth of being despite the ubiquitous threat of nonbeing. He asserts that the state of absolute faith has three essential components. Each element reaffirms meaning and life over and against meaninglessness, guilt, and mortality. The first component of absolute faith is “the experience of the power of being which is present even in the face of nonbeing.” In other words, even though persons may be beset by various anxieties, in a state of absolute faith they may still draw basic courage from a felt sense that their being remains intact, that their very ability to experience the possibility of nonbeing shows that they are in fact still in a state of being. This brings us to the second component of absolute faith, a more intellectual element consisting of the awareness of “the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience of being.” A person who understands that nothingness must be a threat to something is in a position to (at least intellectually) reaffirm the priority of being over nonbeing. The final component of absolute faith is the “acceptance of being accepted.” This is in fact the most important source of the “courage to be,” which Tillich (1952/2000) at one point defines as “the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable” (p. 164). This implies that absolute faith involves a conviction that, despite one’s imperfections and the possibility of self-condemnation, one is ultimately accepted, by life, by others, and finally by oneself.

As is clear, Tillich’s condition of absolute faith is an example of what Schneider (1999) called a “paradoxical state” of being. It is marked by both determination and critical questioning. The individual in a state of absolute faith acknowledges nonbeing and the self’s unacceptability, but nevertheless paradoxically affirms the priority of being and the self’s final acceptance. As a paradoxical state, absolute faith is difficult to demonstrate. The filmic image, with its multiple sensory elements and layers of potential meaning, is ideal for experientially transmitting this paradoxical concept. I will conclude this essay by discussing how the final part of Mirror contains three sequences that illustrate each of the three components of Tillich’s absolute faith.

After the stock footage sequence containing images of collective mortality and intergroup violence, we are immediately presented with what is perhaps the most significant straightforward narrative event in the film: the return from war of the father who has been alluded to from the first lines of monologue and whose absence in the narrator’s childhood has been continually emphasized. The narrator-as-child and his sister are playing in the woods when their father’s call brings them rushing back to the house, their expressions suggesting that they almost cannot believe what they have heard. As the children rush into the arms of their father, still in his wartime uniform, a curious piece of loud operatic music swells on the soundtrack. It is an excerpt from the St. Matthew Passion by Bach. Specifically, the vocalist is reciting (in German) lines 27:51-52 of Matthew: “And suddenly, the veil of the Sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom, the earth quaked, the rocks were split, the tombs opened and the bodies of many holy people rose from the dead.”

The fact that Tarkovsky presents this sequence immediately after the dark newsreel meditation on mortality, and accompanies it with these particular lines from the Passion, suggests that he is attempting to capture the first component of absolute faith: the power of being in the face of nonbeing. The father has miraculously emerged from the mass carnage and collective death captured in documentary footage only a few frames earlier. This is the essence of the religious symbolism of resurrection: the paradoxical notion that, despite ultimate nonbeing, being still forces itself onto the world. Despite overwhelming odds, the father has survived the war. For his children, this miracle is as much a sign of the power of being in its struggle against nonbeing as the story of Christ’s return from the grave.

A few scenes later, a pivotal sequence occurs which can be read as a brilliant commentary by Tarkovsky on the nature of human anxiety and, simultaneously, the second component of absolute faith. As mentioned in the earlier outline of Tillich’s theory of anxiety, anxiety is the awareness on the part of an existing being of the potential negation of her being, of potential nonbeing. An important corollary of this proposition is that anxiety is an inherent part of human self-awareness: because we can symbolically represent our own being to ourselves, we are aware of the possibility of our nonbeing.

Tarkovsky captures the dependence of anxiety on self-awareness in what is arguably the true climax of the film’s narrative, the memory sequence in which the narrator (as a child) sits alone in a room and stares into a mirror. He is so transfixed by his reflection that it is as if he is looking into a mirror for the first time. As he stares deeper into the mirror—symbolizing the growing self-awareness of the maturing child—we suddenly see images of fire and the red-haired girl, images which were connected to the threat of death at earlier points in the film. Then a lamp flickers and eventually burns out, leaving the narrator-as-child alone in a pitch black room. In this short poetic sequence, Tarkovsky finds an ideal metaphor for anxiety: a state born out of the self-awareness of a being, which allows her to glimpse her potential nonbeing. When the child sees himself for the first time, he also glimpses (in the fading of the lamplight) the possibility of his death.

This scene therefore embodies the second component of absolute faith, the dependence of nonbeing on being. Not only does being remain enigmatically powerful in spite of nonbeing, the person with the courage to be understands (as does Tarkovsky) that the potential for nonbeing is always defined by the prior existence of a being something. The significance of the dying lamp only exists in the mind of the narrator; and it is only his self-awareness that “reflects” the possibility of his nonbeing back to him. Self-aware (and thus human) being is inherently accompanied by anxiety, but this means that anxiety stems from and is dependent on being.

Having illustrated the first two elements of absolute faith—the power of being symbolized by the miraculous return of the father and the dependence of nonbeing on being symbolized by the mirror—Tarkovsky lays out, in the final sequences of the film, a series of ideas and images linked by the third and most important element: the acceptance of being accepted, despite unacceptability. A painful scene follows the incident with the mirror, in which the mother is humiliated by a well-to-do neighbor to whom she has come to ask for money but who forces her to slaughter a chicken. As the child and mother are walking home racked by the anxiety of guilt (for the mother’s slaughtering of an animal and for the relative inadequacy implied by their poverty), a final poem is read by Arseni Tarkovsky. The poem begins with a condemnation of the physical animality and mortal limits of the human form: “A man has one body . . . the soul is sick of this solid sheath . . . skin, a mass of scars, a skeleton’s robe.” But unexpectedly, after this harsh beginning, the tenor of the poem changes from unacceptability to acceptance of the limiting relationship of body to soul: “A bodyless soul is sinful/Like a body without a shirt/No intention, nothing gets done/No inspiration, never a line.” In these lines, the poet gives expression to Tillich’s (1952/2000) observation that “Being affirms itself against non-being . . . Non-being drives being out of its seclusion, it forces it to affirm itself dynamically” (p. 179). The body encases the soul and promises its death, but it should not be condemned because in limiting the soul the body is like a shirt, giving it shape and form. Similarly, Tarkovsky (1986) wrote of happiness not as an absolute, perfect end state, but as that which emerges in opposition to those states of anxiety and agitation which inspire in us the yearning for happiness.

As the poem shifts to a tone of acceptance of the body’s unacceptability, the simple poverty of the narrator’s family, which seemed an unacceptable source of humiliation during the visit to the neighbor’s house, is now portrayed in soft, idealized tones. In a series of dream images and memories, sheets hung out to dry billow in the light streaming through the house as the child holds a jar of milk. He then sees himself swimming in the water toward his family on the bank. The interior of the house is then shown flooded by peaceful morning light as the camera moves gracefully toward a window ledge, from which we see the family gathered outside. Despite the rural simplicity of his childhood, of the limiting facticity from which he has emerged, the narrator does not feel guilt or condemnation, but rather a warm, nostalgic acceptance of his childhood and its imperfect but beautiful memories.

In the penultimate scene, set once more in the present time of the film’s narrative, the narrator is bedridden with some illness. His aged mother and a friend are sitting near his bedside, conversing with the doctor. It becomes clear from their conversation that the doctor and the mother both believe that the narrator is suffering largely because of a felt burden of guilt (the friend asks, “Is he guilty of something?” to which the mother replies, “He thinks he is”). But the scene concludes on a note of paradoxical acceptance and serenity. Despite his apparent guilt anxiety, the narrator holds a small bird that has landed on his sickbed and releases it into the air, repeating peacefully, “Everything will be alright.” The emotional tenor of these final scenes captures the essence of the most important component of absolute faith. Despite all the imperfections and apparent unacceptability of our mortal bodies, our moral failures and unrealized dreams, we must know that we are accepted, by others and ultimately by ourselves, if we are to find the courage to be.

The film concludes with a sequence containing images of both the young and old mother. By the end of the film, it feels less as if the old mother is intended to symbolize mortality but rather immortality. The mother’s spiritual strength, and her persistence in Tarkovsky’s memory, ensures the timelessness of her essence. This interpretation is supported by remarks Tarkovsky made about his motivation in making the film: “I cannot come to terms with the fact that my mother will die, I cannot agree with this. I will protest and show that my mother is immortal” (quoted in Synessios, 2001, p. 17). The paradoxical juxtaposition of mortality and immortality is complemented by the last strains of music in the film, the opening movement from the St. John Passion, in which the chorus proclaims that Christ will “triumph even in the deepest humiliation.”

Conclusion

As Tillich observes, all anxiety strives to find an object, a concrete symbol of nonbeing against which being can assert itself and reaffirm its courage. Thus, the speech therapist in the prologue of Mirror focuses the stutterer’s tension and anxiety into his hands and fingers—a concrete object—and when he confronts this focalized anxiety, he is released from vocal paralysis and free to speak. Similarly, as noted by Synessios (2001), Tarkovsky’s original intention in making Mirror was to come to terms with troubling dreams and emotional demons that haunted him from his personal and cultural past. In various ways, Mirror concretizes, in an object of aesthetic contemplation, the diffuse anxiety we feel in connection with life’s instability and meaninglessness, with the guilt that burdens our memories, and with our fear of the future and our death. By immersing ourselves in this highly experiential film, we encounter our anxieties in a concentrated form and, if we are fortunate, feel our absolute faith renewed, and experience the release (however temporary) of the stutterer.