An Unsolved Problem
The real title is “A Problem I don’t know how to solve.” or maybe “An Unsolvable Problem”. The problem is somewhere in between an artists intentions and a viewers expectations. To explain, I need to spoil the film The Mirror by Tarkovsky.
I watched The Mirror with a friend of mine. We love to watch movies and analyze them, trying to figure out the subtler details as they go on. We turned on The Mirror not having any idea what it was, but I assumed it was a movie and so I expected it to have a narrative with some kind of plot that advances. The movie starts out with a gorgeous rural scene in rural Russia, with some details that suggest is in the earlier part of the 20th century, and a young woman who has 2 young children. Then a little bit later it cuts to a new place, an industrial area and it feels much later, maybe the later half of the 20th century. Except the same actress is there, just as young and still a mother with young kids, so I was confused. She did something which seemed to imply that she may have occasional hallucinations, so maybe the world we’re seeing isn’t what’s real? I wasn’t sure and neither was my friend. And the movie kept going like this. Scenes played out in ways that didn’t quite make sense. They felt vaguely similar to moments earlier but had too many incongruencies to be directly connected. We kept watching but only got more and more confused. The more we tried to understand, the less it made any sense at all. And by the end of the movie, I couldn’t decipher what had even happened throughout, even in the faintest of terms. And I was pretty annoyed.
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I went on Youtube to see if there were any explanations and found a video essay by someone who said he did his PhD on The Mirror and that in his opinion, the movie does not have a plot, at least not in any concrete sense. He sees the movie as more of a series of vignettes. But in my opinion, that can’t be quite right either because there are too many similarities from one scene to the next to see each of them as separate. Yet they aren’t really coherently connected either. Like many of Tarkovsky’s movies, it’s probably better not to try to hard to intellectually understand it, but to sit back and take it in emotionally or spiritually. That’s how he seems to make movies to me anyways.
But I had gotten pretty annoyed by watching this because the blatant weirdness like there being a young mother who is played by the same actress as some other young mother, separated by decades of time — it’s a strange thing to do in a film. I really don’t understand what the intention of The Mirror is. But my expectations are what made me annoyed. I thought it was a movie, and to me movies have a plot and characters which… progress forwards in some ways. If I hadn’t been so stuck trying to understand whats going on and whats the point, I think I could have enjoyed it more. I absolutely loved the cinematography. It’s a gorgeously shot film and if I had watched it as a series of interesting but only loosely related vignettes, I probably would have had fun. But I didn’t.
The problem here isn’t necessarily the artists or the viewers responsibility. It’s unclear to me if there even is a solution. But there is a problem. If your viewers come to your art expecting something, and your work just so happens to accidentally or unintentionally give them a bit of confirmation bias, they may not ever be able to let go of what they want your art to give them, and then they will be annoyed. :O
You can be ultra super careful about how you set up your arts intro, and carefully curate expectations with your marketing / presentation. But art is difficult to make. You can’t just tell people what’s the point at the beginning. So I don’t really know what can be done about this, or if its more the artist or the viewers fault when this problem happens. But it’s a problem. :)
