"To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind; so to understand the
possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to
construct such representations."
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p3
In this establishing scene from The Mirror, Tarkovsky exposes his main concerns not in a didactic fashion but in a gentle aesthetic pan of the elements which occupy his own particular existence in this world; his mother, his homeland, his literary forebears (Chekhov's story 'Ward No.6' has as its main character the doctor Rabin, whose fate is sealed by his apathetic acceptance of reality. This over-intellectualization of reality allows him to rationalize his own inaction), and his absent father whose voice and poetic words underscore the second half of the sequence.
Tarkovsky's use of polaroid photography at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s (see further at Polaroids of Andrei Tarkovsky) offer a distillation of his meditations on the relationship between physical world and metaphysical reality. They are microcosmic in their physical composition and they offer further evidence in their careful staging of Tarkovsky's greater concerns.
