Mirror

Sometimes seeing a film on the big screen, surprisingly, really does nothing to alter the sense one has gained of it through watching it on DVD. At other times it may be enjoyable and add something here and there but not really transform one's sense of a film. Watching Mirror today on a big screen at the BFI in London - a film I know well from DVD viewings - did not exactly transform my understanding of the film, but it was a profoundly different and revelatory experience. It wasn't the size of the screen as such (though that did accentuate certain things beautifully, like the cat early on, drinking away, happily oblivious to the salt the mischievous Alexei is pouring on its head; or the military instructor's headwound, pulsing in time to his loudly beating heart), but rather the gradations it made visible. These gradations, particularly in the colour segments, and particularly of focus, of light, and of hue, are all but invisible on the small screen. They created, not a sense of hyperrealism, but of simple, beautiful, corporeality. I really did want to reach out and touch somebody's face, or shoulder. Having the sound come from a single speaker behind the screen also bound the sound to the image more than can happen at home.
Other more local touches I spotted for the first time: the way the camera seems to pass, impossibly, through the wooden fence as it pans round the mother speaking to the passerby at the beginning; the apparent allusions to suspense or even horror cinema in the music at certain points (eg the ghostly appearance of the two women in the apartment), and in the images: the final shot of the mother before they leave the doctor's wife. It also seemed to me that inside the dacha, before we exit to watch the haybarn burn, a telephone can be heard faintly, preechoing the call from the mother that follows and suggesting the way sound can insinuate itself into a dream. But I may just have imagined this...
And this was a digital print, so although I have now finally seen Mirror on the big screen, I still have yet to see it on film...