Andrei Tarkovsky's fourth feature film, Mirror, had a complex and difficult production history. The shooting script and film itself went through torturous changes, many of which were demanded by Goskino, the State Committee for Cinematography in the USSR. The project developed over ten years, but was always fundamentally concerned with memory and the traces of passing time. Mirror was partly inspired by Tarkovsky's own childhood memories, of a time spent in the countryside during wartime evacuation, and by the poetry of his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, which is recited in the film. Many of the film's scenes take place in a dacha (country house) that was rebuilt to mirror the dacha where Tarkovsky had spent time as a child. Tarkovsky's family photographs were used to recreate not only the house but also the clothes, poses, objects and lighting in Mirror.

Unlike Antonioni, Tarkovsky has not inspired criticism based upon an aesthetic of the ‘momentary’, but rather upon the passing of time in the long-take. This has largely been encouraged, it seems, by his own writing on film in his theoretical work Sculpting in Time, where he privileges duration and rhythm in film. According to Tarkovsky,