Jeremy Millar, 'Time-Mirror'

Inspired by the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece, Stalker, this specially-commissioned work is a complex portrait across place extended across time and space. Much of Tarkovsky’s film concerns a strange region called the ‘Zone’ where people travel in order that their desires come true. Most of these sequences were shot just outside Tallinn, Estonia, in two disused hydroelectric power stations. Sound recordings taken at these locations are mixed with recordings made around Grain Power Station to create a new place, in which are located the voices of Estonian migrants in the UK who speak short extracts from the script of Stalker, thereby emphasising an important theme of the film: the sense of sacrifice inherent in travelling to a new place in the hope that one might better one’s life. The similarities between the ‘Zone’ and Grain — the power stations, the desolate landscape, even the military installations — mean that they act as ‘Time-Mirrors’ to one another, or perhaps, more appropriately in this context, as echoes; these are places that reverberate.

The title ‘Time-Mirror’ is the English translation of ‘Ajapeegel’, the title of an Estonian book on Tarkovsky found in a second-hand bookshop in Tallinn.

Commission / Biography