A game of mirror reflections. A surreal film with many metaphorical images. Fire - burning paper - wind that spreads ash. The figures are a man in an animal mask, a woman and a young man moving in slow motion relative to each other. A mirror reflecting light (and images of the pyramids with the Sphinx), transmitted from hand to hand.
You can interpret these images in different ways, but perhaps by comparing fire and mirror Derek Jarman wanted to show that like fire, as elements transforming matter from one state to another, the mirror is a vehicle from the real world to the imaginary (nature-art).
Starting with this film, Jarman returns to the image of the mirror again and again (Sebastien, looking at his reflection in the water - the plot-forming scene of Sebastien (1976), the mirror room in Jubilee (1977), Prospero and Ariel in front of the mirror in The Tempest (1979), the shield with the reflection of Perseus in Caravaggio (1986), etc.).
Figures in “The Art of Mirrors” – a man in an animal mask, a woman, a young man – directly refer to “The Testament of Orpheus” by Jean Cocteau (also a fan of mirrors), whose work, according to Jarman, he was fascinated.
The play of reflections illustrated by Derek Jarman in this film becomes a kind of author's signature in his subsequent works.