When Coetzee found himself ‘sobbing uncontrollably’ on reading
The Brothers Karamazov
he asked himself why he found himself ‘more and more vulnerable’ to those pages. It had nothing to do with ethics or politics and everything to do with ‘the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world.’
Back in the Zone Stalker said he might move there with his wife and child; now he tells his wife he won’t even go
there again. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. Or maybe the unbearable horrors of this world have proved more bearable than the promise and refuge of the Zone. She says she’ll go there with him.
49
After all, she reminds him, there are plenty of things she could wish for. Such as? That her husband wasn’t a Stalker for one. That he wasn’t so obsessed by this wretched Zone, that he would stop sleeping in his dirty sweater…you name it. There’s also the possibility that she has realized that the one thing worse than his sneaking off to the Zone every chance he gets is having him here, getting under her feet, moping around at home the whole time. But no, she can’t go there. Because she’s a woman? No. Because what if she went and it didn’t work for her either? A last straw,
too terrible even to contemplate clutching. He turns his head to sleep.
THE TRAIN WHISTLES
are blowing. Stalker’s wife walks towards the wall and then sits down, turns to the camera and takes a cigarette from her packet. A dreadful moment, this, for me. By lighting and smoking a cigarette she turns herself, instantly, into something hideous. That sheepskin coat, we realize now, must stink of cigarettes— and her hair. And it’s not just that: I hate all gestures associated with finding, lighting and smoking a cigarette.
Her family were against their marrying, she says. Everyone in the neighbourhood laughed at him. She has lit her cigarette and shakes the match to extinguish it. I hate that smell, the smell of an extinguished match, as much as I hate the smell of cigarette smoke and I also hate the sight—by the side of cookers without a self-ignition facility—of curled and blackened matches. Lots of creaking and groaning of timbers, and the usual drop and drip of a tap or a leak, all imparting a touch of the nautical to this homely scene. He was a Stalker, an eternal prisoner. She knew this about him, and about the kind of children Stalkers have. But still, when he said come with me she
went, like an apostle, and she’s never regretted it, not even with the pain and shame and sorrow.
Tarkovsky thought the wife’s expression of love and devotion was the ‘final miracle’, the heart of the film, its ultimate lesson: ‘namely that human love alone is— miraculously—proof against the blunt assertion that there is no hope for the world. This is our common, and incontrovertibly positive possession.’ Well, as Philip Larkin said on discovering that he was ‘too selfish, withdrawn and easily bored to love’: ‘useful to get that learned.’ As a lesson this—like so much in
Sculpting in Time
—fails to do justice to the revealed complexity of what takes place onscreen, but it does correspond with Olga Surkova’s assessment of Tarkovsky’s second wife, Larissa, as ‘a Russian angel standing guard over the persecuted Russian artist.’
50
At least that’s how things started out. Then Larissa came to believe she was ‘the fountain from which he drank’.
But of course in the film the wife is not married to a world-famous director, one of the most revered filmmakers ever to have shouted ‘Action’, she’s married to a Stalker whose pyjamas are his sweater.
Even with all the pain she has no regrets about the choice she made. In fact, it wouldn’t have been any better
without the pain because then there would not have been any happiness. Without the pain there wouldn’t have been any hope. Hmm. Except happiness trumps hope, at least in the short term. It’s not just that if you’re happy you have no need of hope. When you’re happy, hope, like all the other big questions—as Solonitsyn’s character, Sartorius, says in
Solaris
—becomes meaningless. It is possible, in parts of California particularly, to live a life devoid of hope (in what’s to come) and brim full of happiness (for what is here now). Elsewhere, hope has persistence and endurance on its side, is happy to stand around and wait—for things to get bad again, for happiness to pass. In terms of the Zone, Stalker may have been right about his wife; maybe it wouldn’t have worked for her there. She clings to hope and the Zone, he suspects, lets through those who’ve lost all hope. Life is shit. You put up with it. You hope even though you don’t believe in hope. People who’ve got over terrible things say they never gave up hope, never stopped hoping. But hope is a source of torment as well as an inspiration. Didn’t the Buddha counsel against hope? Wasn’t hope one of the torments of Samsara from which we had to free ourselves? Besides, the Zone—on the evidence of this excursion at least—is not a
place of hope so much as a place where hope turns in on itself, resigns itself to the way things are. To that extent she is there already, in the Zone.
MONKEY, IN PROFILE
and in colour, still wearing that autumnal gold-brown headscarf, reading. Reading in the way people used to read, before there were so many books that they became a bit of a nuisance and burden, before there was even an inkling of the Kindle. Smoke is drifting. Nice-looking smoke, incense. Floating blossom. The loud cheep and chirrup of birds: Zone sounds, Zone blossom. But also the railroad and dockside moan of horns—sounds that were nowhere to be heard in the Zone, the quietest place on earth. We are on the brink, here, of one of the all-redeeming moments of any art form. It can’t be isolated from what has gone before, it gathers into itself the whole film. But by ‘all-redeeming’ I don’t just mean in the context of
this
film. It redeems, makes up for, every pointless bit of gore, every wasted special effect, all the stupidity in every film made before or since. Oh well, you think, none of that matters, all of that is worth it, for this. As we have seen several times already in
Stalker,
there is nothing symbolic about what
occurs. The camera simply shows what is happening. It retreats down the table, past a glass half full of what looks like porter or some kind of Soviet Coca-Cola that has gone completely flat or probably started out that way. And a couple of empty, opaque glasses. Monkey lays down the book as if she has been memorizing what she was reading—which turns out, or so the voice-over would have us believe, to be a love poem by Fyodor Tyutchev.
51
There is the moan of transport outside. She bends her head and looks at the glass with the flat cola in it and, evidently in response to her thoughts, the glass begins to move down the table. The dog whimpers and whines, aware he is in the presence of something not normal, but it is nice to think that the dog is at ease with her, that she and the dog have each other for company.
52
She glances
at the dog, not unkindly, and the dog quietens down. It could be that she has zapped or silenced him with her telekinetic powers, but it seems more likely that he is reassured that nothing bad is happening here and can resume his nap or continue enjoying lying on the floor of his new home. She focuses her attention on the glasses once more. How was this done? Like doubting Thomas sticking his finger in the wound I want to know how this
miracle was achieved. With a magnet hidden by the cola while someone under the table dragged it along?
53
Next she moves a jam jar with something in it, just a couple of inches. Then the big tall empty glass.
54
She rests her head on the table, brings the glass right to the edge of the table before propelling it that extra, gravity-grabbing centimetre. It falls over the edge. In the story quoted earlier, Oë writes that ‘one of the glasses that’s moved to the edge of the table falls to the floor and breaks into pieces. Up to this point you saw the child’s face behind the glass, so now you see it better, and the expression on it appears to be savouring the sound of destruction.’
Except the glass doesn’t break. We don’t see it break and we don’t hear it break either. What we hear, in fact, is the glass
not
breaking. It hits the floor not with a smash and tinkle but a sturdy, almost indestructible crash. The claim that the child is ‘savouring’ the destruction—that, to judge by her eyes, she is ‘harbouring some kind of malevolent force’, that she might even be ‘the antichrist’ whose role is ‘to destroy everything’—is a further projection intended to confirm the initial misreading, or mishearing. These particulars aside, Oë’s reading of the scene is completely out of whack with the larger scheme of the film. Would he really have us believe that Stalker was rewarded for his faith by a daughter who was not only crippled but a malevolent, glass-smashing antichrist to
boot? Her telekinetic powers, surely, are a manifestation of unmeasurable compensation or consolation.
The thing in the jam jar, we can see now, is an eggshell or the remains of one, but at this late stage we are untroubled by any irritable straining after symbolic meaning and significance. There’s just a jar with an eggshell in it and Monkey’s head in that autumnal-gold scarf, resting on the table as if it’s a pillow. It’s impossible to say with any certainty what the look in her eyes and on her face mean. She seems content, almost drowsy in the knowledge of her harmless power.
A train is approaching, making the windows rattle, making the jar shake and the table too, as it did right at the beginning, when she was asleep in bed with her mum and dad, before he went to the Zone and got her a nice doggy. The vibrations from the train are so strong that her head is being shaken as it rumbles and rattles past, blaring out Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. Eventually the noise diminishes and the train passes and there is just the rattle of the train that has passed and her eyes, her watching eyes, and her face and head, resting on the table, watching us watching her, fading to black.
26
What happened was that approximately half of the film had been shot (and two-thirds of the money spent) in Tallinn, Estonia, over the spring and summer of 1977, when it became obvious, in the autumn, that there was a fault, either with the experimental Kodak film that had been used or with the way it had been stored or processed. According to the sound designer, Vladimir Sharun, this only became evident at a screening attended by Tarkovsky, his wife Larissa, Rerberg, and Boris and Arkady Strugatsky who had developed the script from their own book
Roadside Picnic.
‘Suddenly one of the Strugatskys turned towards Rerberg and asked naively: “Gosha, and how come I can’t see anything here?” Rerberg, always considering himself beyond reproach in everything he did, turned to Strugatsky and said: “And you just be quiet, you are no Dostoyevsky either!”’ With that he stormed off and was never seen on set again. For his part Rerberg insists that he did not go voluntarily, that he was banned from the set by Tarkovsky. Everyone blamed everyone else, but everyone agreed with Tarkovsky that it was a ‘total disaster’, that the film was doomed. There were proposals to write the whole thing off as a creative accident so that Tarkovsky could abandon
Stalker
and get on with something else. Tarkovsky refused to give up, kept trying to find ways of keeping the ill-fated picture afloat. His intransigence paid off: after much wrangling and manoeuvring it was agreed that
Stalker
would be a two-part film, that another 300,000 rubles would be found to make this second part even though—it was understood—a portion of this extra money would be needed to cover the cost of reshooting what had been lost. The hiatus was not without its benefits. Tarkovsky always had ‘a rigid idea of what he wanted,’ according to Evgeny Tsymbal, ‘but that idea changed all the time.’ The delay obliged Tarkovsky to clarify what he was trying to achieve, gave him the chance to reconceive the character of Stalker, turning him from a ‘bandit’ to a believer (a believer, like the director, that in spite of all the setbacks, the film about him would be made, that the Zone would exist). It was also during this interval that Tarkovsky ditched the science-fiction element of the film. More exactly, Tarkovsky manoeuvred Arkady Strugatsky—already worn down and frustrated by endless rewrites—into proposing that he get rid of the science fiction from his own sci-fi story: ‘There!
You
suggested it, not I!’, said Tarkovsky. ‘I’ve wanted it for a long time, only was afraid of suggesting it, so you wouldn’t take offense.’ (In a sense this suggests that there was more than a grain of truth in Rerberg’s extravagant claim, in the documentary
The Reverse Side of ‘Stalker’,
that Tarkovsky chose the wrong book to adapt in the first place!) And so an entirely new
Stalker
began to take shape. (‘Everything is going to be different,’ Tarkovsky announced in his Diary.) Stripped to its bare bones, the script became a parable with Stalker as an apostle, a holy fool. A new director of photography, Leonid Kalashnikov, took over from Rerberg but, according to Sharun, ‘he could not understand what Tarkovsky wanted from him. Kalashnikov left the picture on his own and Tarkovsky thanked him for such an honest, courageous action.’ Tarkovsky himself is more concise and characteristically less sympathetic: ‘Kalashnikov refused to go on working and walked out,’ he writes in April 1978. ‘He didn’t have the guts to say anything’. Kalashnikov was replaced, in turn, by Aleksandr Knyazhinsky, who shot the final version. It’s impossible to know of the exact extent to which this version of
Stalker
differed from the old damaged and abandoned one (preserved by the editor, Lyudmila Feiginova, in her apartment before she and the film perished in a fire). Tarkovsky’s assistant, Maria Chugunova, says that they were ‘almost visually identical’. Tsymbal thought that Rerberg’s footage was ‘extraordinary’ and ‘included astonishing effects.’ Tarkovsky, on the other hand, believed it ‘lacked simplicity and inner magic.’ Aleksandr Boim, meanwhile, supports Rerberg’s opinion that Tarkovsky used the numerous administrative obstacles and technical setbacks as a smokescreen for his own megalomaniacal uncertainties. This perhaps is not surprising—which is not the same thing as saying it is untrue—since Boim was also sacked (‘for being drunk’). They were ‘lightweight shallow people, with no self-respect,’ the pair of them, Tarkovsky claimed in his Diary. ‘Childish degenerates. Cretins.’ Shavkat Abdusalamov took over as art director but was soon sacked ‘for behaving like a bastard’, leaving Tarkovsky to credit himself as art director in the finished version. Amid all the upheaval, stress and conflict, Tarkovsky was beset with yet another problem in April 1978 when he suffered a coronary.
Stalker,
he decided, was ‘bewitched.’
It may be difficult, with so many accusations, recriminations, counteraccusations and denials, to work out exactly what was going on, but the set of
Stalker,
clearly, was a far from happy ship. As Rerberg put it with characteristic vehemence: Tarkovsky may, ultimately, have got the film he wanted, ‘but at the cost of a heap of corpses and triple retakes.’ As is often the case in the midst of much acrimony, there is a pocket of agreement here; after the disaster of the ruined footage Tarkovsky considered Rerberg ‘a corpse’.
27
It was around this point, I think, that when I saw
Stalker
for the third time—at the Academy on Oxford Street, on February 4, 1982—the projectionist got the reels the wrong way round and we suddenly jumped ahead not a few frames but twenty or forty minutes. I was the only one to notice. (Yes, even then I was quite the
Stalker
scholar.) Presumably no one else in the cinema had seen the film before. I dashed out of the auditorium to the ticket desk, explained what was happening and got the whole screening cancelled. My girlfriend and I left the cinema and went to a tea dance (a brief craze) and returned to the cinema two days later and saw the whole film all the way through again.
28
Vladimir Sharun, sound recordist on the set, recalls: ‘Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured poisonous liquids downstream.’ This caused numerous allergic reactions among the cast and crew and, Sharun believes, ultimately caused the deaths from cancer of Tarkovsky, his wife Larissa, and Solonitsyn.
29
But maybe my time at university did help prepare me for this aspect of Tarkovsky’s art. A famous passage— identical in both the 1805 and 1850 versions—from Wordsworth’s
The Prelude
seems very close to what Tarkovsky does again and again (what is
Mirror
if not a visual account of the growth of the director’s mind?):
To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.
As we have seen, the slow contraction and expansion of the frame creates the impression that the Zone is breathing, respiring, and the passage as a whole fits nicely with the idea of Tarkovsky as a romantic artist, as a
poet
of the cinema. Having compared him with Wordsworth, however, having used that expression
poet of the cinema,
I realize that poets are the only people I want to be poets, that I want poets to be poets only of
poetry.
And Tarkovsky is both more and less than a romantic. The simple things he notices and imbues with breathing magic always remain just what they are. Do they have a moral life? If so it is not one that they are
given
by the artist; it’s more like he responds to a tree’s tree-ness and a wind’s wind-ness which is the only ‘moral life’ we can expect from a landscape. It is when there is some kind of human interaction with landscape, when the landscape, having been manufactured or altered, is in the process of being reclaimed by nature—a source of abiding fascination for Tarkovsky—that its ‘inward meaning’ is most powerfully felt.
There’s actually another moment in Wordsworth that seems even more proto-Tarkovskyan in this respect. It occurs in one of the draft versions of ‘The Ruined Cottage,’ when the poet encounters his old friend Armytage, who describes his reactions on coming across the broken walls, overgrown garden and half-concealed well of the cottage and, more specifically, the numerous unnoticed— ‘I see around me here / Things which you cannot see’—and insignificant objects lying around unused:
…time has been
When every day the touch of human hand
Disturbed their stillness, and they ministered
To human comfort. When I stopped to drink
A spider’s web hung to the water’s edge,
And on the wet and slimy footstone lay
The useless fragment of a wooden bowl.
It moved my very heart.
Isn’t it exactly this quality of undisturbed stillness that gives Tarkovsky’s filmic archaeology of the discarded its special aura?
30
Like all children, I loved quicksand. In films set in the desert, especially the desert of north Africa during the Second World War,
all
I wanted to see was quicksand sucking jeeps and men into its sucky embrace. Not because I wanted to see people perish but because I couldn’t conceive of such a thing actually existing (certainly there was no quicksand where I grew up in Gloucestershire and, for all I knew, none anywhere in England), because it didn’t make sense. I loved it, in other words, because it was a phenomenon unique to film or television. Quicksand
was
film.
31
It wasn’t just an LSD phase; it was also a phase of intense cinemagoing and I have no doubt that my high opinion of
Stalker…
No, let me rephrase that. The prominent place occupied in my consciousness by
Stalker
is almost certainly bound up with the fact that I saw it at a particular time in my life. I suspect it is rare for anyone to see their—what they consider to be
the
—greatest film after the age of thirty. After forty it’s extremely unlikely. After fifty, impossible. The films you see as a child and in your early teens—
Where Eagles Dare, The Italian Job
—have such a special place in your affections that it’s all but impossible to consider them objectively (you have, moreover, no desire to do so). To try to disentangle their individual merits or shortcomings, to see them as a disinterested adult, is like trying to come to a definitive assessment of your own childhood: impossible because what you are contemplating and trying to gauge is a formative part of the person attempting the assessment. Gradually, usually in your late teens and early twenties, you start to watch the major works of the medium. At first it is difficult to make sense of these alleged masterpieces: they are too different, often too boring and challenging. I did the bulk of my serious film-watching as an undergraduate at Oxford, at the Penultimate Picture Palace and the Phoenix, back in the days when there was a late screening every night. By the time I saw
Stalker
I was ready to sit through it even if I was not able to enjoy it. I understood enough—barely enough—of the grammar and history of cinema to see how they were being enlarged, adapted and extended by Tarkovsky. Not that the experience could be confined to the compartment or file called ‘cinema’. My capacity for wonder was also being subtly enlarged and changed. At the same time, however, that capacity was also being permanently limited or defined in the same way that reading Tolstoy enlarges and, by so doing, definitively limits one’s capacity for future enlargement, revelation and astonishment in the realm of fiction. Of course you can still enjoy Tarantino after Tarkovsky, can see that he is doing something new; you can see that Harmony Korine is doing something new with
Gummo,
or Andrea Arnold with
Fish Tank.
Of course, of course. But by the time I was thirty, approximately eight years after seeing
Stalker
for the first time, the potential of cinema to expand perception—or at least my own potential to appreciate and respond to,
to perceive
such an expansion—had been so vastly reduced as to seem negligible. For people older than me the expansion had been achieved by Godard; for Godard’s generation by Welles or (though this now seems hard to credit) Samuel Fuller…For people younger than me it may well have been Tarantino or the witless Coen brothers. To them Tarkovsky may have the slightly outmoded or taken-for-granted quality that Godard had for me.
Some further refinement—or labouring—of this point is necessary. It happens that the phase of my getting into serious cinema—in my late teens and early and midtwenties, from the mid-1970s onwards—overlapped with the intensely creative period of what might be called mainstream independent filmmaking, when American directors, having absorbed the influences of the European
auteurs,
carved out the freedom to realize their cinematic ambitions. I saw
Taxi Driver
when it was first released, and
Apocalypse Now
(and
Jaws
and
Star Wars,
which, together with the financial catastrophe of
Heaven’s Gate,
heralded the end of this phase).
I saw
Stalker
slightly later but I saw it when it came out, within a month of its release, when Tarkovsky was at his artistic peak. I saw it, so to speak,
live.
And this means that I saw it in a slightly different way from how a twentyfour-year-old might see it for the first time now, in 2012. So much so that the film I saw was slightly different from the one that a twenty-four-year-old would see now, in 2012. Obviously the difference is not as acute as it would be if you saw a band today who were at their peak twenty years ago. The thing, the product, the work of art stays the same but by staying the same it ages—and changes. It exists now in the wake of its own reputation, not quite in the way that
Citizen Kane
does, not only as a monument to itself, but trailing clouds of its own glory. And it exists also in the wake of everything that has come in its wake, both the films that have been influenced by it (that’s why
Citizen Kane
is both ageless and incredibly old-looking; practically
everything
seems to have come after it) and the ones that treat it with tacit disdain and contempt
(Lock, Stock and Two
—tediously—
Smoking Barrels).
The facts are unalterable. When I first saw
Stalker
it was brand new, the latest thing. I also saw
Pulp Fiction
live, as soon as it came out, but I didn’t see it as I saw
Stalker,
when I was at that point of maximum responsiveness or aliveness, when my ability to respond to the medium was still so vulnerable and susceptible to being changed and shaped by what I was seeing. At a certain point, even if you keep up-todate with new releases (books, records, films), even if you keep broadening your horizons, even if you manage to keep up with the latest things, you realize that these latest things can never be more than that, that they stand almost no chance of being the last word, because you actually heard—or saw or read—your personal last word years earlier.