Zona (14 page)

³²
Or, of course, to Herzog himself, specifically the famous epigraph—‘Don’t you hear the terrible screaming all around you? The screaming that men call silence’—and shot of wheat swaying in the wind at the opening of
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

³³
I got that phrase from an aging acidhead in Santa Cruz, who first tripped back in the days when LSD was still legal. The difference between acid then and now, he said, was that in its earlier incarnations it produced ‘open-eye hallucinations’ (as opposed to closed-eye hallucinations and open-eye distortions). An open-eye hallucination: there are worse definitions of cinema.

³⁴
In
Mirror
the mother reads a poem by Tarkovsky’s father:

Everything on earth was transfigured, even
Simple things: the basin, the jug…

This is exactly what we get in Tarkovsky’s films and in…But let’s go back a bit, to the moment where Writer says, rather Tarkovskyly, that we are here—on earth, he means—to create works of art. Elide this claim with the lines of Tarkovsky’s father and we get something close to the passage in the ninth of the
Duino Elegies,
where Rilke wonders if

Perhaps we are
here
to say: house,

bridge, stream, gate, jug, fruit-tree, window—

at most: column, tower…But to
say
them, you must grasp them,

oh, to say them
in a way
that the things themselves

had never dreamt of being.

The poet ‘says’ these things; Tarkovsky
shows
them, enables us to see them more intensely than we can with the naked, non-cinematic eye. Rilke continues, sketching his poetics of the Zone:

Here
is the time of the
sayable, here
its home.

Speak and avow. More than ever

the things that might be experienced are falling away, for

what ousts and replaces them is an imageless act.

Tarkovsky is preserving or making visible exactly what Rilke claims is disappearing—ironically, as it turns out, as a result of the amazing ubiquity of the image (‘our overcrowded gaze’, the poet terms it a few lines earlier). The Zone: refuge of meaning, hope of the unvanished. (This overlapping of Tarkovsky and Rilke is not as arbitrary as it might seem. Having immersed himself in Russian literature and thought after travelling through the land in 1889 and 1900, Rilke, in the words of one commentator, ‘came to feel that he could be that country’s voice. As he put it more than a decade later: “All the home of my instinct, all my inward origin is there.”’)

³⁵
It was this sequence, apparently, that prompted an official at a Mosfilm screening of the original, damaged version of the film shot by Rerberg to complain that it was out of focus: a rather strange complaint since there was nothing on which
to
focus.

³⁶
Cf. Bresson: ‘Shooting is going out to meet something. Nothing in the unexpected that is not secretly expected by you.’

³⁷
Tilda Swinton’s character—white wig, white shades, white cowboy hat, white mac—mentions this sequence in Jim Jarmusch’s vacuous
The Limits of Control.
She was apparently drawing on her own experiences as a student at Cambridge in the 1980s: ‘I saw Tarkovsky’s
Stalker,
and there’s a scene of that image—of a bird flying through a room of sand. And I’d been having that dream my whole life, or probably since before I was ten. I’ve stopped having it since seeing that film, but it really blew my mind that someone else would have exactly the same image somehow and put it in a film. That really informed my relationship with cinema: the idea that it
is
what’s unconscious.’

³⁸
I may have wanted to see it again immediately but that was impossible. I had to wait until it was showing at a cinema again. Of course it’s fantastically convenient, being able to see
Stalker
—or at least to refer to it—at home, on DVD, whenever the urge takes one. But I liked the way that my visits to the Zone were at the mercy of cinema schedules and festival programmes. In London or in any other city where I happened to be living I always looked through
Time Out
or
Pariscope
or the
Village Voice
in the hope that
Stalker
would be playing. If it was showing somewhere, then seeing it became a priority, an event that gave shape to the surrounding week. Like this, the Zone retained its specialness, its removal from the everyday (of which it remained, at the same time, a part). Getting there was always a little expedition, a cinematic pilgrimage. As was entirely appropriate to the Zone, the film changed slightly, manifested itself differently according to where it happened to be found: the fact that I was seeing
Stalker
in a tiny cinema in the Fifth
arrondissement
of Paris—the same cinema, in fact, where I had sat through
L’Avventura
— made it a slightly different experience to seeing it as part of a Tarkovsky retrospective at Lincoln Center in New York. But what about the possibility of a cinema as semipermanent pilgrimage site? Bresson believed that the riches offered by certain films were so inexhaustible that ‘there ought to be in Paris one quite small, very well equipped cinema, in which only one or two films would be shown each year.’ Taking this a stage further, how about a cinema dedicated to showing
Stalker
exclusively? (For a less rapturous take on such a possibility see David Thomson on page 159.)

At various times before the advent of DVDs,
Stalker
was shown on TV and I taped it, to make sure I had a record of the film but, unlike Mahmut in
Uzak,
I never watched
Stalker
on telly. That list of things and people I won’t watch on TV does not stop at
Top Gear
and Jeremy Clarkson. It also includes…
Stalker.
One cannot watch
Stalker
on TV for the simple reason that the Zone
is
cinema; it does not even
exist
on telly. The prohibition extends beyond
Stalker,
to anything that has any cinematic value. It doesn’t matter if the TV is HD: great cinema must be projected. It is the difference, as John Berger puts it, between watching the sky (‘from where else would film stars come if not from a film sky?’) and peering into a cupboard. I was so unshakeable in this rule, at a time when fewer and fewer classic films were being shown at the cinema, that I was in danger of eliminating much of film history from my life. I would permit us to watch only romcoms at home, films whose defining characteristic was an absolute lack of cinematic value. So we bought a DVD projector and it was wonderful, even though the setup each time we wanted to watch a film—setting the aspect ratio, clambering through the complexities of the menu tree, shifting stereo speakers, lowering the blinds to eliminate light from the street—often reduced me to a state of such fury that the screening had to be aborted. All of this was, perhaps, to be expected. The unexpected problem was that so many of the classic films of the past actually turned out to be pretty terrible. Buñuel’s
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
and
Belle de Jour
sucked. Godard’s
Breathless
was unwatchable, and not only because of the smoking. Kieslowski’s
The Double Life of Véronique
made straightahead porn seem tasteful by comparison. Getting through Bresson’s
Diary of a Country Priest
was a bit of a struggle too. Still, at least we could watch Tarkovsky. Except
Nostalghia,
a film I saw and was disappointed and bored by when it first came out, was even worse than I remembered it, so bad—
so
far up itself—that I thought it best to leave
The Sacrifice
on the video shop’s shelves of memory.

³⁹
Scope, also, for an allusive YouTube-style redub: Professor answers the phone and says, ‘Ah Michelangelo!’

⁴⁰
Tarkovsky toyed with the idea of a ‘subsequent film’ in which Stalker himself develops some of these tendencies and ‘starts forcibly to drag people to the Room and turns into a “votary”, a “fascist”. Bullying them into happiness.’

⁴¹
As is the film itself.
Stalker
has long been synonymous both with cinema’s claims to high art and a test of the viewer’s ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett’s enthusiasm—‘every single frame of the film is burned into my retina’—attests not only to Tarkovsky’s lofty purity of purpose but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement. So a certain amount of blowback is inevitable and desirable. Having given Tarkovsky short and rather grudging shrift in the various editions of his
Biographical Dictionary of Film,
David Thomson was moved, in 2008, to include
Stalker
(mentioned but not discussed in the
Dictionary)
in his pantheon of the thousand best movies,
‘Have You Seen…?’
But he remained dubious about the much-hyped Room at the heart of the Zone, suspecting that it would turn out to be ‘an infinite, if dank enclosure in which an uncertain number of strangers are watching the works of Tarkovsky. Equally, it may be that as malfunction of one kind or another covers the world, we may have a hard time distinguishing the Room, the Zone, and the local multiplex.’ This is infinitely preferable to the reverence that Tarkovsky tends to invite from his admirers—including himself. I have little instinct for personal reverence and, though I’ve not exactly been inundated with offers, I know I would hate to be revered myself. One of the things that I thought I would love as a writer, one of the perks of the job, would be having people come up to me to say how much they loved my books. And I do like it. For about ten seconds. After that I am desperate for the conversation to move on to any other topic. Actually, I need to slightly qualify what I just said about my own capacity for revering. I have a sizeable capacity for admiring people’s
work
but I suspect that the verb ‘to revere’ describes a relation to people rather than things. Let’s say I greatly admired
your
work and, at some point, had the chance to meet you. I would be overjoyed and would not be shy about expressing my admiration. But after a very short time, if I felt that you were interested in this as a basis for any kind of interaction, if you wanted to extend the reverence beyond what was considered politely necessary—if, in other words, you didn’t get bored by being revered almost as quickly as I would be bored by revering—then I would start thinking you were a dick.

All of this is a lengthy way of introducing a pretty simple point: that if you have a considerable instinct for reverence and if you don’t have an aversion to being revered, then it makes perfect sense to start revering yourself. If you’re a public figure then this occurs in public. This, I think, is what happened to Tarkovsky.

⁴²
Reading about and around
Stalker
or Tarkovsky, one cannot go for long without this word
miracle
cropping up. ‘My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle,’ said Bergman. He was talking about
Ivan’s Childhood,
but continued in a way that could not but put one in mind of
Stalker,
as if his innermost cinematic wishes had come true. ‘Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room, the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.’ Kris, near the end of
Solaris,
also seems to be looking ahead to what the director might come up with next: ‘The only thing that remains for me is to wait. For what? I don’t know. A new miracle?’ There were more miracles to come from Tarkovsky— though none of these took the form of further employment for Donatas Banionis, who played the part of Kris. The caption at the beginning of
Stalker
describes the Zone as ‘a miracle.’ A still from
The Sacrifice
in the updated edition of
Sculpting in Time
was summarized by Tarkovsky with these words: ‘“Little Man” waters the tree his father planted, patiently awaiting the miracle which is no more than the truth.’ And the miraculous, it seems, was not confined to the effects created on-screen, but was part of the process by which they were achieved. Looking back on the numerous obstacles that had to be overcome with so many of the shots and set ups, production designer Rashit Safiullin said, ‘Every time it was a little miracle-making.’

The prevalence of miracles and the routinely miraculous in Tarkovsky perhaps hints at something more general about the society and history of which he was a product. One of the goals of Marxism-Leninism or of historical materialism is to do away with the category of the miraculous— in history, as in logic, there are no surprises. As the promise of the Soviet Revolution hardened into the relentless bureaucracy of Stalinism, so the opposite occurred. The thoroughness with which everyone was caught in the mechanism of the totalitarian system meant that any escape or exemption acquired the quality of a miracle. ‘The greater the degree of centralisation,’ writes Nadezhda Mandelstam in
Hope Against Hope,
‘the more impressive the miracle.’ The more intolerable life became the more it became ‘impossible’ to live without miracles. Addressing letters to Stalin in the hope of clemency or of having a sentence commuted—‘what is such a letter but a plea for a miracle?’—meant that people lived in the routine expectation of miracles: ‘They had become part of our life.’ On the occasions that these pleas were answered—as happened to Osip Mandelstam in 1934—people were ‘overjoyed.’ But, Nadezhda continues in terms curiously appropriate to
Stalker,
‘one must remember that even if they got their miracles, the writers of such letters were doomed to bitter disappointment. This they were never prepared for, despite the warning of popular wisdom that miracles are never more than a flash in the pan, with no lasting effect. What are people left with in the fairy tales after their three wishes have come true? What becomes, in the morning, of the gold obtained in the night from the lame man? It turns into a slab of clay or a handful of dust. The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles.’