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11 We can’t actually see what time it is. If we could, then part of this scene might have found its way into Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), a video montage of moments of glimpsed time grabbed from thousands of films. The Clock lasts twenty-four hours and is synched precisely so that every minute of screen time—as revealed by clocks, watches or dialogue—is exactly the same as the local time of wherever the film is being screened. Tarkovsky expressed distaste for ‘montage cinema’, but Marclay’s sampled narrative is like an extrapolation of many of the points he makes in the ‘Time, rhythm and editing’ section of Sculpting in Time. (Actually, it’s possible that this moment of Stalker glancing at his wife’s watch is in The Clock somewhere—I’ve only seen about ten hours of the whole thing—floating free of the relentless anchoring of verifiable time as a kind of gestural filler. For the record, I did spot a few bits from Nostalghia and Solaris.)
12 Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 version is obviously and consciously a sci-fi film set in the sci-future. He claimed his film was not a remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris but a refilming of the Stanislaw Lem novel on which Tarkovsky’s film was based. There was certainly scope for this as far as Lem was concerned; in his opinion, Tarkovsky ‘did not make Solaris; what he made was Crime and Punishment.’ Still, in the very first shot of Soderbergh’s film (raindrops on a windowpane, olive green and beigey brown) it’s obvious that memories of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (specifically the transitional shot near the end, taking us back from the space station to earth, of a plant on Kris’s brown-beige window sill) are intent on coming (and are intended to come) back to haunt us. The film is a lot better than Tarkovsky loyalists might care to admit and George Clooney is good as always, even though he looks, as usual, like he’s starring in a (futuristic) advert for George Clooney. The most interesting thing about it, from my point of view, was that from the start Natascha McElhone looked rather like my wife. After a while this became so striking that I whispered to my wife, ‘She looks incredibly like you.’ ‘I know,’ my wife whispered back. This resemblance deepened as the film continued. With every subsequent death and reincarnation of her character, Natascha McElhone came to resemble my wife more and more closely until, about halfway through, it was exactly like watching my wife up there onscreen, constantly getting killed off and constantly coming back with more devotion and more love. Although I was deluded in thinking that it was my wife on-screen, this delusion was encouraged by the film to the extent that I was more deeply implicated in the on-screen drama than I had ever been before. Just as writers sometimes speak of an ideal reader, so, in a way, I was Soderbergh’s ideal viewer. There I was, sitting thinking, ‘My god, it’s my wife’, and there was Clooney being told, ‘That’s not your wife.’ She kept reappearing as he wanted her to be, as he remembered her, as he wrongly remembered her. Star and viewer—Clooney and I!—were suffering from the same delusion. This was not vanity on my part, and the delusion was not all-enveloping: I wasn’t sitting there thinking I’m married to Natascha McElhone, therefore I’m George fucking Clooney. But I wasn’t—we weren’t—alone in thinking that my wife looked incredibly like Natascha McElhone. We once went to a wedding in the Adirondacks where a fellow guest sidled up to my wife and said, ‘I’ve been wondering all weekend if you’re really Natascha McElhone.’ At least two other people made similar observations in the years immediately following the film’s release. We watched Solaris again a few days ago, only to discover, predictably enough, that my wife no longer looks like Natascha McElhone in Solaris—but then neither does Natascha McElhone. We were sitting near her at a lavish fund-raiser for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2010 and although we did not chat we were able to have a discreetly good gawp. Natascha McElhone and my wife have both changed, but have changed differently—in the same direction (they’re older) but in slightly different ways. It doesn’t matter. In the film Natascha McElhone is as she is because that’s how George Clooney remembers her and she looks like my wife because that is how I remember her. Only the film preserves that memory of how alike they were, more alike than the two films of the same book.
13 On the subject of quotation within film: an interesting study could be made—in a sense this book is a catalogue or compendium of proposals for potentially interesting studies—of scenes in films where bits of other films are seen, glimpsed or watched, either at a drive-in, on TV or in the cinema (Frankenstein in Spirit of the Beehive; Red River in The Last Picture Show; The Passion of Joan of Arc in Vivre Sa Vie). Actually, maybe it wouldn’t be that interesting after all; one wouldn’t get far without the word meta cropping up and turning everything to dust. But, as it happens, this sequence in Stalker is used to brilliant effect in Uzak (Distant, 2002) by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Mahmut, a middle-aged photographer, is living in Istanbul. When his clodhopping cousin, Yusuf, comes to the city looking for work Mahmut is obliged to put him up in his apartment. They may be from the same village but they’re worlds apart and Mahmut is not about to compromise his high aesthetic standards just because a dull-witted cousin has come to stay. So when we see them at home, feet up, watching TV, it’s not Top Gear or Turkey’s Got Talent they’re watching; it’s Stalker, the trolley sequence. The two of them are slumped and stretched out in their chairs, in a torpor of concentration and boredom. Mahmut is eating nuts, pistachios presumably. Cousin Yusuf has nodded off. One can hardly blame him; even the most boring night in the village cannot compare with the depths of tedium being plumbed here. Professor, Stalker and Writer are on-screen, on the trolley, heading towards the Zone, faces in tight close-up, while, in the unfocused background, some kind of landscape blurs past. The electronic score echoes and clangs through the apartment. Yusuf wakes up, amazed to discover that he’d been asleep for only a few seconds or, even more amazingly, that after a long nap the TV is still showing these three old blokes drifting along the railroad to nowhere. Peasant he might be, but at some level he has intuited Jean Baudrillard’s insight that television is actually a broadcast from another planet. The evening, evidently, is not going to improve. He decides to go to bed. They say good night. After a decent interval Mahmut gets up, fetches a video, puts it in the VCR and points the remote. Stalker is replaced by girl-on-girl porno. Everything else remains pretty much unchanged. Before, he had one foot on the pouffe, and one hitched up over the arm of the chair. Now he has both feet on the pouffe, otherwise he’s stretched out the same way as when he was watching Stalker. The only difference is that now, instead of this long magical sequence of three men clanging toward the Zone, we’ve got a silicone-breasted woman sucking the enormous tits of a Page Three model. Upstairs, Yusuf telephones home. After a while he comes down again and Mahmut, who has not budged, who is not jerking off, whose fly is not even open, just about has time to flip to a broadcast channel. The fact that the indescribably boring film they were watching earlier has morphed into comedy is not lost on Yusuf—this is much more his cup of tea—and he stands there snickering a bit so Mahmut flips channels again and comes to a kung fu movie—which is exactly Yusuf’s cup of tea. His evening has improved after all but Mahmut’s has taken a decided turn for the worse: no Tarkovsky and no g.o.g action, just him and his moronic cousin watching a kung fu film. It’s late, he says. Let’s turn that off.
If you wanted a definition of deadpan you could do a lot worse than choose this sequence to illustrate your point. In fact, thinking about it, this sequence is probably the most deadpan I have ever seen in a film. It’s so deadpan that you have to be a real cinephile to find it funny and even then you don’t actually laugh out loud. You just sit there on the sofa with your feet up, munching pistachios, watching, snickering. If you laugh out loud it’s partly to show you get the joke in all its precise levels of denotation but there’s an element of affectation about that laughter; it’s one of those laughs that contains the desire to explain why you’re laughing, why you’re so clever. If I were to make a film I would definitely contrive a scene in which a couple of people were watching
a bit of Uzak, though probably not this bit. That way I’d really show how clever I was and it would give people in the audience a chance to have a good, third-degree, cinephilic meta-chuckle.
Uzak shows and quotes from Stalker. But what about the final shot in Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (2003)? The refugees from an unexplained, all-engulfing catastrophe—at least it appeared all-engulfing at the time, before Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, after which most catastrophes seemed rather modest and local affairs; at least people aren’t eating each other in Time of the Wolf— are holed up at a railway station where they hope to be able to stop and board one of the trains rumoured to be heading south. (That earlier, facetious reference to asylum seekers is entirely and unfacetiously appropriate here.) The hope offered by these trains becomes increasingly forlorn as conditions and social relations deteriorate—though the hope of some kind of millenarian salvation grows correspondingly stronger. The film’s narrative comes to an end. Then there is a long sequence, shot from a train, of landscape rushing past, speed-blurred in the foreground, unspoiled and apparently unthreatened in the distance. Clouds piled up in a silver-grey sky: a sky with spring in its step. An expansive landscape. Trees, roads and clearings, then more trees and meadow. Deciduousness. A level crossing. The odd road sign and house, but no sign of people or cars. The landscape is pristine but not unusually or ominously so. There is no sign of devastation, though it is possible that it has recently been cleansed, not only ethnically but humanly. It has also been emptied of all clues as to what it might mean. There is no explanation of what this train is or where it is heading. The landscape rushing past refuses to sanction any symbolic reference to what has gone before. Trees and sky are absolutely unimbued. Then black. The end. In keeping with Haneke’s rinsed neutrality, one cannot say that he alludes to Stalker—that would be to freight the shot with exactly the kind of meaning he has rigorously avoided. But if it is impossible, as the poet Anthony Hecht pointed out, ‘to begin two consecutive pentameter lines with the words “After the” without an alert reader saying “Ha! Eliot! The Waste Land,”’ then it is equally impossible to film anything like a horizontal view of a landscape from a train without a similarly alert viewer saying ‘Ha! Tarkovsky! Stalker.’ In both cases the reaction is—Hecht again—‘an index of the authority and duration and resonance’ of Eliot and Tarkovsky. Since Haneke is obviously a highly alert viewer, he can allude to Stalker without doing so—and, by the same token, can’t not do so.
14 The similarities between Stalker and The Wizard of Oz have been widely remarked on: Dorothy longs to leave her small black-and-white town in Kansas; a tornado transports her to the magically coloured kingdom of Oz, where she and her companions—Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow—set off on a journey to find the wonderful wizard who will allegedly grant all their wishes, etc. Or so I’m told. I take other people’s word for it. I’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz, not even as a kid, and obviously have no intention of making good that lack now.
15 Tarkovsky encountered a similar landscape again in 1983, just before the Telluride Film Festival, where he was to be honoured—alongside Richard Widmark—with a lifetime achievement award. Tom Luddy, codirector of the festival, served as a kind of Stalker, escorting Tarkovsky, Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi and others on a road trip through Utah and Arizona. The otherworldly scenery—especially the mythically cinematic Monument Valley—overwhelmed Tarkovsky, but Luddy’s attempted explanations of the geomorphological processes at work fell on deaf ears: such a place could only have been created by god. Anticipating the speech he would make at the festival itself (a diatribe against the idea of cinema as entertainment to which Widmark delivered a witheringly polite riposte the following day), Tarkovsky said that only Americans could be so vulgar and materialistic as to make Westerns in scenery like this; in such a place, he said, one should only make films about god. I wonder, was Luddy tempted to reply, ‘But John Wayne is a god’?
16 Or maybe not. In the years when I used to go to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert, we were greeted at the festival entrance with the words ‘Welcome home!’ and tears always welled up in my eyes because it was true, because I believed absolutely in the Temporary Autonomous Zone of Black Rock City.
17 I am reminded of the time, in Big Sur, when a friend and I were perched on the edge of cliffs, overlooking the fog-shrouded Pacific. Perhaps the fog sealed in the sound of the ocean below. There was no wind. It was absolutely quiet. We were the only people there until a family turned up and the father, eager to articulate the charm of the place, boomed out, ‘Must be real peaceful here!’
18 This is one of several occasions when what we are hearing and seeing on-screen echoes something from the making of the film. Preparing a later shot, when Writer rejects Stalker’s warning and starts walking straight towards the Room, Tarkovsky noticed that a few dandelions had blossomed—if that’s what dandelions do—thereby spoiling the look of the scene. Production designer Rashit Safiullin and his team were sent to pluck them out. A simple enough task, except the Zone also had to look like no one had ever set foot there, so they needed to make sure that in the process of plucking the dandelions they left no sign of their own work, no flattened grass or footprints. The dandelions had hardly been obtrusive but even when they were removed so that shooting could begin Tarkovsky was not happy: ‘Rashit, the flowers are not here but their presence can be felt.’
19 Lars von Trier takes this aspect of the Zone and raises it to a Hammer Horror—ish degree in Antichrist (2009). The most offensive thing about Antichrist—worse than the clitoridectomy, the drill through Willem Dafoe’s leg and the blood ejaculating from his dick—was that it was dedicated to Tarkovsky. I couldn’t believe it. In the classic Satanic Verses style of the offended, I did not need my outrage to be corroborated by actually seeing the film. Then I did see it. And, in its weird, perverse way, amongst all the silliness and nonsense—of which there is a vast amount— the film is, very obviously, a warped love letter to Tarkovsky, shot through with allusions, nods and references. At times it looks exactly like a Tarkovsky film. Right at the start, when Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg— gorgeous to look at but, in this instance, hopeless as an actress—are having sex, there’s a bottle falling over and leaking water onto the floor, as in Mirror and, less exactly, Stalker. But it’s when they set out for the forest, to Eden, that they head, unmistakably, into the dense remembered green of Mirror. (Actually, some of the CGI scenes in the forest, the fairy tale bits, are maybe more reminiscent of the enhanced forest of Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son than Tarkovsky’s almost-ordinariness.) The cabin in the woods, the wind appearing from nowhere whipping through the foliage, the orange bonfire, the sense of a landscape being haunted by memory—all of this is wonderful. Some sequences seem even more specifically allusive: the moment when Dafoe turns to the camera as if alerted either by some unspecified external stimulus or in the midst of some inward realization (pure Tarkovsky, that collapsing of the internal and external), or the sequence when we follow him, in his overcoat, from behind, through the ferns and leaves. These are authentic tributes to Tarkovsky, admiring glances from one director to another. Not that Antichrist is any kind of Tarkovsky pastiche; von Trier sees what is special about Tarkovsky but does something uniquely his own. What he does is absolutely repellent and silly—a waste. Antichrist is daft in the way all horror films are daft, especially when seen beside the routine horrors of modern life.
In von Trier’s favour, if you wanted to mount a case for this as a serious—as opposed to a beautifully shot, thoroughly stupid—film, you could say that this is a trip into a mirror image of Tarkovsky’s Zone. Whereas in Stalker the Zone is a place where your deepest wish could come true, here it’s a place where your most horrible nightmares will be revealed, your—or Charlotte’s—deepest fears, the terrors at the apex of the pyramid of terror described by Dafoe. But I don’t want to give Antichrist too much credit: it’s nonsense, a highly crafted diminution of the possibilities
of cinema.
20 Rather different but even more extraordinary documentary corroboration of the existence of some kind of Zone is provided by Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen in his book Satellites, particularly the images from the socalled spacecraft crash zone in Kazakhstan and just across the border in the Altai Republic of Russia. The debris that regularly came crashing from space gave rise to a thriving unofficial business here—in spite of the risks—in scrap and salvage. Bendiksen’s most famous—and beautiful— photograph shows two villagers atop the dented remains of part of a spacecraft or satellite in the midst of an idyllic green landscape and blue sky, all snow-blurred by the wings of thousands of white butterflies.
21 Again, myth and reality have become intertwined in the years since Chernobyl. Freed from human interference animals thrived in the Zone of Exclusion. Species not seen for centuries returned or were reintroduced: lynx, wild boar, wolf, Eurasian brown bear, European bison, eagle owl, moose, beaver, Przewalski’s horse (whatever that is). The population of already established species increased. A new generation of trees took root, settled in. The forest surrounded and then advanced unimpeded into the excity. With animal and plant life flourishing in this way, the Ukrainian government put a positive—and entirely logical—spin on the idea of exclusion and, in 2007, designated the area a wildlife sanctuary. (Scientists who carried out a census and published their findings in Ecological Indicators dispute these claims of increase and abundance. They found a diminution in the diversity and numbers of mammals but welcomed the idea of a wildlife haven as a kind of natural laboratory to further study the effects of radiation.)