by Geoff Dyer
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 w
as 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.
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.
34In 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.