Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris)

by Steven Erikson

  For if there is any solace in the world of Quintet, if there is any meaning to be found as Essex steps over half-eaten dead bodies in the snow, determinedly marching toward another enigma, it is this and this alone: there exists no meaning – except for that created and embraced by the individual.

  [STALKER]

  ( Director: Andrei Tarkovsky; starring: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Alisa Frejndlikh, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko - 1979)

  Adam Roberts

  As with all the best cinema, Tarkovsky’s Stalker generates a sense of an intensely personal relationship between watcher and image. Certainly, it has haunted me, as a person and as a writer, profoundly: holy writ to my imagination.

  The story is simple. Or, rather, the plot is simple; the story is extraordinarily nuanced and complex. In a run-down town the titular Stalker (played by Alexander Kaidanovsky) makes a dangerous living guiding people through a mysterious ‘Zone’, a beguiling but potentially fatal landscape. He leaves his wife and young child to lead two clients – a writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) and a Professor (Nikola Grinko) – to a specific place inside the ‘Zone’: a room that is reputed to make a person’s deepest desire come true. In Tarkosvky’s film, the nature of this ‘Zone’ is not explained – the movie is based on Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic, in which the ‘Zone’ is explicitly the result of alien visitation, a space in which (as with humans stopping at the side of a road to have a picnic, and then travelling on, leaving the forest animals to encounter their mysterious detritus) are littered incomprehensible artefacts, some of them marvelous advances on human technology, some of them dangerous, maiming or deadly. In the novel, people venture into the ‘Zone’ hoping to make their fortune, and aware of the risks.

  Tarkosvky’s film has a very different emphasis: perhaps its ‘Zone’ is the result of alien presence, although aliens are never mentioned; perhaps it is the result of human experimentation, or a natural – or supernatural – occurrence. The story goes that an earlier version of the film was closer to the Strugatsky’s novel, but that the film stock upon which it was shot was accidentally ruined; and that Tarkosvky, in remaking the piece, radically changed its emphasis. Leaving it open-ended, like this, makes for a greatly enhanced, almost visionary potency.

  The movie starts slow, and gets slower; but it is one of the striking things that this trajectory takes the film out of tedium and into transcendence. The opening shots, filmed in sepia black-and-white, convey a kind of claustrophobic monotony in a way so effective as to constitute an actively off-putting audience experience. The Stalker’s wife, earnestly played by Alisa Freindlich, begs him not to go in the ‘Zone’ again; he ignores her pleas and goes to a seedy bar to meet his clients – the otherwise unnamed Writer and Professor. This is grim, low-key, talky, depressing filmmaking. Elements that in another film-maker might be pitched so as to raise levels of excitement – since entry is forbidden the three men must break into the ‘Zone’ past armed guards, and drive a land rover through hails of gunfire – are handled in an almost desultory way.

  Tarkovsky is deliberately, I think, flattening and leaching the first act of his drama of conventional cinematic satisfactions. The moment where this film lifts itself from the rebarbatively blank to a sort of blankness of sublimity is where the three men, past the guards, finally travel into the ‘Zone’ itself by means of a railway handcar. This is filmed in one very lengthy shot, the camera tight on the three passengers, the mis-en-scène augmented with sound effects. There is some alchemy at work here, for the movie lifts itself off the ground and moves into an epiphanic mode that it does not leave. This is underlined by a shift (I’ve always assumed this is in part an ironic homage to The Wizard of Oz) from black-and-white to colour footage.

  Tarkovsky, of course, is famous for the length of his individual shots; often very slow tracking-shots (as here) or glacial pans across a barely- or un-changing landscape. Some of them seem to last decades. Vida T Johnson and Graham Petrie, in their monograph The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: a Visual Fugue (1994), calculate that the nearly three-hour film contains only 142 separate shots – most film directors might stitch together a rapid montage of that many multiple short shots into a four-minute sequence. Tarkovsky often holds single takes for that long. This visual style is said by some to give his films a slow, floaty or dreamlike quality; but I’ll confess I’ve never found those qualities in Tarkovsky’s films. Rather they strike me as unusually wide-awake pieces of cinema; films that compel particularly close attention from their audience.

  This is particularly a feature of Stalker, since as the characters pass through the ‘Zone’ they are repeatedly warned by their guide to be on their guard, to pay close attention to the polluted yet beautiful rural landscape through which they move. The emphasis of the Stalker is: it looks harmless, but it may kill you. Little happens in the remainder of the film, and yet that little is enormously resonant and suggestive, replete with a luminous beauty. The three individuals discuss their reasons for wanting to come into the ‘Zone’: the Writer hopes to recapture his lost inspirations; the Professor hopes to win a Nobel prize. The Stalker takes them on a circuitous, sometimes baffling series of loops and detours. At one point they can see their destination – a room in a broken-down house – directly in front of them; but the Stalker tells them that, with a Through the Looking Glass logic (another text with which this film is in dialogue, I think) they cannot simply approach it, but must go in the opposite direction. They pass over fields, through tunnels and into wrecked buildings; the Stalker sometimes checking the safety of the proposed routes by thowing metal bolts ahead of them. It transpires that the Professor is carrying a bomb – although the Stalker warned both men not to antagonise the ‘Zone’ by bringing weapons into it – intending to blow up the room at its heart that makes desires come true, fearing the consequences if evil men gain access to it. But he does not do so. Eventually the three men arrive at their destination: a room in a ruined house where the roof has fallen in. In one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful shots in all cinema – another of Tarkovsky’s prolonged takes – the camera pulls very slowly back with the three men sitting in the room, as rain begins to fall through the open ceiling, swelling in intensity and then fading away.

  There is a coda: the three men, out of the ‘Zone’ and back at the bar. The Stalker’s daughter, nicknamed ‘Monkey’, seems to carry some congenital deformity or illness as a result of her father’s trips into the ‘Zone’. The final shot of the film is of her sitting at a table. She stares at some glasses, and they begin to move – as if her deformity is actually the telekinetic power to move objects. But as the glasses move the sound of a passing train becomes audible, and the viewer is left to decide for herself whether ‘monkey’ actually has the power to move things with her mind, or whether the glasses are moved by the train’s vibrations.

  Jonathan McCalmont has written some penetrating ‘Thoughts on Tarkovsky’s Stalker’ (you can find them on his blog: Ruthless Culture http://ruthlessculture.com/), focusing in particular on one long panning shot of a river filled with junk:

  ‘As Cocteau put it, for some style is a very complex way of saying something simple, for others it is a very simple way of saying something complex. Consider the… panning shot of the shallow river filled with junk. This scene flawlessly conveys the impression of semiotic depth. A gun? a box? what could it all mean? it is like a cinematic trompe-l’oeil that gives an amazing impression of depth whereas in fact there is none. The fact that there is a gun in that stream rather than any other type of object bears no relation to the meaning of the film or the scene, but a gun is so richly symbolic that we cannot help but look at that scene and try to work out what it is that Tarkovsky is trying to tell us. The power of Stalker comes not from its use of symbols to tell a story, but from its technical expertise at inducing what can only be described as cinematic empathy. The relationship between us and the film is akin to that between the Stalker and the ‘Zone’. We see it as being
rich in possibilities, we might even try to make some kind of sense out of it… by suggesting that it’s about Soviet culture or about immigration, but in truth, the film is not really about any of these things. The room has no secret nature, there is no true reading of the film and yet we cannot help but try and wrap our minds around it, just as the Stalker tries to articulate his deepest desire without success.’

  I replied to McCalmont’s post: ‘That’s right, I think. Certainly, absolute semiotic specificity is not the film’s currency; and it would be fatuous to “decode” the images, as if it were all some rigid allegory. But guns figure in particular ways in this text that give the appearance of the gun here greater than just random-noise symbolic heft. The Stalker’s horror that his charges have brought a handgun into the ‘Zone’, the shot where the abandoned weapon is in the water and the Stalker nudges it to push it deeper in. This gorgeous pan along the water connects with this; as, I suppose, with the gunfire the three brave to get into the ‘Zone’ in the first place; and with the Professor’s bomb.’

  McCalmont’s reply to my comment (‘I’d actually forgotten about the bit with the hand-gun’) caused me to go on:

  ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it? This seems exactly the way Stalker works, at least in my experience. I watched it again recently and there was a whole bunch of stuff I simply didn’t remember from when I last saw it. This isn’t because the film is unmemorable (of all the films I’ve seen, this is the single most memorable, I think, in lots of ways) but because it seems to play peculiar tricks with memory, as the ‘Zone’ does topographically with the protagonists. So for instance: I’d forgotten that the Professor goes back for his rucksack, despite being specifically told not to go back by the Stalker… and then somehow ends up ahead of the other two. It doesn’t seem to me coincidental that my memory took some kind of perverse short-cut past that part of the narrative. And now, as I write, I can’t remember if it’s the Writer or the Professor who brings the pistol into the ‘Zone’… presumably the latter, I suppose. But the movie lives in a much more fluid, sinuous way in my mind than most films I’ve seen. I wonder if part of the thing here is the way Tarkovsky’s cinematic technique, his scrupulous way with lighting and cinematography, his famous slow pans and long-held takes, encourages us to pay much closer attention to the quiddity (if you’ll pardon the pretentious language) of the world of his films. He is the great visual poet of attentiveness to the world. What this means, I think, is that when he puts a gun on screen we’re much less likely to respond to it on the level of crude symbolism (as it might be: that representes ‘violence’ or ‘power’ or ‘intimidation’ or whatever) and much more likely to respond to its materiality as a thing; its colour and shape; the texture of its metal and the way its material responds, especially under water, to light.’

  I’m not sure I can think of another film I’ve seen that’s had so massive an impact on me and that nevertheless maintains so evasive, hard-to-pin-down a quality the way Stalker does. This latter fact may go some way towards explaining that former, of course. As for the final shot of ‘Monkey’ at the table, I agree that it generates enormous power by bringing in the vibration of the passing train in order to problematise whether she actually has telekinetic powers or not. But I think the reason this is so clever is that it crystallises a moment of desire in the viewer. It makes you think: am I disappointed or relieved that she has, or that she hasn’t, these powers of telekinesis? Which explanation for the moving glass do I prefer? What does that say about me? The room in the ‘Zone’ is about making manifest your deepest desires after all, and one of the threads of the movie is that these desires are hidden even to yourself. Stalker, the movie, is one of the finest representations of the coloured shadows those desires throw upon the screen of consciousness.

  MAD MAX 2: THE ROAD WARRIOR

  (Director: George Miller; starring: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Michael Preston, Max Phipps - 1981)

  Brian Keene

  My father wanted to be a cowboy when he grew up. His heroes were Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke’s Marshall Matt Dillon, and pretty much any character played by John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. My father and his friends were fed on a steady diet of Westerns. The plots were often the same – a group of settlers are menaced by a lawless band of thugs until a laconic, emotionally-scarred stranger arrives to save the day with his guns.

  I didn’t grow up wanting to be a cowboy. Instead, I grew up praying for nuclear war. I was 14 years old in 1981, and according to all reports, the world was supposed to end at any time. We weren’t sure who would be responsible. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Leonid Brezhnev seemed the most likely candidates. It didn’t matter to my friends and I who pushed the button, as long as the button was eventually pushed. We’d been fed on a steady diet of post-apocalyptic and dystopian films, comic books, novels and cartoons – Kamandi: Last Boy on Earth, Thundarr the Barbarian, Damnation Alley, Planet of the Apes, Doomsday +1, Def-Con 4, and of course, Mad Max.

  Nothing mattered. Not grades or the pretty blonde girl who sat in front of me in history class or the school bully or anything else. None of it mattered to me because I was convinced that at any moment the world was going to be reduced to a radioactive slag heap infested with mutants and roving gangs of punk barbarians, and that was when I’d find my true calling. That was when I’d rise up like the anti-heroes in those books and movies, and rule the wasteland. All of my friends had the same dream, and that summer Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior fueled those dreams like a scarce drum of gasoline for a Ford Falcon GT coupe with a supercharged V-8 engine – just like Max’s legendary Pursuit Special.

  That year also saw the release of another post-apocalyptic classic, Escape From New York, but while Kurt Russell’s uniquely American Snake Plissken appealed to our patriotic sense of nationalism, it was Mel Gibson’s Australian Max Rockatansky who we really aspired to be (except for the one kid who always wanted to be Star Wars’ Han Solo).

  The Road Warrior is considered by most to be the best installment of the Mad Max trilogy. The first film, 1979’s Mad Max, depicts civilization’s collapse. The third film, 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, shows us civilization rising once more from the ashes. It is The Road Warrior’s bleak, nihilistic vision that appealed to a generation of teens growing up in the shadow of not only nuclear annihilation, but of rampant Yuppie greed reminiscent of the movie’s barbaric hordes. It has also become the visual blueprint for nearly every post-apocalyptic film since then. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior’s iconic imagery and themes have influenced countless films, comic books, novels, video games and other media. Its bleak junkyard landscape pops up in everything from Doomsday to Disney-Pixar’s Wall-E.

  The film’s plot borrows from the aforementioned Old West archetype – a laconic, hardened anti-hero emerges from the wasteland and helps a group of well-meaning settlers defend themselves against marauders, thus reclaiming his humanity (and quite often ending up with a buffoonish sidekick for comedy relief). It worked for Clint Eastwood’s Cowboy with No Name in most of his ‘spaghetti Westerns’ and it works for Mel Gibson’s Max. But instead of riding out of the sunset on a horse like The Lone Ranger and his trusty steed Silver, Max comes barreling down the highway in his dependable, fast-as-shit V-8 Pursuit Special. The settlers in this case are a group of people, led by the wise and benevolent Pappagallo, who have inhabited a functioning oil refinery. The marauders, led by a disfigured but charismatic mutant named Lord Humungus (played by the foreboding Kjell Nilsson), want the refinery – and its precious content – for themselves. The sidekick role is filled by the pilot of an autogyro (played to iconic stature by Bruce Spence). Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior even gives us a permuted version of the ‘child looking for a father-figure’ motif popularized by the western Shane, but in this case, it’s a feral, savage boy with a razor-sharp and deadly-accurate boomerang.

  The set-up is at once easy and recognisable, yet new. Instead of cowboys and Indians, we have survivors and mutant biker
s. Instead of raiders going after cattle or grazing rights, Humungus and his marauders seek gasoline and ammunition. This seems fitting when you consider that, at the time of the film’s release, America and much of the rest of the world were just recovering from a gas shortage crisis and were facing economic uncertainty, civil unrest and concerns about gun control. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior was a fable for those times. Of course, we didn’t know that as kids. We didn’t see the rich and layered subtext. We just knew that Max was a badass motherfucker, and the man we most wanted to be when we grew up.

  My father is in his sixties now. He never became a cowboy. Instead, he went to Vietnam, came home, and worked in a paper mill until his retirement. I’m forty-two, and instead of becoming the warrior of the wastelands, I became an author. I have two sons of my own. The youngest, who is two, might grow up to be an artist, judging by how much he likes to draw on the walls of our home with his crayons. My other son, who is nineteen, admires the characters of a Japanese anime series that leaves me confused and vaguely uncomfortable. The threat of nuclear war seems distant and unreal. Russia is no longer the enemy. The more realistic scenario these days is that of a dirty radiological bomb detonated in a large city by one extremist group or another. The cold war is over, and that’s probably for the best. I know now, with the prescience of adulthood, that the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust would be much more grim and un-survivable than the fantasy depicted in the Mad Max films.