STALKER (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky - Not unlike the scenic misery of Nostalghia (1983), Tarkovsky develops a doubly ruined world in which to set his tale of the frustrated search for token redemption. The metaphorical language of the signature Tarkovsky poetic-philosophical dialogue suggests that each pitfall along the way to The Room leads the three protagonists -- the Stalker, the Writer and the Scientist -- closer to a breakdown of their own fragile selves and toward the fulfillment of something wholly mysterious and earth shattering. That this does NOT happen is part of the tension of the film and squares with the extraordinary pessimism of Tarkovsky's work in general.To explore his theme of human wreckage adrift in a fabulously fallen world and hyper-intensify the metaphorical passage of the abject subject through a disenchanted landscape, Tarkovsky creates the sinister Zone, set aside from the rest of the world, where no one lives, and to where the Stalker, as guide, clandestinely escorts paying customers -- as if The Zone was a metaphysical game reserve and the interlopers were trophy hunters.
The Zone is set up as a place to step (ostensibly) outside the fractured world of toxic modernity -- high industrial modernity -- even though it, too, is a ruined, deserted wasteland surrounded by barbed wire and secured by military police. The throwaway explanation that a meteorite crashed and destroyed the area is but one explanation. Another is that an alien force occupies The Zone and it has been shut off from the rest of the world as a result of fear and terror after failed attempts to retake the area by the authorities. The Stalker guides his hand-picked customers into The Zone to reach The Room, a place where wishes are supposedly granted to anyone capable of threading one's way through the dangers of the treacherous landscape haunted by a spectre that is never quite realized except in words and traces. The Stalker explains that everything changes from one minute to the next in The Zone and that no one route is retraceable and all routes are dangerous. His very own haunted presence betrays a sense of foreboding and uneasiness with the potential calamities -- traps -- set by the supposed alien intelligence that inhabits The Zone and tests all intruders.
That NOTHING happens along the way, even though the Stalker makes continuous tests of the possible routes and forbids a direct route to The Room, is part of the enigma of the film. (One detects shades here of Ionesco's The Chairs.) Things are not even happening 'off camera' -- as it were -- as they might in a film built on similar resources; e.g., Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock. "Everything will begin to reverberate in response to the dominant note: things, landscape, actors' intonation. It will become interconnected and necessary. One thing will be echoed by another in a kind of general interchange: and an atmosphere will come into being [...]" (Tarkovsky, "Sculpting in Time").
Tarkovsky refuses to gratify the most supple of desires -- the vicarious thrill of knowing without seeing -- and leaves the off-screen phantasm off screen entirely. Tarkovsky's films are 'long' because of the long, slow tracking shots he indulges, as reflex, and because silence needs to be maximized to enhance the otherwise normative elements of dialogue and denouement. Like Artaud, Tarkovsky utilizes mise en scčne as a cipher for the unconscious resources of the world -- and, as with Artaud, there is a vicious residual aspect to these resources that invade the consciousness (of the film itself) and against which are arrayed the most tenuous of spiritual principles. Artaud, ever the Nietzschean, like Tarkovsky, was obsessed with the ritual ruin of things and the irruption of the repressed. These dangers are always palpable but never purely demonstrated. Instead the ruined landscape, here the decrepit industrial infrastructure and rotting houses, act as de facto pitfalls as the Writer, the Scientist and the Stalker wind toward The Room. As in Nostalghia, there are scenes with the minutiae of daily life -- papers, instruments, floor tiles, miscellaneous detritus of the world and the mind -- lodged in mud below a putrid layer of barely moving water, AND through which the characters must wade. Conscious life goes on in the forlorn dejection of a broken world animated by the relentless forces of nature (wind, rain, fire), by degrees, turning inward and toward an equally bleak metaphysical landscape that stands nonetheless in stark contrast to the stained and cracked tain of Tarkovsky's mirror -- the alluring, evocative ruined state of the fallen man-made world overrun by nature. This ruined mirror is itself a mirror of the so-called mirror stage of childhood fantasy -- it is the origin of the sense of profundity and even elation produced by Tarkovsky's films, films that are, in fact, force fields that exceed the boundaries of any expectant explanation (including this one). Through such a slippery and vitalistic mélange of effects (and affects) Tarkovsky is able to paint a high-tragic portrait of life -- a Nietzschean "high tonality of the world soul", as it were -- setting it against the torturous inner worlds of his characters and, in the alchemical soup of this mix, bringing something extraordinary (and incommensurable) to bear.The half-morose character of the Stalker is the key to the mystery (as he develops his tales of The Zone -- told through recollections relayed to him by another stalker, Porcupine, who received his own wish, and became rich, only to hang himself in despair). The idea that The Room may not exist is irrelevant as it is an apparent destination not a real one. That the film does not end with any of the party entering The Room, though they reach its threshold, suggests the deferred -- the idea of the wish -- is exactly the point. That the film ends with a bizarre soliloquy by the Stalker's wife, that her husband is slightly deranged, undercuts the notional (literal) nature of the quest and also brings to light the perhaps troubling (alternative) idea that he is quite simply a visionary madman. (Tarkovsky has repeatedly used the mad fool in almost the precise manner prescribed by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra -- e.g., the saintly lunatic in Nostalghia.) The Stalker's crippled daughter's telekinesis would seem to add something to this perverse alternative reading, as she may yet be a product of his own fallen, visionary world -- a mirror of a broken mirror. These two late developments alone reduce the narrative integrity of the film to rubble of another kind.
Tarkovsky plays fast and loose with a creeping paranoid sensibility throughout this putative 'sci-fi' film but uses this queasiness to offset and de-center the analogical moral aspirations of the 'quest' within the quest and to cover the dangerous (problematic) critique of modernity that lies somewhere just off-center (off-screen). This is NOT a quasi-covert anti-Soviet film so much as a quasi-overt anti-modern film. Token wish fulfillment is brought under vast pressure through the refusal of the Writer and the Scientist to enter The Room, after the long trek, through the paradoxical insinuation that secret desires fulfilled may, just as likely, turn out to be curses. Subsequently, the Writer and the Scientist are denounced by the Stalker as soulless egotists and he sinks (returns) into a stupor upon returning to the bleak world outside The Zone.
Seeking fulfillment of his own wish -- through The Room -- has been renounced (deferred), as well, as he set himself the selfless role of guide (following in the ambiguous footsteps of other so-called 'guides' to The Room). The Stalker has, in fact, developed a highly suggestive ethic for entering The Zone that includes ritualistic pathfinding, guiding only people of so-called impeccable character and putting them at the frontline of the prospective dangers associated with making the trek; as such, he guides them through their very own fears and compulsions. He is dejected to learn that the Writer and the Scientist fail these tests, and he is equally morose about his spurned intentions to act as midwife to other people's dreams. He is the failed prophet, the failed romantic and, therefore, one of "the most interesting of men".
Gavin Keeney (November 2001)
Apologies - The PDF was taken offline 07/15/05
Tarkovsky's Mirror (1974) / Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (1983) / Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972)
Slavoj Zizek, "The Thing from Inner Space" (ArtMargins, 1999) / “The Thing from Inner Space: On Tarkovsky” also appeared in Angelaki, Vol. 4, No. 3 (December 1999)
Tarkovsky on the Web (Skywalking) / More Tarkovsky (Tea @ 5)
Stalker (The Wish Machine) - Mostar Films, 1979 - 161 minutes - Color/B&W - Russian w/ English subtitles - w/ Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, and Alisa Freindlikh
RusCiCo - "RUSCICO (RUSSIAN CINEMA COUNCIL) is a commercial association of Russian and foreign companies, created for the purpose of realizing a complex program of restoring, remastering, replication and world distribution of a collection of the best Soviet and Russian feature, documentary and animated films, as well as of film versions of the best ballet, opera and theatre productions, in a DVD format. The project's budget will allow RUSCICO to release on DVD discs, within the 1999-2005 period, over 120 motion pictures produced at MOSFILM, LENFILM, GORKY FILM, GEORGIA-FILM, SOYUZMULTFILM, and other studios."
Andrei Tarkovsky Companion (Artficial Eye) - "Moscow Elegy" (Alexander Sokurov). Conceived to mark the 50th anniversary of Tarkovsky’s birth, this is a highly personal tribute by Alexander Sokurov -- the acclaimed director of "Russian Ark" and "Mother and Son" -- to the man who was both his mentor and friend. Reflecting upon Tarkovsky’s life, his far-reaching influence and the void left by his defection from Soviet Russia to Europe in 1982, this elegiac film features fascinating footage of the man at work and rest, and, of course, his films. Russia 1987, 88 minutes, Russian & Italian with English subtitles / "One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch" (Chris Marker). This appreciation of Tarkovsky made by his friend Chris Marker for the French television series "Cinema du Notre Temps" is both an illuminating personal portrait and a poetic study of the Russian master’s films. Granted access to the set of "The Sacrifice" Marker captured fascinating and insightful behind-the-scenes footage, including the editing process which the then gravely ill Tarkovsky conducted from his sickbed. France 1999, 55 minutes, colour, French, English, Italian & Russian with English subtitles / "Tempo di Viaggio" ("Time of a Journey") (Andrei Tarkovsky & Tonino Guerra). Tarkovsky’s documentary explores the creation of the screenplay for his penultimate film "Nostalgia". It shows his wide-ranging discussions with his Italian co-writer Tonino Guerra (Antonioni’s regular collaborator) and the hunt for suitable locations that might embody his vision of the film. Italy 1983, 62 minutes, colour, Italian & Russian with English subtitles.
