Stalker - Andrei Tarkovsky

(If you haven't seen it.) Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker is, among many things, an exercise in pace. And it is your second viewing of the film that counts. Your first will be needed to adjust to the pace. The pace is ostensibly slow. The thing tries to get you to 'see' in a different way. The second time you sit before it, however, just maybe you'll fall into step with it. If you don't - no problem. It is not for everyone. Above all else, Stalker is a film of ideas. There are ideas within the plot and, quite separately, there are ideas voiced within conversations throughout the film. Some of these conversational ideas are more interesting than others, and certainly one of them (about writers who know they are geniuses) is blatantly wrong. Stalker is haunting and unique. If you think you'd take to a Russian film made in 1979, about three men breaking through the guarded perimeter of a 'Zone' to reach a supernatural 'Room' where (possibly) a wish will be granted, a zone that, before it can be crossed, must be tested for traps by throwing steel nuts tied to strips of bandage - if you think you'd like this sort of journey, then Stalker is likely to be unforgettable. Good luck with it.

If you must tell someone about a film, then perhaps say something original? No tedious 'saying of the plot'?

It's the railway-trolley scene isn't it. By far the most important reason to see Stalker. The perfect example of how a scene is what it is when taken in isolation, but when placed next to what came before and what comes after, it is so much more. The rail journey comes right after the penetration of the guarded perimeter of the Zone. (Psychologically) after mortal fear comes a still anxiety; (physically) after darting about and brief stops, comes a steady railway progress; (audibly) after a jumble of sounds (splashes, engines, pistol shots) comes the beat of those wheels on the track. And it is the pace of that sound, isn't it, which is genius. It could have been whatever the director wanted; it had to be chosen - that's the point. And that pace, that beat, which is a pause in the film for 'Stalker' 'Writer' and 'Professor', and a pause for the audience also, is dead right. The eventual distortion of the sound of those wheels is dead right also - we move into a Zone where much else is distorted. Do go track it down again.

I cannot believe that I missed Tarkovsky's Stalker. What to say? The lingering pace of the film frustrates many, but suits others perhaps unexpectedly as an unplanned tour with an obsessive guide round an abandoned Chernobyl might. Pace is everything in Stalker surely. Isn't there something interesting in the several techniques Tarkovsky uses to get his pace? He gradually slows his depiction of travel as the movie progresses. At the beginning Stalker moves from his apartment to the bar where he is to meet his clients. This is shown in a camera 'cut' - the fastest form of travel a film has at its disposal. Stalker and his two clients move from there to the Zone perimeter at the speed of a Land-Rover - vehicle speed. Once through the perimeter they move by rail - trolley speed - to the fields of the Zone. From there they move on foot, stop start, testing the way with their steel and their strip of bandage. Travel is slowing. After that, they creep through the curving tunnel that is the 'meatgrinder'. Finally there remains a slow wade through the 'baptism' pool and they have arrived at the destination. The Room. The camera moves (or not) at Tarkovsky pace and, separate from that, the seekers move towards the destination at a pace that is progressively slowed by the director. It is one of the ways in which the mood of Stalker is achieved.

And then of course there is the review-wide tedious question of the meaning of Stalker. A film about which you tend to ask "What was all that about?" should (surely?) open up doubts in the mind about the film-maker and, more so, the audience that is indulging itself in that question. An 'obscure' film can be ok: but it usually isn't. When a film-director is deliberately obscure, then almost always he is a tiresome individual - isn't he? A great film demands time and thought and effort from an audience - we all know that. But if an audience is to struggle hard to work out a film's meaning, specifically this, then the meaning had better be damned interesting surely? Or if it isn't particularly so, then the bland meaning had better be presented in some astonishingly mannered way: the triumph of style over content if you wish. 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to everybody's mind, whether it falls into either of these two camps. Did Tarkovsky have a tiresome hidden meaning which is there for his audiences to decipher? Well actually, no he did not. He said it in several interviews, apparently, in which he voiced his exasperation (justifiable?) with certain of his audiences; and he 'voiced' it in 'Sculpting In Time' - 'The Zone doesn't symbolize anything. The Zone is a zone.' Just that.

So if Tarkovsky didn't bury a hidden meaning somewhere in Stalker, did he commit the sin's even more tiresome cousin? The director, or artist of any sort, who squirts some product out and says that it means whatever you want it to mean. This kind of 'artist' is just - plain - lazy. We can all do it surely? Magritte's pipe and black bowler-hat, being swept into a dustpan by a charwoman who  absently gazes at a 'Madonna' on the wall - neither is a comment on the fluctuating fortunes of Art-Movements, nor is some religious 'comment', and nor has it some feminist reading. It is not Art because I made it up in less than half a minute. You can do it with anything. Has Tarkovsky made a film that is just plain lazy? Has he deliberately scattered easy symbols, religious and societal, and spun childish obscurities? After all, there are strong symbols there, icons and syringes and the Gun all lying just beneath the surface of the flood water. Well perhaps he isn't being lazy and he is not setting cheap clues. Perhaps after all it's simple. There are religious and societal symbols certainly, and perhaps they are there because they straightforwardly tell you something about the straightforward story that is there before your eyes?

Lazy film-makers are one thing. But horribly more common, surely, are immature audiences looking for hidden meaning and mystery where none has been put there by the director. Does Tarkovsky's Stalker attract these audiences? (Chuckle) It's the Twin Towers to the fevered imaginations of the conspiracy-theorist isn't it. Stalker's audiences that crave mystery have agendas surely? They take a simple note out of a complex chord, a note that appeals to their imagination, they expand it wonderfully, and then conveniently (or genuinely perhaps) miss-hear the whole chord which is saying something far less mysterious of course. The hidden meanings claimed for Stalker, poor thing, range from environmental distortions that see a Zone 'getting back' at Man because he has abused the Natural World (the Zone has been put there by an outer influence, hasn't it, and wouldn't any 'getting-back' be the fault of that influence?) to religious ignorance (the Kingdom Of Heaven is not a wishing-well; it is something utterly different). 

Doesn't this nonsense arise because Tarkovsky's Zone is like a religious journey towards faith, Stalker is like a priest or a Christ who guides, the pool is like a place of baptism, the very word 'faith' is brought up repeatedly, the crown of thorns is there, the miracle of the cripple who 'now can walk' is amusingly played with? All of this 'like' stuff, but no 'is'. Of course the fact that Tarkovsky has a faith is irrelevant. The Zone and the Room are what they are, surely? Nothing more. The film is clear - people want to have their deepest wish come true; the Room promises them that; the journey is tricky; there is a catch: the Room sees not their conscious wish, but their unconscious wish, something they might not be proud of; and it grants that wish whether they want it or not; thus is the fuse blown on the attraction of the Room, a revelation from (a smarter) Writer to (a not so smart) Stalker which causes his break-down. 

If you wish however to look for meanings that got in, as it were, beneath the director's conscious mind, that's a different thing surely.

Some scenes - In the early morning, Stalker has got out of bed and is brushing his teeth, washing . . . He lights a water heater to left of shot, and a row of flames within the contraption flicker during the rest of the scene. Those flames, a horizontal rectangle of movement and light, bring the scene alive don't they? Later, a scene in the bar - the three meet before approaching the Zone; there are two strip-lights at the top of shot; one of them flickers all the time (at the beginning of the journey and again at its end). It's not necessary to the plot, it need not be symbolic of anything about that world, it need not be essential to anything at all - and yet the scene is far more visually interesting with it in.

The final scene - Monkey and her three glasses. Were Stalker divided into three sections - 'break-in'  'the Zone'  'life goes on' - then Monkey and the glasses-on-the-table happens at the end of 'life goes on' a sequence where the film is rounded off with a handful of these scenes. Writer and Professor are left in the bar with the same problems they had before; Stalker has a catastrophic problem - the way the Room operates on the unconscious has been revealed to him by Writer, he cannot trust even his wife to enter it, there will be no movement of the 'faithful' for him to guide through the Zone; Stalker's wife will never leave him, she knew what she was letting herself in for at the outset, she has addressed camera: "if there was no grief in life, there would be no hope of something better." Life goes on. And there, right at the end, is Monkey and the table and the glasses. This is not superpower, woo-hoo watch out everyone, rubbish. Surely it is simply strange, poetic, and very charming indeed? Nothing more. Her life goes on also.