Stalker

It's been 5 years (already!) since I saw my last Tarkovsky. I had come to rest with Zerkalo, because here was a man, one of few, very few in the cinema, who can permeate so deeply into the essential mystery of how things move, and he only made a handful of movies really so I must make them last, and take them in when the time feels right. My next one might be in another 5 years time, but yesterday night the time felt right for this, one I've been heartily anticipating for years.

This is Tarkovsky entering the mind once more. He never does it in any obvious, Inception way, it's never actually the mind; but we arrive at a place, a source of the imagining, where wind blows from and rings each thing into being. In Rublev he was the artist looking to paint the face of god in a godless world that concealed it. In Solyaris he was the cosmonaut. In Zerkalo, a filmmaker who recalled a whole life, receiving visions at the doorstep. Here he's the Stalker who takes us into the Zone, obvious enough.

Each one is self-referential of course about the very process of stepping into the movie. The Zone as a Tarkovsky movie - full of desolate nature and a mysterious presence that bends logic. We first have to cross the iron border where censors (his illiterate Soviet patrons) prevent entry.

This is the border guarded by the irongated mechanisms of reason that has to be crossed before we can begin our guided meditation beyond logic. One way he does this is by splitting himself into characters. One is a scientist, which is Tarkovsky's critique of a mechanistic worldview that reduces a tree to what biological facts it can explain. Another is a writer, a surrogate for Tarkovsky's intellectual self who despairs about the possibility of words to communicate sense. The Stalker himself as who Tarkovsky feels himself to be most purely, the guide who knows the whims of this landscape and wants nothing other than to bring us to the doorstep of miracle.

It's his uncanny ability, as always, to pave the way for that miracle. We never enter "the room", as it were. But we are brought to the doorstep. He cultivates the space that leads up to that apperception, this is what people call elusive and dreamlike. Tarkovsky's real work is that he teaches, rewires, us how to see, effects this change in the whole of logic of space, so that we leave with Tarkovsky eyes to go back out. This is far more valuable, and insightful, than any of the imagery that blends industrial grime, fish and religious iconography (in one memorable instance, with voice-over from John's Apocalypse). It's that elements can swirl and reflect in this way.

He does several wonderful things, some of them completely breathtaking like the meditation on music that rings a chord in the listener who responds to it with what we have no other name to call but soul. He stretches space, seemingly with no effort, both in the industrial segment early and then across the Zone. He makes the geography elastic, shuffles boundaries of forward and back. It's not that this means something again, it's that the place in which you can receive _anything_ (which is perception itself) can bent thus. The result is a marvelous sense of heaving. Thunderous views of a train, or waterfalls, crash across the frame. Same thing. It's his most sculptural work so far.

The dilapidated Soviet locales provide ample opportunity for gnarly imagery, I simply shudder to think that it was actually filmed in places like we see. It's possible that we're seeing the place that killed him and several more from cast and crew.

But there's also another side that I want to draw my distance from. In Zerkalo he had reached a point of equanimity that lets go of questions and accepts what is, that for better or worse a life was lived. This is gone here and replaced with a sense of tiredness and cynicism that narrows down to the personal. Now it's not about what is let go of, it's about what is clung onto. None of it is sci-fi of course. But too much is an artist's stream-of-consciousness on what place his own art has. Too much is angsty here. What am I to make for example of Stalker being escorted to bed by his wife, now a pathetic figure who complains that no one wants what he has to show? This is a dangerous path to take because it substitutes the struggle to make sense of life, with the struggle to deliver art about doing it and complain that no one appreciates it. The latter Tarkovsky is far less interesting to me than the former. I fear he would get worse in this regard, compounded by his exile from home.

I've read about how Tarkovsy was possibly interested in Zen Buddhism and Tao while preparing for this and may have incorporated influence. There is the notion of spontaneous arising in the Zone as the Zen mind and the bit about how the soft endures while the hard breaks that comes from the Daodejing. It doesn't really venture into either, its preconceptions simply lie elsewhere. But Tarkovsky fails to make use of the Buddhist wisdom in his own predicaments. Instead of letting go, he clings to the burden of fixed views. He suffers their weight, for no reason I might add. The title of this post is a Taoist excerpt.

So there are two sides here. The journey to where perception is made fluid and mingles with its reflection and the intellectual burden of its creator. One soft, the other hard. Maybe in another 5 years I will get to see what gives way in Nostalghia.

Andrei Tarkovsky is a rarity among filmmakers in that he creates films that resemble elaborate (and always smartly written, beautifully shot and superbly acted) puzzles. The pieces are always scattered, and Tarkovsky relies on his viewer to bring the final element of the puzzle along with him. SOLARIS explores the boundaries of consciousness and the sense of grief (and it uses the titular planet as a metaphor for God). ANDREI ROUBLEV is a multi-layered voyage into religious belief. STALKER, however, is far more spiritual and existential than both of them.

A teacher and a scientist wish to go to a restricted patch of nature - the mythical conscious "Zone" - to make their wishes come true. To enter the area and survive its numerous danger, they hire a man sensible to the Zone's thoughts and actions, a Stalker. What they find there turns out to be very different from what they expected, as they come to discover who they truly are.

There's only so much you can say without getting drowned in details that would appear heavy-handed on paper but flow seamlessly on screen. Quite often, Tarkovsky reduces his characters to silence, letting their movements and eyes convey their thoughts and feelings and letting the viewer bring his own thoughts and beliefs to the film. One of STALKER's many treats is that it invites you to get carried away into your own thoughts, flowing with the images as it provides new questions to ponder... In that sense, the film is very much like a philosophical poem: a very simple surface covering innumerable layers of meaning. Yet the images Tarkovsky provides - whether filming landscapes or wide-shots or simply peering into his actors' extraordinary faces - make this almost hypnotic.

STALKER is a treasure: an invitation to go on a mental ride with a poet and philosopher. A film that makes you wonder more about yourself yet without making you anxious. The few existing films like STALKER are the reason why cinema is called "art"!

Some have claimed that "Stalker" is not a science fiction film. I'd say it's more of a science fiction film than most of what Hollywood passes off as part of the genre, most of which are simply action films with a sci-fi bent. Stalker is science fiction in the vein of the genres greatest writers like Phillip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem. It's pure science fiction, based on science, metaphysics and speculation, not some action fantasy or space opera that fits into the genre on the technicality that it takes place "in the future" or "a long, long time ago". The film is slow...very slow but it has to be to put you into the mindset of the film. After the opening 30 minutes the pacing actually draws you into the film in a more personal way more than any Cyborg-post-apocalyptic-hell crap Hollywood could spew out. This film is truly sci-fi, and truly great sci-fi.

The characters at the heart of Tarkovsky's "Stalker" are people who embark on an arduous journey only to discover that they had no idea what they wanted to gain from it. The central character is a "stalker," a man who makes a living by illegally escorting people through a restricted area to The Room, a place where their greatest wish will supposedly come true. Exactly why the area is restricted is never made perfectly clear; in the novel this film is partially based on, "The Roadside Picnic," it was a site where aliens briefly landed, and The Room was an object they left behind almost as if it were refuse. But Tarkovsky would rather not settle for such a flat explanation. To him, The Room is a place that means different things to the people who journey there, and the stark, ravished landscape they must journey through consists of the phobias and anxieties that they can hardly bear to face. The expedition the men experience is a long and often maddening one, and there are many scenes where the camera lingers on a beautifully composed shot so that the viewer can take time to understand how the characters fit into the settings and how those settings form both natural and supernatural obstacles.

Andrei Tarkovsky was an artist who did not like giving solid answers to the questions his films posed. He sculpted his stories so that viewers who had the patience and self-discipline to stay attentive all the way through could draw their own conclusions. If there is any specific meaning to "Stalker," it is that we have to fully understand anything for which we are willing to alter our lives.

There have been some comments about this film's length. I am initially reminded of the scene in "Amedeus" where Mozart is told that his composition has "Too many notes" to this he replies "There are just enough..." This film offers great insight into the inner workings of not just the creative mind but the social will of mankind. If you are a viewer who enjoys film please disregard the whining of those who don't enjoy investigating thoroughly the possibility of a well thought out and concise perspective and please watch this masterpiece of modern film. The director leads the viewer through some profound aspects of humanity with such brilliance and in my opinion swiftness that to pass it by would be a shame.