The title of a book of conversations with Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, ‘Sculpting in Time’, is, to my mind, perfectly illustrative of the transcendent power of his work. The atemporality of Tarkovsky’s cinematic vision is nowhere more spellbinding than in 1979’s ‘Stalker’; a film that has become embedded in my psyche since I first watched it some 3 or 4 years ago. Despite, or perhaps because of, repeat viewings it retains its ponderous mysticism and dream-like aura, becoming something of an artistic sanctuary to retreat to at times from the often frenetic momentum of everyday life.
‘Stalker’ must rank as one of the most analysed of films, indeed the web would appear to be strewn with disparate analyses and conjecture, and yet there is so much be said about the film on philosophic, analogous and purely poetic levels, that I feel no sense of opprobrium for skimming my own stone across the lake of interpretation.
Based loosely upon the novel ‘Roadside Picnic’ by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, the film opens with the eponymous ‘Stalker’ agreeing – against the frantic wishes of his wife and mysteriously malformed child – to take two men, ‘Writer’ and ‘Professor’, into the forbidden territory known as the ‘Zone’, a place in which some kind of unexplained phenomenon – maybe a meteorite, maybe government conspiracy, or maybe even extraterrestrial activity – has distorted the orthodox laws of physics, leaving multiform dangers lurking beneath the apparently tranquil surface. Within the Zone is the ‘Room’, in which one’s deepest desires will be made a reality.
On an aesthetic level the cinematography is masterful. The washed-out sepia tones of the industrial wasteland (a fictional template for the Chernobyl disaster that was yet to come), starkly contrast with the often supernatural serenity of the Zone. It serves to both enervate and rejuvenate the trio; they lie upon the ground as if trying to affect some kind of cathartic communion with the life-affirming powers of the terra firma that might happen to percolate through to them.
If you were prone to the association of ideas, and I am, you could view the Zone itself as being the physical incarnation of the strange ‘psychological ocean’ that incites visions and hypnosis in Tarkovsky’s earlier film ‘Solaris’.
Adhering to the conventions of ‘Tarkovskian time’, the film proceeds at a languorous, almost weightless, pace with single shots lasting several minutes at a time. According to Wikipedia, in 163 minutes there are a total of 142 shots, a ridiculously scant number when compared to the often epileptic nature of modern Hollywood fare.
The score, composed by Edward Artemiev, adds much to the overarching ambience of a dream-state that pervades the visuals, utilising traditional instruments such as an Iranian tar and flutes and intermeshing them with a bristling electronic dissonance.
Essentially, the film stands as a cinematic allegory for the nature of all philosophical enquiry. It demonstrates the willingness of humanity to mine the abstract for deeper meaning, the gnostic urge to attain some kind of esoteric spiritual insight that might herald salvation from the mundane order of mere mortals.
Each of the three explorers arrive at the Zone with their own distinct agendas. Writer is disillusioned with his work, laden with vice and holding steadfast to his conviction in the efficacy of the true artistic statement to trump all other concerns. Professor is a refined man of science, interested only in uncovering empirical truth. He is goaded by Writer for simply seeking his Nobel Prize, yet, as it transpires, he harbours his own destructive motives for reaching the Room.
Whilst they are myopic, the Stalker is humble yet confused. He is the antipode to the two intellectuals; a renegade who leads men on to the attainment of their desires, yet seeks a desperate truth, dogged by the fact that his contact with the Zone has resulted in his child's malformities. He is haunted by memories of a fellow Stalker known as Porcupine who, upon entering the Room, had his latent wishes for great wealth granted and, in the tidal wave of prevailing guilt, committed suicide.
This notion of faith in the ambiguous permeates through every layer of the film; the two intellectuals unerringly follow the Stalker through the Zone despite warnings of its dangers and the manifest lack of evidence to substantiate them. One could see the bolts bound with bandages tossed by Stalker to delineate a safe path as symbolic of the way philosophical and intellectual advancement is affected, by many great leaps into uncharted space which may or may not allow transitory passage.
One of the most intriguing sequences occurs as the camera pans across a collection of supposedly random artifacts submerged in water - a syringe, coins, a machine gun, and such like. These serve as emblems of the manifold and elementary dogmas that proliferate through human existence, all the time inspiring and demanding a persistent level of faith - medicine, economics, war, religious iconography, the transition of time...
And yet, there is the compelling theory that the Room, and the film as a whole, is simply an exercise in aphophenia, whereby meaningful patterns and connections are construed from random items of information. We the audience are lead blind through the film, searching for intellectual meaning, sifting through the ambiguous stratigraphy that we are offered - the undulations of sand, the ringing telephone, the crown of thorns - in order that we can feel sated in some way by our immersed investment in the artistic medium.
Ultimately, the travellers to the Room have a crisis of faith and waver on the threshold, deigning to submit themselves to its possible revelations, accepting the superficiality of the ulterior motives that have driven them there, and consigning themselves to the psychological safe haven that supplants the unknown and the unexplored, the Nietzschean abyss that might very possibly stare back at them.
The fascinating behind-the-scenes accounts of 'Stalker' can also be interpreted as a strange encapsulation of the overall aura that the film conveys. The genesis of the film was notoriously protracted, with Tarkovsky coming close to abandoning the project at several instances. Having spent a year shooting the external scenes it was discovered that incompatible camera film had been used, rendering the entire work unusable.
Tarkovsky was cast into a state of despondency, a response to which any creative mind would empathise, knowing or sensing the acute agony of losing forever so much of their work. In the end, his dogged faith in the project convinced the Soviet studio Mosfilm to maintain their financing, and by all accounts the re-shot footage was completely different, provoking the romantic rumination as to what this 'lost version' of 'Stalker' would have resembled.
The romantic mythology of the 'artist dying for his art' can also be applied to Tarkovsky and 'Stalker'. As much of the shooting took place near a hydroelectric station outside Tallinn, Estonia, the proximity to toxic liquids (captured on film as strange foaming water), resulted in Tarkovsky, his wife and one of the principal actors dying of cancer several years later. The awareness of this through hindsight acts as a poignant primer onto which the poetic philosophising as to the nature of immortality and fulfilled desires are layered.
In the end, the simplest and most profound expression of faith is invoked by the Stalker's long-suffering wife who, in an extraordinary 'breach of the fourth wall' monologue, professes her love for him regardless of his wayward shortcomings. The celebrated final scene, in which their malformed child apparently uses her powers of psychokinesis to shift objects along a table still remains wonderfully open to interpretation and has been aped in more recent films such as 'Inception' (although the astute will read the scene as closing the circle begun from the opening sequence of the family in bed).
Many would contend that 'Stalker' is not even Tarkovsky's finest film, opting instead for 'Andrei Rublev', 'Solaris' or 'Mirror'; but in my view it sits comfortably among the masterpieces of the cinematic medium, containing several astonishingly beautiful images that I believe have seldom been surpassed.
It is a film that gets to the heart of man's longing for an inner truth that, in the end, should probably remain out of reach, and the door to the Room remain wisely unopened.
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