Stalker: a personal reflection

You dream of one thing and get something quite different

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Soviet Union, 1979

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While ReidsonFilm gird our loins in preparation for our next season of film reviews, this week one of the team reflects on a personal favourite, Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

We also thought it would be a good opportunity to point our newer readers in the direction of the first (and only) ReidsonFilm original production. A link follows this piece.

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Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker is almost three hours long. Yet, on viewing, the film’s creeping pace makes it feel even longer. This, however, is no slight against the 1979 classic. When I first saw the film, five years ago, I found it a challenging watch: agonisingly long tracking shots, obtuse, meandering dialogue, and an altogether ambiguous narrative. Yet it had a strange, alien tone I had not encountered before in cinema, and despite not being able to fully make sense of what I had seen I had no hesitation in succumbing to repeated subsequent viewings.

At its core the film’s plot is quite simple. Our protagonist, known only as the Stalker, guides a Writer and a Professor through a mysterious, forbidden wasteland known as ‘The Zone’, in search of a room rumoured to grant the deepest desires of anyone who enters it. However, with Stalker the devil is in the detail. The film is rich in symbolism and metaphor, and philosophical debate permeates every line of its dialogue.

Characters’ motivations are constantly in flux and their intentions are foggy. You could spend years unpicking these threads in an attempt to build some grand unifying theory that encompasses Tarkovsky’s motivation behind Stalker, but I think, fundamentally, this is a film that must be felt before it is understood. In the words of Tarkovsky himself:

Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.

Recently, I had the opportunity to see Stalker at The Watershed Cinema in Bristol. The experience was nothing short of sublime, and seeing the film projected onto a big screen I was taken aback by the power of its imagery. Adopting a less analytical approach, I’d like to give a personal account of some of the striking moments from the film and the elements of Tarkovsky's craft that contribute to their weight.

Overwhelming misery and deprivation haunt this opening shot. A sluggish tracking shot gradually pushing its way into the room where the Stalker and his family share a bed. A monochrome colour palette emphasises the tattered walls, and ragged window frame. Water seeps through the floor boards. There is a dramatic chiaroscuro that highlights these varied textures and you can’t help, to not just feel, but also smell the decay in this room. Other than some crutches, belonging to the Stalker’s daughter ‘Monkey’, the room is bare and there is a sonic scarcity punctuated only by the lonely whistle of a distant train.

This shot shows the introduction of our lead characters to the Stalker before he takes them to the Zone. We witness a conversation between the Writer, a cynical artist whose existential moans indicate a man who has fallen out of love with his art, and the Professor who embodies science and rationality. His curiosity and anxiety about the potential for the room to be misused will later become apparent. The men’s stark ideals and the lack of proper names paints them as archetypes, and indeed Stalker does seem to take place in the mythological realm.

The world itself feels timeless, disconnected from any concrete reality. Other than our characters and the seemingly mute bartender, the bar in this scene is empty. The atmosphere is cold and liminal, with flickering overhead lights. I can only imagine that once they leave, the bar blips out of existence only to reappear when our characters return from their journey at the end of the film.

Sometimes the context of a shot is as important as its form. Following a three-minute sequence through a sepia-toned, industrial wasteland we finally arrive in the Zone. The frame is flooded with verdant greens and blue hues. There is a contradiction in this landscape: one would usually associate the transformation to colour with an appeal to awe and wonderment (think The Wizard of Oz), but there is a hostility to the Zone that perhaps makes it even eerier than the Stalker’s home town. Thick fog rises from the ruined remains of civilisation, and overgrown shrubs and vegetation dominate an apocalyptic scene. Yet the Stalker is clearly happy to be back:

It’s so beautiful, there’s no one here!

This is his exclamation before disappearing into the undergrowth, writhing around in ecstasy. This is the first of many occasions where the Stalker’s companions (and the audience) will question his sanity.

The reverence with which the Stalker treats the Zone is central to its embodied mysticism. There is very little evidence to support the presence of the paranormal in the Zone, but the Stalker’s caution and care in navigation reflect his genuine belief in the dangers he espouses. Tarkovsky’s intimate close-ups capture a deep sense of fear in the face of the Stalker (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy). Where another director would reveal the supernatural through plot points, Tarkovsky instead indicates the Zone’s ‘magic’ through texture and form in the frame.

After some further meandering our characters inexplicably decide to take a nap - perhaps it is the constant yapping from the Writer that causes this? At this point the film’s already slow pacing relaxes further as we sink into a surreal dream sequence. A top-down tracking shot slides over a shallow body of water, it feels as though we are wading through the thick, primordial mud of the Stalker’s subconscious, as an array of bizarre objects, including a gun, bowl of fish and portrait of Jesus, appear and disappear from the frame. The moment is meditative, and a haunting ambient track - music is sparse in Stalker - only drags you deeper. There is a cyclical nature to the sequence which begins and ends on our slumbering guide. A female voice cites a passage from the Book of Revelation:

And there was a great earthquake. And the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair. And the moon became like blood; and the stars of the sky fell to the earth, as a fig tree casts it's unripe figs when shaken by a great wind. And the sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth and the great men and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the strong and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains. And they said to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”

Throughout Stalker, themes of spirituality and faith are omnipresent. Tarkovsky was an Orthodox Christian, and his filmic language often reflects that. However, the truths revealed by this language, including the significance of the great cosmic upheaval described in the passage above, have a universality that allows for interpretation outside of the theological.

The Stalker, the Writer and the Professor find themselves at the opening of a long dimly lit tunnel, known ominously as the ‘Meat Grinder’. According to the Stalker this is the most dangerous place in the Zone so they must proceed with caution. The Professor and the Writer draw matches to see who must take the lead (why the Stalker is given a free pass is unclear), and it is decided that the Writer will go first.

The set design for this sequence is one of the film’s most memorable. The texture of the location can be felt in the dank walls and heard in the crunching of glass under the Writer’s feet. The reverb within the tunnel has been distorted and takes on an alien quality. The Stalker is visibly terrified here, and as an audience conditioned to cinematic conventions of tension rising to a sudden crescendo, you can’t help but imagine the awful fate that the Writer is about to succumb to… and then nothing. There is no obvious danger here and the Stalker’s legitimacy is again called into question. The sequence ends with an absurd moment where the Writer pulls out a gun. The Stalker cries out, “Who are you going to shoot at there?” In the Zone there are no monsters hiding around the next corner, yet Tarkovsky still conjures the presence of ghosts.

This is perhaps the most iconic image from Stalker, a large concrete hall filled with sand dunes. Blue-green light floods in from above, haloing our characters. The dunes evoke the uncanny: are these natural formations or products of human artifice? After surviving the perils of the Meat Grinder, this chamber, which lies on the threshold of their final destination, seems to transcend the physical. The sound of Writer’s feet crunching through glass is now replaced with the cushioning of sand and, breaking the fourth wall, he delivers a pivotal monologue direct to camera:

What hell of a writer am I, if I hate to write? If for me it is a torture, an illness-like, shameful occupation, something like hemorrhoids…

Here I am reminded of an earlier quote from the Stalker himself:

For softness is great and strength is worthless. When a man is born, he is soft and pliable. When he dies, he is strong and hard. When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life. That which has become hard shall not triumph.

Is glass not a hardened form of soft, pliable sand? Could this be seen as a moment of growth for the Writer? 

Stalker is a cinematic journey that transcends conventional storytelling, and has a depth that I have not encountered in many other films. For those who haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend giving it a watch— but I’d also suggest a strong coffee before hitting play!

It is close to a perfect film - N

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