Zona Page 3

  As the train makes its way beyond the barriers the jeep comes sliding along in its wake, on the coattails of the iron horse. The guards are hardly on the ball but, once the alarm is sounded and the searchlights flick on, they are not slow to open fire. It really is all action at this point—maybe Tarkovsky was right about starting slowly so people who’d come in by mistake had time to leave. There are ricochets and everything. Things get blown apart and the jeep crashes through a pile of crates. They come to a halt in another part of what seems an infinite warehouse complex, though the part they’re in seems not unlike the part they were in a few minutes earlier. The air is full of the cawing of birds. Instead of the lonesome whistle, there is the busy moan of foghorns. Whatever else it may be this is obviously a major transportation hub. Stalker tells Writer to see if there’s a trolley. In a few minutes we will see that he means a little diesel-powered thing that takes them along a narrowgauge railway track but at this point the word suggests that they are in one of the world’s more decrepit airports or an outpost of Sainsbury’s that has long since gone belly-up. Obediently, if rather grudgingly (later it will be all grudge and very little obedience), Writer goes looking for a trolley but finds only a volley—of fire from the guards. He is sent sprawling into a spongy safety net of botany. By this point he is possibly regretting all those drinks he downed before setting out on what is proving to be a quite dangerous escapade, not the well-oiled caper that he had envisaged. The sober Professor says he’ll go instead, into another even wetter and more ruined part of wherever-the-fuck they are. Shots are fired at him too but they miss and land in the water, leaving pale oblongs of light—reflections of windows, the world outside—to sway and settle and eventually, after the camera has moved on, to resume their shapely place in the brackish water’s scheme of things. Professor finds the trolley car and waves the others towards him, through the water that he’s just walked through, the water that is being dripped into by more of itself. You can see why Stalker didn’t mind about that puddle outside the bar: they all have wet feet now! Another hail of bullets, but harmless, Where Eagles Dare-ish in their harmlessness. They clamber onto the trolley car, hunched and seated, and they’re off, the three of them, chugging out of sight, screen left.

  THERE FOLLOWS ONE of the great sequences in the history of cinema. First there is Writer’s head in tight close-up while, in the unfocused background, some kind of landscape blurs past. The camera moves from Writer to Professor (in his bobble hat, the texture of his coat in sharp focus) to Stalker and back as they scrutinize their surroundings with concentration, perplexity, foreboding and, in the case of Writer, a suggestion of hungover befuddlement. These are the faces—the expressions—of travellers anywhere, from Columbus’s crew in search of the Americas to tourists in a taxi on their way from the airport to a city centre that they—Writer and Professor at least—have never visited before. They’re taking everything in even though they’re not sure if what they’re seeing is any different from what they’ve already seen or where they’ve just been. Frankly, they’re not entirely sure that what they’re taking in is worth taking in, a feeling we’ve all had as we make our hyperattentive way through the universally uninteresting, often desolate stretch between airport and the luxurious promise (hotel, cafés) of the city centre. Occasionally the camera permits a focused glimpse of what they are passing through—mist, a brick building, piles of discarded pipes, crates, a river (or possibly a lake)—but even then, even when we can see clearly, we are not sure what we are seeing. Outskirts, periphery, abandonedness. Buildings that are no longer what they were once intended for: sites of decayed meaning that may, as a result, have acquired a new and deeper meaning. It depends. On what? On whether we have entered the Zone yet. Difficult to say as the camera—fixed, implicitly, to the trolley—runs horizontally through this area of in-between-ness and indeterminacy. We are, as Roberto Calasso says of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, ‘on the threshold of a hidden world that one suspects is implicit in this world.’ The threshold is a thin line and it is also ubiquitous. Stalker must know if we are in the Zone—he, after all, has been here many times before. So what are his feelings? His expression of furrowed anxiety, of generalized unhappiness—all the world’s a prison— has not changed since the film began, when he was quarrelling with his wife, in his sweater and underwear. What we do see, quite clearly, is the patch of white on the left side of his closely cropped hair: is it the mark of a Stalker, of some kind of election? The insistent, soporific clack of the rails is gradually infused with and gives way to clangy electronic music, moving from the literal noise of mechanical operation to a dreamy rhythmic soundscape. It’s stood the test of time, this music by Eduard Artemiev with its Indianish drone of flute and stringed instrument (a Persian tar, to be precise) fed through a synth and washing over the steady—and steadily distorting—clang and clack of the rails. It still sounds far-out, has hardly dated at all. Give it a slight remix, put it through a system with some hefty subwoofers and there’d be more than a hint of Basic Channel or one of those other minimalist electronic outfits about it.

  In his poem ‘The Movies’, Billy Collins says he’s in the mood to watch a movie in which ‘someone embarks on a long journey, / a movie with the promise of danger.’ I like movies like that too, whether the journey is by boat (Apocalypse Now, Deliverance), train (Von Ryan’s Express) or car (take your pick). The idea of the road movie is almost tautologous in that all movies are—or should be—journeys, it’s just that some of them are so tedious you’d rather be on a bus from Oxford to London. Stalker is a literal journey that is also a journey into cinematic space and—in tandem—into time.

  Collins doesn’t care what dangers are encountered in the film he’s watching since he will just be sitting there, watching. So they’re our representatives, these three middle-aged men, sitting there watching, still and still moving, while the endless grey-black imagery slides past their eyes and into their heads. This long tracking sequence, following the trolley as it clanks and clangs along, is the most straightforward journey imaginable— horizontal, flat, right to left, in a straight line—and full of all the promised wonder of cinema. That’s what we are being sold in the trailers that precede what used to be called the ‘feature presentation’. Unfortunately this has become some of the most debased wonder in the history of the earth. It means explosions, historical epics in which the outcome of the Battle of Hastings is reversed by the arcane CGI prowess of Merlin the Magician, it means five-year-old children turning suddenly into snarling devils, it means wrecking cars and reckless driving, it means a lot of noise, it means that I have to time my arrival carefully (twenty minutes at least) after the advertised programme time if I am to avoid all this stuff which, if one were exposed to it for the full hour and a half, would cause one’s capacity for discernment to drop by fifty percent (or, conversely, one’s ability to tolerate stuff like this to increase a hundredfold). It means sitting there shaking one’s middle-aged head; it means that one is wary about going to the cinema. It means that there are more and more things on the street, in shops, on-screen and on telly from which one has to avert one’s ears and eyes. With television I have my strict rule, a rule applying to Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand, Graham Norton and a whole bunch of others whose names I don’t even know: I won’t have these people in the house. It’s not— as Stalker claimed—that all the world’s a prison; it’s just that a lot of what’s being shown on the world’s screens— televisions, cinemas, computers—is fit only for morons. Which is another reason why, in the long years since I first saw Stalker, I am as badly in need of the Zone and its wonders as any of the three men on the trolley as they sit there and the blurry landscape clangs past. The Zone is a place of uncompromised and unblemished value. It is one of the few territories left—possibly the only one—where the rights to Top Gear have not been sold: a place of refuge and sanctuary. A sanctuary, also, from cliché. That’s another of Tarkovsky’s virtues: an absolute freedom from cl
iché in a medium where clichés are not only tolerated but, in the form of unquestioning adherence to convention, expected. There are no clichés in Tarkovsky: no clichés of plot, of character, of framing, no clichés of music to underline the emotional meaning of a scene (or, as is more usually the case, to compensate or make good for an emotional meaning that would be absent were it not for the music). Actually, we need to qualify this slightly: there are no one else’s clichés in Tarkovsky. By the time of his final films, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice, however, he is reliant both conceptually and incrementally on Tarkovskyan cliché. Bergman said that, towards the end, Tarkovsky ‘began to make films that copied Tarkovsky.’ Wim Wenders felt exactly the same way about Nostalghia, that Tarkovsky was ‘using some of his typical narrative devices and shots as if they were between quotation marks.’13 The guru became his own most devoted disciple.

  We are in no hurry for this sequence to be over with, partly because it’s difficult to keep track of how long it lasts. Writer’s appearing to nod off suggests that, on this most linear of journeys, we are drifting into nonlinear time, are entering dream-time, but a dream-time where everything, every treasured detail is anchored firmly in the real and the now. This is not like the flashing psychedelic rhetoric—’Beyond the Infinite’—of the closing phase of 2001; this is strictly within the finite; it’s just impossible to say how long this finitude might extend. We never know when we’re going to die, we learn in Solaris, and because of that we are, at any one moment, immortal. I read Stanislaw Lem’s novel to see if that line was in the book or if it was something added by Tarkovsky. As far as I could tell—I skimmed—it wasn’t there, but years later I came across a similar sentiment in a poem by Auden: ‘Happy the hare at morning for he cannot know the waking hunter’s thoughts.’ What are their thoughts, the thoughts of these three men, as they travel into the Zone? Professor and Writer are thinking—wondering—exactly the same thing that we are, the question we asked as children on every journey with our parents: Are we there yet? Is this the Zone? Is this it? That, perhaps, is a question that can be answered only by the questioner, when he stops asking it. We are in the Zone when we believe we are there. The blurred landscape slips and clangs past. What we are seeing may be the external representation of the dream-flecked remains of Writer’s sleep, a sleep littered with booze-blurred memories of things he has seen a few minutes or hours earlier: abandoned buildings, discarded metals, the man-made poised to return to the natural. Is anything especially worthy of our attention? Everything is, or may be.

  IT LASTS LONG ENOUGH, this sequence (a sequence one remembers as a single take, though it actually consists of five), to lull us into a kind of trance. There then occurs one of the miracles of cinema, one of several miracles in a film about an allegedly miraculous place. It’s not a jump cut or fade but suddenly and gently—the clanging and echoey clank of the music and trolley are still on the sound track—unambiguously, we’re in colour and in the Zone.14 You can watch the trolley car sequence again and again, can refuse to succumb to its hypnotic monotony, and you can never predict where it will come, this moment of subtle and absolute transition. Camera and trolley continue clanking forward for a few moments and then come to a halt. The camera pauses and moves back.

  We are there. We are in the Zone.

  It is every bit as lovely as Stalker claims—and, at the same time, quite ordinary. The air is full of the sound of birds, of wind in the trees, running water. Mist, muted greens. Weeds and plants swaying in the breeze. The tangled wires of a tilted telegraph pole. The rusting remains of a car. We are in another world that is no more than this world perceived with unprecedented attentiveness. Landscapes like this had been seen before Tarkovsky but—I don’t know how else to put it—their beingness had not been seen in this way. Tarkovsky reconfigured the world, brought this landscape—this way of seeing the world—into existence. Many forms of landscape depend on a particular artist, or writer or artistic movement to render them beautiful, to make the rest of us see what has always been there (as the romantics did for mountains, or John C. Van Dyke for the deserts of the American West). But it’s not only the unchanging, eternal, natural world that needs to be mediated in this way. Walker Evans opened our eyes—Stalker himself will soon use that very phrase of his own teacher and guide—to the sagging shacks, wrecked cars and fading signs of America in the thirties. To that extent Evans anticipated Bresson’s reminder to himself, in Notes on the Cinematographer: ‘Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.’ A little later Bresson added a mediumspecific twist to this ambition: ‘Quality of a new world which none of the existing arts allowed to be imagined.’ Two related questions, then: would we regard this landscape of fields, abandoned cars, tilted telegraph poles and trees as beautiful without Tarkovsky? And could it have been brought into existence by any medium other than film?

  If Stalker had not been the first Tarkovsky film I saw I might have recognized elements of this landscape from Mirror—the cross T’s of the telegraph poles, the greens (made more lush, somehow, by being subdued), the distinction between the man-made and the natural being eroded before our eyes. If I had seen Mirror I might have recognized this landscape, these elements, as Tarkovskyland, might have echoed the first words uttered by Stalker: Here we are. Home at last.

  And yet, at some level, I must have recognized or at least been familiar with a modest and local variant of this kind of landscape—which perhaps accounts, in part, for why the film has made such a deep impression on me.

  There is just one train station now in Cheltenham, where I grew up, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s there were four. One of these, Leckhampton, was only a five-minute walk from where we lived. My father used to take me up there when I was a toddler to watch trains steam in and out. The line and the station closed down in 1962, when I was four. I have no recollection of going there with my dad (only of his telling me that we used to go there) but I have strong memories of heading off to this abandoned, brambly zone to play with a couple of friends, when we were eight or nine. The windows of the disused station building had been smashed and the rain had seeped in; it looked as if it had long ago fallen into decay. (It may have only been three of four years previously that the station closed down but this, to me, was half a lifetime ago.) Faded, rain-buckled, the timetable was still displayed—a memorial to its own passing. An empty packet of Player’s cigarettes, the ones my mother smoked, with the face of the bearded sailor on the front, gone to a watery grave at the bottom of a puddle: frog-spawny, rust-coloured, pond-size, cloudy with gnats. The tracks had rusted, were overgrown with weeds, grass, stinging nettles, dandelions. Sometimes we followed them for a while, beyond the ends of the platforms, but never as far as the next station along the line—also abandoned—a couple of miles away, in Charlton Kings.

  Here we are, says Stalker. Home at last.

  THE ZONE PARTS of Stalker were filmed in or near two abandoned hydroelectric power plants—one of which had been partially blown up when the retreating Red Army was trading space for time in 1941—on the Jägala River, about fifteen miles from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. This was not Tarkovsky’s first choice for the Zone. He initially intended to film around an old Chinese mine in the Tian Shan foothills near Isfara in Tajikistan. Apart from the single-line railroad track curving through it this earlier version of the Zone has almost nothing in common with the place in the actual film. It’s more like the badlands of Death Valley (where Antonioni got the name for and shot the final scenes of Zabriskie Point): devoid of vegetation, pale yellow and desert-dry, stark.15 Tarkovsky loved everything about the original location, but when an earthquake devastated the region before filming could begin, an alternative had to be found. As Rerberg put it, ‘The first stone thrown out of the wall of the script was the location.’ Footage exists of the original location: one can see how it might have served Tarkovsky’s purpose, though the film would have been quite different, would have lacked the damp, drippy, almost-ordinarin
ess of the Zone in its final incarnation. Alien, unearthly (a word applied to a surprising number of places on earth), it lends itself perfectly to sci-fi but lacks the subtle magic of the more temperate Zone. As such it would have rendered that line of Stalker’s—‘Home at last’—rather odd.16

  Stalker utters this cosy sentiment after stretching his arms, as though he has been sleeping, like one awakened from the dream of life. But it’s not only him: the whole landscape seems to be emerging from sleep, rubbing the mist from its eyes, as if it has been stirred into consciousness by the fact of being seen, appreciated, visited, needed. We have only just arrived and already there is a sense, dormant and untapped, of slumbering sentience about the place. How quiet it is, says Stalker. The quietest place on earth. One sees what he means even though, strictly speaking, it’s not quiet at all. There are the sounds of birds, wind, flowing water, sounds that emphasize the lack of other sounds, the sounds that constitute noise, industrialization, cities, traffic, stress. As with the unquiet quiet, so with the solitude: Not a single soul here, says Stalker. What about us? asks Writer, logically enough.17

  Stalker is overwhelmed by his return to the Zone, struggling to compute and explain the way that it compares with his memories of earlier visits. The flowers don’t seem to smell. Partly because—this is Writer again—there’s a pervasive smell of damp bog. No, that’s the river, says Stalker quickly, like an estate agent assuaging the doubts of a potential buyer. But Writer has made his point: to him, the Zone looks like a bit of a dump. He doesn’t feel at all like he’s home. On the contrary: at this point, he understands exactly what Heidegger meant when he said that ‘the unhomely does not allow us to be at home.’ Writer, evidently, is in a bad way. He’s one of those people who could wake up in paradise but wouldn’t know he was there unless he found something to grumble about. There were flower beds here, Stalker says, but Porcupine trampled them down. (This is the first we’ve heard of Porcupine, a name which has vague asso-ciations with The Last of the Mohicans or something like that.) The smell lingered for years after the flowers were gone.18