Zona Read online

  After this little set-to Writer, naturally enough, is in need of a drink. Stalker, uncharacteristically, seems to want one himself. Writer hands him the bottle but any hopes he may have entertained that Stalker will take a slug, that this might after all turn out to be a pedestrian equivalent of a booze cruise, prove short-lived. The mood of buoyant optimism that animated Stalker after his solitary walk proves almost as short-lived; his face has reverted to its default look of profound dismay, of generalized and specific woe. Stalker pours away the contents of the bottle, a gesture that could also be construed as some kind ofpuja: making an offering to the gods of the Zone, wetting their whistles.

  Undeterred, Writer insists on going straight ahead, at his own risk, with or without a drink. The Room looks even nearer than previously thought: about fifty yards? He strides ahead confidently enough but, when the camera jumps in close, right up to the back of his head, he seems to be moving with considerable trepidation. In its way it’s a terrific bit of acting on Solonitsyn’s part: rarely has the back of someone’s bald head expressed such a rich combination of bravado—I said I’d go, so I’ll keep going!—and naked dread.23

  Stalker has felt the wind picking up but it is only when Writer is seen from the front, making his hesitant way forwards, that we become aware of this wind. The branches sway and bend more deeply. The breeze is becoming a sudden gale. We have seen this wind before, near the beginning of Mirror, sweeping past the same actor, stopping him in his tracks as he walks away from the woman he has just met, sitting on a fence. Already sentient, the landscape becomes suddenly animate. Writer insists that the landscape amounts to no more than its physical features, which are susceptible to empirical measurement and conscious calculation—that from here to there can only take so long. At this moment the movement of wind through the trees shows the unconscious making itself felt, becoming visible, staking its claim. There is an abrupt accumulation of noise, the flap of birds’ wings. A voice orders, Stop! Don’t move! and the camera withdraws, sniper-like, more deeply into the building. Whose order was this? Writer comes scurrying back like a whupped dog, demanding to know who told him to stop. Stalker? No. Professor? Not him either. It’s your own fear, Professor tells him. You’re too frightened to go on so you invent a voice telling you to stop. That sounds about right, but the thing about the Zone is that it’s always subtly reconfiguring itself according to your thoughts and expectations. You want it to seem ordinary? It’s ordinary—or is it? And at that moment something occurs to make you think maybe it’s not ordinary, whereupon it does something briefly extraordinary. (Or does it?) Whereupon it becomes quite ordinary again. The Zone manifests itself even as it withholds itself—and vice versa.24

  One thing’s for sure: the Zone has comprehensively disabused Writer of Kundera’s distinction between ‘the world of routes’ and ‘the world of roads and paths [where] beauty is continuous and constantly changing; it tells us at every step: “Stop!”’

  Stalker says he has no idea what goes on in the Zone when there’s no one here; but as soon as people enter it the Zone becomes a system of traps. (One of the big unanswerables: what is the Zone like when there is no one here to witness it, to bring it to life, to consciousness? I was going to ask, rhetorically, if the Zone even existed in the absence of visitors, but one of Tarkovsky’s technical preferences suggests that the answer would be yes. The characters are all the time stepping into shot, into an already established frame: screen and Zone are there waiting for them, watched and waiting.) Stalker puts the emphasis on what we want from the Zone, on the needs it answers. But there is always the latent, unasked question of what the Zone needs from the people who come to it, from us. What use is a miracle if there is no one there to witness it?

  Everything that happens depends on us, says Stalker. The relationship between pilgrims—even the most sceptical or outright cynical, even those who don’t consider themselves pilgrims—and the Zone is absolutely recipro-cal. To be in the Zone is to be part of the Zone. It may be impossible to tell whether a given action is initiated by people or place but the feeling that the Zone is an active participant in whatever occurs becomes increasingly tangible. Stalker is framed against a green so dark it is almost black—what Conrad, with his irresistible urge to overegg any and all puddings, would have called an impenetrable darkness. This darkness makes Stalker’s face and blue eyes burn more brightly as he speaks. With what? With the intensity of his belief, but also—and it is this which distinguishes him from jihadists and born-again Christians—with the intensity of his despair. The Zone is not simply a source of solace, the heart of Marx’s heartless world, it is a source of torment, a system of traps that constantly tests, teases and threatens not just his clients but Stalker himself. No one is immune to the capriciousness of the Zone. And another thing, too, separates him from the jihadists. One of Tarkovsky’s strengths as an artist is the amount of space he leaves for doubt. In Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog looks into the eyes of the bears caught on film by Timothy Treadwell and decides that the chief characteristic of the universe—or ‘the jungley’ as he metonymically termed it in Burden of Dreams—is ‘overwhelming indifference’. For Tarkovsky the artist, despite his Russian Orthodox Christian faith, despite his insistence that the epic scenery of Utah and Arizona could only have been created by god, it is an almost infinite capacity to generate doubt and uncertainty (and, extrapolating from there, wonder). This, it hardly needs saying, is a far more nuanced position than Herzog’s. The story of Porcupine, Tarkovsky said later, may have been a ‘legend’ or myth, and spectators ‘should doubt… the existence of the forbidden Zone’. So to give oneself entirely to the Zone, to trust in it as Stalker does, is not only to risk but embrace betrayal by the principle from which he draws his life. That’s why his face is a ferment of emotions: everything he believes in is threatening to turn to ashes, the ledge he clings to is poised to crumble beneath the weight of his need for it, the weight that also supports it.

  Another word on that wind, the wind that springs from nowhere: Tarkovsky is the cinema’s great poet of stillness. To that extent his vision is imbued with the still beauty of the Russian icons, like the ones painted by Andrei Rublev. But, as he himself explained, this stillness is the opposite of timeless: ‘The image becomes authentically cinematic when (amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it, even within each separate frame. No “dead” object—table, chair, glass—taken in a frame in isolation from everything else, can be presented as [if] it were outside passing time, as if from the point of view of an absence of time.’ Tarkovsky’s stillness is animated by the energy of the moving image, of cinema, of which the wind is expression and symptom. Out of this comes the most distinctive feature of Tarkovsky’s art: the sense of beauty as force.25

  Professor sums up Stalker’s little sermon: so the Zone lets the good ones pass and the bad ones die? (Well, it’s more complicated than that, obviously, and simpler too.) Stalker doesn’t know. It lets pass those who have lost all hope, the wretched, he says in an agony of wretched-ness, never once realizing that he might (by definition) be among their number. Does wretchedness ever have this capacity to transcend itself? Or is it simply a path to further wretchedness? The fathomless implications of this can be seen pressing down on Stalker as he turns from the darkness and walks into the light, where Writer and Professor are framed against the drifting mist and trees of the Zone.

  On the very last page of the postscript to The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes of people’s willingness to stake everything on the chance of salvation. Chance makes the difference, says James, between ‘a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.’ Again the impossible paradox of Stalker’s relationship to the Zone makes itself felt. The keynote of his life is hope, but the Zone will let through only those who have lost all hope. Stalkers, we learn later, are forbidden entry to the Room. Forbidden, perhaps, by virtue of their belief—their hope—in i
t.

  This speech of Stalker’s has had an effect on Professor, who is all too ready to resign himself to a life whose keynote is resignation. He’s decided to call it a day. If they reached the point of no return surprisingly quickly it’s even more surprising to find that one of them has already reached the point of giving up. Sometimes the two are one and the same; the usual difference is that there’s only one point of no return whereas the point of giving up is constant—the opposite of a point, in fact—and can be yielded to at any and every step of the way. You go ahead and I’ll wait here, says Professor. Given the awesome publicity generated by the Zone—a place where all your holiday hopes will come true!—Stalker has not proved himself to be a very successful tour operator. Or perhaps he’s had the misfortune of lumbering himself with two extremely hard-to-please clients. Either way, both of them have pretty well lost faith and interest in the promised package. (In holiday terms the weather is pretty dismal, would probably have been much better in the first-choice destination, Tajikistan.) Writer seems game to go on even if he is scarcely ecstatic about the prospect, but Professor wants to sit here in this nice little picnic spot with his thermos and his coffee and wait for them on the way back. Unfortunately that’s not possible. You don’t come back the way you go. (So even if you want to give up you have to keep going; the Zone is nothing if not lifelike.) The only option is for them all to return imme-diately. Stalker will offer them a refund minus a certain amount for his trouble (strain on his marriage, getting shot at, wet feet and so on). Reluctantly, Professor gets to his feet. Go on then, he says, resigning himself to having to live in hope for a bit longer. Throw your nuts. Stalker does so and they tramp off, screen left. There is the call of cuckoos. The camera stays behind, raises itself up slightly so that, above the mist, we can see the Room, the ruined house, which at this moment—the moment when it has become, depending on your point of view, either impossibly far away or barely worth visiting—seems nearer than ever.

  * * *

  1 There’s a wonderful moment in Tempo di Viaggio, the documentary Tarkovsky made about his time in Italy, researching what would become Nostalghia with scriptwriter Tonino Guerra. The two of them are sitting there, chatting. The phone rings and Guerra answers: ‘Si… Oh, Michelangelo…’ Antonioni has called up for a chat! It’s the twentieth-century, cinematic equivalent of those entries in the Goncourts’ Journals: ‘A ring at the door. It was Flaubert.’

  2 Tarkovsky constantly reiterated his admiration for and love of these two, especially Bresson, with whom he shared a special Grand Prix du cinéma de création (for Nostalghia and L’Argent respectively) announced by Orson Welles, in Cannes, in 1983. Quite a trio. Bresson declines to give any kind of acceptance speech, Tarkovsky shrugs and says ‘Merci beaucoup’; neither behaves with any graciousness. Maybe both are a little miffed at having to share the honour with the other.

  3 Tarkovsky’s wife, Larissa, wanted this part and the director-husband was eager to give her the role. He was persuaded to drop her in favour of Alisa Freindlikh by other crew members, chief among them Georgi Rerberg, director of photography on Stalker—initially—and Tarkovsky’s previous film, Mirror. In making an enemy of Larissa, the seeds were perhaps sown for Rerberg’s later leaving the film.

  4 And the Gulag, let’s not forget, has its own allure and semiromantic mythology. On a couple of occasions, in Paris, I have attended dinners where the guests included men who had been ‘in the camps’. Both had about them the quality of election by experience, were assumed to be in possession of a truth about the toll exacted by the mere fact of being alive—of being born in a certain place at a certain time—in the twentieth century. They had been tested. Something had been revealed or vouchsafed them that was simultaneously beyond comprehension and quite routine. Both of them joked compulsively and had no desire to enter the serious political debates that often raged around the dinner table and which I could not participate in—or even follow—because my French was so poor, but I do remember thinking, when one of the women said that she and her husband were going to have a poster of Lenin above their bed, that that was something so ridiculous, so preposterously French, it might have been a quote from a Godard film, one of the ones he made after Sympathy for the Devil with the Rolling Stones, an experience that led Mick Jagger to remark of the great auteur, ‘He’s such a fucking twat.’

  5 Cf. the second resurrection of Hari, in Solaris, coming back to life, so to speak, in a see-through shorty nightie after drinking liquid oxygen.

  6 Printed in the Observer alongside a review by the film critic Philip French, a still from this sequence was actually one of the things that persuaded my friend Russell and me to see the film in the first place. When I was a boy, growing up in Cheltenham, stills were displayed outside the ABC, the Coliseum and the Odeon as a way of luring you in and it was always a significant moment when you saw the still image in motion. (The ABC and the Coliseum are long gone and the Odeon is now derelict, though I still think of it as the Odeon, just as my parents always referred to it and the ABC by their earlier incarnations and names—the Gaumont and the Regal respectively— thereby suggesting that these places were the sites of some kind of mythic prehistory, an impression heightened by the fact that I saw the film adaptation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods in one of them.) It confirmed that you were within the experience advertised outside, even though it was almost impossible to pin down the precise moment when the still was taken (we didn’t realize, back then, that a still was not a frame lifted from the flow of images, but a different, independent entity), or at least the slight lag between ‘seeing’ the still and recognizing it as such meant that it had morphed into a slightly different image. A still, it seemed, was not still at all, more like the aftermath of a more specific but still elusive tingle of déjà vu.

  7 In interviews Tarkovsky often strikes one as a bit priggish but there are occasional touches of comedy in his films. One of them—Nostalghia—contains a terrific joke. A man comes across another man, apparently drowning in a slimy pond. He pulls him out, saves him, whereupon the rescued man says, ‘What are you doing? I live here.’ I guess that’s what is meant by Nostalghia. Is this joke about Tarkovsky looking back at his time in the slimy pond of the Soviet Union? Having got out of it, having freed himself from the stifling restrictions of its filmmaking institutions and processes, he now looks back on it quite fondly. My favourite comic moment, however, is in Tempo di viaggio, when Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra are scouting locations. They arrive in Lecce by car and the great director gets out wearing a pale yellow T-shirt and the shortest, cutest, tightest little pair of white shorts imaginable. He looks like he’s flown straight in from the Castro Street Fair!

  8 Rerberg’s alleged drinking and womanizing were contribu tory reasons for his getting sacked from the film; Rerberg doesn’t deny this, though he does suggest that, as far as drinking goes, he was just keeping up with the director. Certainly, drinking on set was a widespread problem, especially during the periods when something went wrong (something was always going wrong) and there was nothing to do but wait for it to be sorted out. A snowstorm in June threatened to shut down the production completely. Then Tarkovsky announced, out of the blue, that shooting would begin again at seven in the morning. Sound engineer Vladimir Sharun went to Solonitsyn’s room to let him know and found the actor and his makeup man ‘totally out of it.’ The makeup man immediately asked for three kilograms of potatoes so that the peel could be applied to Solonitsyn’s face and reduce the swelling caused by ‘the two-week binge.’ (Not two days, two weeks.) The potatoes were procured and the potion mixed. Sharun returned to Solonitsyn’s room to find the makeup man flat on his back, and the star applying this peasant version of a Kiehl’s product to his face.

  9 A sentiment shared by many men on this thirsty earth of ours. When I was a boy my dad would come home from work, after the summer holidays, full of disgust for his workmates, who had been on holiday somewhere and had spent the entire time
at the bar or round a swimming pool, drinking, either in Spain or some other place where the licensing laws were not as repressive as in England. That was their deepest desire and wish. We rarely went anywhere on holiday because my dad’s deepest desire was always to save money and the best place to do this, to avoid the temptations of knickerbocker glories and overpriced choc-ices, was not to leave our home, the room where money came in, very slowly, but left even more reluctantly. (I am aware that this is not the first time that I have referred in print to my dad’s fear of the overpriced chocice. Albert Camus believed that ‘a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’ This certainly seems true of Tarkovsky, especially in Mirror. In my case, it seems that one of these images is a chocice and my dad reluctantly forking out for it. I am being unfair, or at least am referring to chocices in overpriced holiday destinations such as Bournemouth or Weston-super-Mare. My father had a friend who worked at the local Walls factory, in Gloucester, who was able to get chocices cheap. I asked him once if these chocices were stolen—hot, as they say in America. ‘It’s a perk,’ my dad said with a look of immense inward satisfaction.)

  10 I had intended breaking this little book into 142 sections—each separated from the one preceding and following it by a double space—corresponding to the 142 shots of the film. That’s a very low number of shots for a long film and it worked well at first but then, as I became engrossed and re-engrossed in the film, I kept losing track of where one shot ended and another began. This forgetting or not noticing is an authentic and integral part of watching any film—and this book is an account of watchings, rememberings, misrememberings, and forgettings; it is not the record of a dissection.