25 This wind that springs from nowhere, suddenly appearing with a force capable of carrying it across the steppes of Russia: genealogically it springs from the opening sequence of Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1930 silent Soviet classic, Earth (Zemlya), a film Tarkovsky watched ‘over and over again’ without ever being able to explain why it touched him ‘so deeply.’
TWO
GLAD OF THE BREAK? Of course you are. Any kind of respite is always welcome: the end of a section or a chapter, even a double space break; at a push, just a paragraph. Henry Fielding likened these interludes to stops at taverns in the course of the long journey of the novel. Even if there are no scheduled chapter stops, even if the whole thing is one long, uninterrupted paragraph (i.e., even if you’re reading Thomas Bernhard), you can put the book aside and do something else for a couple of minutes, hours or days.
With concerts and plays the intermission often proves a bit of a dilemma. Yes, you can stretch your legs, but there’s nothing worse than scrumming for drinks at the bar only to find that by the time you’ve got your bottle of Grolsch (a drink you would never order in normal circumstances) the bell is ringing to tell you that the second part will begin in three minutes. How many times have you looked at your friends and your unfinished drinks and unanimously decided that, yes, the first half was great but, frankly, we’ve had enough of that (the music, the play) and could do with a few more of these (lagers)?
In the case of films, with double or triple bills, a break is an unavoidable necessity. Personally I no longer have the stamina (though, unusually for a man of my age, I do have the time) for the Bergman doubles and Bresson triples I used to be able to chug down in my twenties, so am rarely confronted with this problem of intermissions and whether to stay on for the second half of whatever it was that I’d paid good money to see. In the case of Stalker there is no intermission, not even time to go to the toilet, just a rather abrupt end to the first part, a few seconds’ pause, and then we’re off again with Part 2. But those few seconds are enough to break the spell and make one suspect that there’s been a continuity error, that something— even if only a frame or two — has gone missing. For a start it all looks a bit darker, as if several hours have gone by and the long day has waned somewhat. We’ve adjusted to the pace of the film — walking pace, the pace of three men trudging — and suddenly it seems as if we’ve had a jump cut, a jump forwards in time. Strangely, and uniquely for a Tarkovsky film, we’re struggling to keep up, to get on the bus! There is Stalker with his bandages and nuts, scampering through the abruptly darker forest, but then he’s outside some kind of building, calling to the other two to come over.
They’re taking it easy outside another building or another part of the same building. Either way, how did they get to wherever they are? Again there is that strange collusion between what is experienced by the people onscreen and us in the audience: it’s as if they too have taken a break. They seem to have internalized exactly the reluctance to persevere with Part 2 that can assail members of the audience during intermissions. Writer is stretched out on a moderately comfy bit of stone and Professor has found a nice place to sit. They look like they’ve just woken up, are actually looking forward to a bit of a lie-in. If Stalker has achieved anything so far it is to have united them in their fed-up-ness. I sometimes think this is the real purpose of guides: to serve as a source of bonding for sightseers obliged to follow and listen to them. My dominant memory of the last time I was at the mercy of a guide — explaining the intricacies of Native American rock art near Cedar Mesa, Utah — is of my companion and me chorusing ‘Wow!’ in increasingly desultory and unwowed tones. From the point of view of prospective clients an obvious drawback of the Zone is that you can go there only with a guide, that you will have to listen to him trot out the same stories and the same gags that he’s been trotting out ever since he got the job. With Stalker, though, it’s not a job, it’s a calling, and it’s not gags and joking (as Writer grumbles), it’s all sermons and sermonizing.
Professor, looking really tired and stiff, steps down from his perch into what sounds like a huge puddle. But no. We cut away to what looks like a reflection of a giant grey moon, smashed apart by a rock or stone — and slowly reassembling itself while Stalker intones some verses by Tarkovsky’s father, Arseny. So far the narrative has been strictly linear, following them step by step: border, trolley, walking through the Zone. Tarkovsky himself ‘wanted it to be as if the whole film had been made in a single shot.’ But now, in Part 2, we seem to have reverted to the loose, associative structure of Mirror, which made much use of the poetry of the director’s father’s. What’s happening?26
STALKER’S POETIC VOICE-OVER continues as the unexplained pale silver-grey circle sways and settles. It is still going on as he lowers himself through the hole in a wall — an abandoned window — and squeezes round the edge of the wall, clinging to it as though on a narrow ledge over a thousand-foot drop. There’s a touch of Nosferatu about his expression, the teeth-bared concentration with which he traverses the decrepit remains of what might once have been a half-decent climbing wall. Strength is a terrible thing, we hear, weakness is a great thing. Hmm. In Enter the Dragon, a film seen by everyone at my school, we heard that the proud civilizations— Sparta, Rome, the Samurai — all worshipped strength because it was strength that made all other values possible, a counterstatement of belief that was later sampled by the Thievery Corporation on their track ‘The Foundation’. Needless to say, Stalker’s apparent weakness is insignificant compared with the faith that Tarkovsky believed made him ‘invincible’. And Stalker, presumably, draws strength from the memory of the so-called ‘beautiful souls’ of Russia in the late 1830s and 1840s, men whose personal and political weaknesses seemed intrinsic to their intellectual and moral purity. The obligations of election laid down by one such soul read like a passage from a training manual for the craft of the Stalker: ‘You are distinguished from the mass of ordinary souls, and heavenly powers educate and guide you invisibly. For without a certain mood of the soul our science is in vain and our searching unfruitful.’
Stalker comes to an echoey tunnel where he meets the others. They’re making good progress, apparently, are ready to go on. Professor is not happy. He didn’t realize they were actually continuing their expedition; he thought Stalker wanted to show them one of the local sights — a side trip as they say in the tourism world — and has not brought his knapsack. He has to go back to get it. You can’t go back, Stalker tells him. There’s no going back, he says, going back to a point made earlier. Professor is insistent. He wants his knapsack. (It so happens that, right now, I identify absolutely with Professor’s desire to be united with his rucksack. Six years ago my wife came back from a trip to Berlin with one of those Freitag bags made out of recycled truck tarps and seat belts. Unlike some Freitag bags it was rather plain — plain grey in fact — and initially I was a little disappointed. Over time, though, I came to see that she had made the wisest possible choice and I came to love that bag absolutely. And then, ten days ago in Adelaide, in the course of a long, multifaceted, multidrinks evening, I lost it, either in a restaurant, at a party, in a taxi or at the gardens of the Arts Festival. No one handed in my bag. It was gone — and is not identically replaceable. Freitag bags now come with a hip fastener, though I could get a reasonably exact match. But it’s my one I want, that I want back. At this moment, in fact, if I found myself in the Room, my deepest wish is that I could be reunited with my Freitag bag. There is a parable — or maybe it’s just part of a stand-up routine — that at the end of your life you are reunited with all the things that you have lost in your life. This lovely idea turns out be a terrible disappointment as you are faced with thousands and thousands of pens and umbrellas, each one a metaphor, I suppose, for the worthlessness of the things by which you set so much value. But it would be nice if, at the end of your life, the locations of where you lost your most beloved ten or twenty possessions could be revealed to you, if you could see a film that showed your younger self walking away from the table at the festival in Adelaide, slightly drunk, while the Freitag bag, discreetly stylish in grey, sat there neglected, unnoticed and mute, incapable of calling out ‘Vergissmeinnicht.’ ‘So that’s what happened’ you would say to yourself, shaking your head in astonishment, at the simple but profound mystery of loss, on the brink of the most profound and mysterious loss of all, that of your life. And who knows — maybe the revelation of how we lost those treasured things would reconcile us to that other loss in ways that religion no longer can.)