In any case, this slight interlude of ennui is cut short by what comes next: a shot of the muddy expanse of the Zone, dry-looking but rippling — quicksand perhaps.30 Whatever it is, this quicksandy stretch of dry muddiness or muddy dryness ripples exactly as it does in the early stages of an LSD trip, when the external world takes on some of the internal rhythms of the body, its breath and pulse. (This, apparently, was from the rejected version of Stalker, shot by Rerberg, one of two such sequences to have made their way into the released version.) The first few times I saw Stalker were during a phase of my life when I took LSD and magic mushrooms quite regularly.31
This shot of the rippling earth seemed a clear indication that what we were dealing with was a trip, that the Zone was a psychedelic place where — exactly in the way suggested by acid guru Timothy Leary — what you experienced was dependent on what was going on in your head. Set and setting. We had excited discussions about this, my friend Russell and I, about whether Stalker and his clients ever left the bar, whether they just stayed there, tripping their heads off on fly agaric mushrooms from Siberia. Tarkovsky, it seems, was not averse to such reactions, was pleased ‘if at the end the spectator came to doubt whether he had even seen a story.’ The ground ripples as if it is not solid at all. A wind kicks up a dust storm, which then seems to turn into a storm of dried blossom, so intense it could almost be snow. (Could that really be what’s happening? Could it be
snowing in the Zone?) The little islands of grass do not ripple. The trees in the background do not ripple: it’s just the boggy-looking dried earth that ripples and then, gradually, stops rippling. How does Tarkovsky do this, how does he achieve these effects? Or are they not effects? Was it simply luck that he came across a patch of ripply quicksand and then it started snowing where, a few seconds earlier, it had been dusting and blossoming? Is this part of the random magic of cinema that Herzog discovered in a sequence of footage shot by Timothy (Grizzly Man) Treadwell? Treadwell plunges into and then out of shot, leaving the camera to record only the wind-whipped bushes and foliage. ‘In his action-movie mode Treadwell probably did not realize that seemingly empty moments have a strange secret beauty,’ Herzog explains as the bushes and trees bend and sway in the wind as if in unconscious homage to Tarkovsky.32 ‘Sometimes images themselves develop their own life, their own mysterious stardom.’