MONKEY, IN PROFILE and in colour, still wearing that autumnal gold-brown headscarf, reading. Reading in the way people used to read, before there were so many books that they became a bit of a nuisance and burden, before there was even an inkling of the Kindle. Smoke is drifting. Nice-looking smoke, incense. Floating blossom. The loud cheep and chirrup of birds: Zone sounds, Zone blossom. But also the railroad and dockside moan of horns — sounds that were nowhere to be heard in the Zone, the quietest place on earth. We are on the brink, here, of one of the all-redeeming moments of any art form. It can’t be isolated from what has gone before, it gathers into itself the whole film. But by ‘all-redeeming’ I don’t just mean in the context of this film. It redeems, makes up for, every pointless bit of gore, every wasted special effect, all the stupidity in every film made before or since. Oh well, you think, none of that matters, all of that is worth it, for this. As we have seen several times already in Stalker, there is nothing symbolic about what occurs. The camera simply shows what is happening. It retreats down the table, past a glass half full of what looks like porter or some kind of Soviet Coca-Cola that has gone completely flat or probably started out that way. And a couple of empty, opaque glasses. Monkey lays down the book as if she has been memorizing what she was reading — which turns out, or so the voice-over would have us believe, to be a love poem by Fyodor Tyutchev.51
There is the moan of transport outside. She bends her head and looks at the glass with the flat cola in it and, evidently in response to her thoughts, the glass begins to move down the table. The dog whimpers and whines, aware he is in the presence of something not normal, but it is nice to think that the dog is at ease with her, that she and the dog have each other for company.52 She glances at the dog, not unkindly, and the dog quietens down. It could be that she has zapped or silenced him with her telekinetic powers, but it seems more likely that he is reassured that nothing bad is happening here and can resume his nap or continue enjoying lying on the floor of his new home. She focuses her attention on the glasses once more. How was this done? Like doubting Thomas sticking his finger in the wound I want to know how this miracle was achieved. With a magnet hidden by the cola while someone under the table dragged it along?53 Next she moves a jam jar with something in it, just a couple of inches. Then the big tall empty glass.54
She rests her head on the table, brings the glass right to the edge of the table before propelling it that extra, gravity-grabbing centimetre. It falls over the edge. In the story quoted earlier, Oë writes that ‘one of the glasses that’s moved to the edge of the table falls to the floor and breaks into pieces. Up to this point you saw the child’s face behind the glass, so now you see it better, and the expression on it appears to be savouring the sound of destruction.’
Except the glass doesn’t break. We don’t see it break and we don’t hear it break either. What we hear, in fact, is the glass not breaking. It hits the floor not with a smash and tinkle but a sturdy, almost indestructible crash. The claim that the child is ‘savouring’ the destruction — that, to judge by her eyes, she is ‘harbouring some kind of malevolent force’, that she might even be ‘the antichrist’ whose role is ‘to destroy everything’—is a further projection intended to confirm the initial misreading, or mishearing. These particulars aside, Oë’s reading of the scene is completely out of whack with the larger scheme of the film. Would he really have us believe that Stalker was rewarded for his faith by a daughter who was not only crippled but a malevolent, glass-smashing antichrist to boot? Her telekinetic powers, surely, are a manifestation of unmeasurable compensation or consolation.
The thing in the jam jar, we can see now, is an eggshell or the remains of one, but at this late stage we are untroubled by any irritable straining after symbolic meaning and significance. There’s just a jar with an eggshell in it and Monkey’s head in that autumnal-gold scarf, resting on the table as if it’s a pillow. It’s impossible to say with any certainty what the look in her eyes and on her face mean. She seems content, almost drowsy in the knowledge of her harmless power.
A train is approaching, making the windows rattle, making the jar shake and the table too, as it did right at the beginning, when she was asleep in bed with her mum and dad, before he went to the Zone and got her a nice doggy. The vibrations from the train are so strong that her head is being shaken as it rumbles and rattles past, blaring out Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. Eventually the noise diminishes and the train passes and there is just the rattle of the train that has passed and her eyes, her watching eyes, and her face and head, resting on the table, watching us watching her, fading to black.
26 What happened was that approximately half of the film had been shot (and two-thirds of the money spent) in Tallinn, Estonia, over the spring and summer of 1977, when it became obvious, in the autumn, that there was a fault, either with the experimental Kodak film that had been used or with the way it had been stored or processed. According to the sound designer, Vladimir Sharun, this only became evident at a screening attended by Tarkovsky, his wife Larissa, Rerberg, and Boris and Arkady Strugatsky who had developed the script from their own book Roadside Picnic. ‘Suddenly one of the Strugatskys turned towards Rerberg and asked naively: “Gosha, and how come I can’t see anything here?” Rerberg, always considering himself beyond reproach in everything he did, turned to Strugatsky and said: “And you just be quiet, you are no Dostoyevsky either!”’ With that he stormed off and was never seen on set again. For his part Rerberg insists that he did not go voluntarily, that he was banned from the set by Tarkovsky. Everyone blamed everyone else, but everyone agreed with Tarkovsky that it was a ‘total disaster’, that the film was doomed. There were proposals to write the whole thing off as a creative accident so that Tarkovsky could abandon Stalker and get on with something else. Tarkovsky refused to give up, kept trying to find ways of keeping the ill-fated picture afloat. His intransigence paid off: after much wrangling and manoeuvring it was agreed that Stalker would be a two-part film, that another 300,000 rubles would be found to make this second part even though — it was understood — a portion of this extra money would be needed to cover the cost of reshooting what had been lost. The hiatus was not without its benefits. Tarkovsky always had ‘a rigid idea of what he wanted,’ according to Evgeny Tsymbal, ‘but that idea changed all the time.’ The delay obliged Tarkovsky to clarify what he was trying to achieve, gave him the chance to reconceive the character of Stalker, turning him from a ‘bandit’ to a believer (a believer, like the director, that in spite of all the setbacks, the film about him would be made, that the Zone would exist). It was also during this interval that Tarkovsky ditched the science-fiction element of the film. More exactly, Tarkovsky manoeuvred Arkady Strugatsky — already worn down and frustrated by endless rewrites — into proposing that he get rid of the science fiction from his own sci-fi story: ‘There! You suggested it, not I!’, said Tarkovsky. ‘I’ve wanted it for a long time, only was afraid of suggesting it, so you wouldn’t take offense.’ (In a sense this suggests that there was more than a grain of truth in Rerberg’s extravagant claim, in the documentary The Reverse Side of ‘Stalker’, that Tarkovsky chose the wrong book to adapt in the first place!) And so an entirely new Stalker began to take shape. (‘Everything is going to be different,’ Tarkovsky announced in his Diary.) Stripped to its bare bones, the script became a parable with Stalker as an apostle, a holy fool. A new director of photography, Leonid Kalashnikov, took over from Rerberg but, according to Sharun, ‘he could not understand what Tarkovsky wanted from him. Kalashnikov left the picture on his own and Tarkovsky thanked him for such an honest, courageous action.’ Tarkovsky himself is more concise and characteristically less sympathetic: ‘Kalashnikov refused to go on working and walked out,’ he writes in April 1978. ‘He didn’t have the guts to say anything’. Kalashnikov was replaced, in turn, by Aleksandr Knyazhinsky, who shot the final version. It’s impossible to know of the exact extent to which this version of Stalker differed from the old damaged and abandoned one (preserved by the editor, Lyudmila Feiginova, in her apartment before she and the film perished in a fire). Tarkovsky’s assistant, Maria Chugunova, says that they were ‘almost visually identical’. Tsymbal thought that Rerberg’s footage was ‘extraordinary’ and ‘included astonishing effects.’ Tarkovsky, on the other hand, believed it ‘lacked simplicity and inner magic.’ Aleksandr Boim, meanwhile, supports Rerberg’s opinion that Tarkovsky used the numerous administrative obstacles and technical setbacks as a smokescreen for his own megalomaniacal uncertainties. This perhaps is not surprising — which is not the same thing as saying it is untrue — since Boim was also sacked (‘for being drunk’). They were ‘lightweight shallow people, with no self-respect,’ the pair of them, Tarkovsky claimed in his Diary. ‘Childish degenerates. Cretins.’ Shavkat Abdusalamov took over as art director but was soon sacked ‘for behaving like a bastard’, leaving Tarkovsky to credit himself as art director in the finished version. Amid all the upheaval, stress and conflict, Tarkovsky was beset with yet another problem in April 1978 when he suffered a coronary. Stalker, he decided, was ‘bewitched.’