It may be difficult, with so many accusations, recriminations, counteraccusations and denials, to work out exactly what was going on, but the set of Stalker, clearly, was a far from happy ship. As Rerberg put it with characteristic vehemence: Tarkovsky may, ultimately, have got the film he wanted, ‘but at the cost of a heap of corpses and triple retakes.’ As is often the case in the midst of much acrimony, there is a pocket of agreement here; after the disaster of the ruined footage Tarkovsky considered Rerberg ‘a corpse’.
27 It was around this point, I think, that when I saw Stalker for the third time — at the Academy on Oxford Street, on February 4, 1982—the projectionist got the reels the wrong way round and we suddenly jumped ahead not a few frames but twenty or forty minutes. I was the only one to notice. (Yes, even then I was quite the Stalker scholar.) Presumably no one else in the cinema had seen the film before. I dashed out of the auditorium to the ticket desk, explained what was happening and got the whole screening cancelled. My girlfriend and I left the cinema and went to a tea dance (a brief craze) and returned to the cinema two days later and saw the whole film all the way through again.
28 Vladimir Sharun, sound recordist on the set, recalls: ‘Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured poisonous liquids downstream.’ This caused numerous allergic reactions among the cast and crew and, Sharun believes, ultimately caused the deaths from cancer of Tarkovsky, his wife Larissa, and Solonitsyn.
29 But maybe my time at university did help prepare me for this aspect of Tarkovsky’s art. A famous passage— identical in both the 1805 and 1850 versions — from Wordsworth’s The Prelude seems very close to what Tarkovsky does again and again (what is Mirror if not a visual account of the growth of the director’s mind?):
To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.
As we have seen, the slow contraction and expansion of the frame creates the impression that the Zone is breathing, respiring, and the passage as a whole fits nicely with the idea of Tarkovsky as a romantic artist, as a poet of the cinema. Having compared him with Wordsworth, however, having used that expression poet of the cinema, I realize that poets are the only people I want to be poets, that I want poets to be poets only of poetry. And Tarkovsky is both more and less than a romantic. The simple things he notices and imbues with breathing magic always remain just what they are. Do they have a moral life? If so it is not one that they are given by the artist; it’s more like he responds to a tree’s tree-ness and a wind’s wind-ness which is the only ‘moral life’ we can expect from a landscape. It is when there is some kind of human interaction with landscape, when the landscape, having been manufactured or altered, is in the process of being reclaimed by nature — a source of abiding fascination for Tarkovsky — that its ‘inward meaning’ is most powerfully felt.
There’s actually another moment in Wordsworth that seems even more proto-Tarkovskyan in this respect. It occurs in one of the draft versions of ‘The Ruined Cottage,’ when the poet encounters his old friend Armytage, who describes his reactions on coming across the broken walls, overgrown garden and half-concealed well of the cottage and, more specifically, the numerous unnoticed— ‘I see around me here / Things which you cannot see’—and insignificant objects lying around unused:
…time has been
When every day the touch of human hand
Disturbed their stillness, and they ministered
To human comfort. When I stopped to drink
A spider’s web hung to the water’s edge,
And on the wet and slimy footstone lay
The useless fragment of a wooden bowl.
It moved my very heart.
Isn’t it exactly this quality of undisturbed stillness that gives Tarkovsky’s filmic archaeology of the discarded its special aura?
30 Like all children, I loved quicksand. In films set in the desert, especially the desert of north Africa during the Second World War, all I wanted to see was quicksand sucking jeeps and men into its sucky embrace. Not because I wanted to see people perish but because I couldn’t conceive of such a thing actually existing (certainly there was no quicksand where I grew up in Gloucestershire and, for all I knew, none anywhere in England), because it didn’t make sense. I loved it, in other words, because it was a phenomenon unique to film or television. Quicksand was film.
31 It wasn’t just an LSD phase; it was also a phase of intense cinemagoing and I have no doubt that my high opinion of Stalker…No, let me rephrase that. The prominent place occupied in my consciousness by Stalker is almost certainly bound up with the fact that I saw it at a particular time in my life. I suspect it is rare for anyone to see their — what they consider to be the—greatest film after the age of thirty. After forty it’s extremely unlikely. After fifty, impossible. The films you see as a child and in your early teens—Where Eagles Dare, The Italian Job—have such a special place in your affections that it’s all but impossible to consider them objectively (you have, moreover, no desire to do so). To try to disentangle their individual merits or shortcomings, to see them as a disinterested adult, is like trying to come to a definitive assessment of your own childhood: impossible because what you are contemplating and trying to gauge is a formative part of the person attempting the assessment. Gradually, usually in your late teens and early twenties, you start to watch the major works of the medium. At first it is difficult to make sense of these alleged masterpieces: they are too different, often too boring and challenging. I did the bulk of my serious film-watching as an undergraduate at Oxford, at the Penultimate Picture Palace and the Phoenix, back in the days when there was a late screening every night. By the time I saw Stalker I was ready to sit through it even if I was not able to enjoy it. I understood enough — barely enough — of the grammar and history of cinema to see how they were being enlarged, adapted and extended by Tarkovsky. Not that the experience could be confined to the compartment or file called ‘cinema’. My capacity for wonder was also being subtly enlarged and changed. At the same time, however, that capacity was also being permanently limited or defined in the same way that reading Tolstoy enlarges and, by so doing, definitively limits one’s capacity for future enlargement, revelation and astonishment in the realm of fiction. Of course you can still enjoy Tarantino after Tarkovsky, can see that he is doing something new; you can see that Harmony Korine is doing something new with Gummo, or Andrea Arnold with Fish Tank. Of course, of course. But by the time I was thirty, approximately eight years after seeing Stalker for the first time, the potential of cinema to expand perception — or at least my own potential to appreciate and respond to, to perceive such an expansion — had been so vastly reduced as to seem negligible. For people older than me the expansion had been achieved by Godard; for Godard’s generation by Welles or (though this now seems hard to credit) Samuel Fuller…For people younger than me it may well have been Tarantino or the witless Coen brothers. To them Tarkovsky may have the slightly outmoded or taken-for-granted quality that Godard had for me.