Some further refinement — or labouring — of this point is necessary. It happens that the phase of my getting into serious cinema — in my late teens and early and midtwenties, from the mid-1970s onwards — overlapped with the intensely creative period of what might be called mainstream independent filmmaking, when American directors, having absorbed the influences of the European auteurs, carved out the freedom to realize their cinematic ambitions. I saw Taxi Driver when it was first released, and Apocalypse Now (and Jaws and Star Wars, which, together with the financial catastrophe of Heaven’s Gate, heralded the end of this phase).
I saw Stalker slightly later but I saw it when it came out, within a month of its release, when Tarkovsky was at his artistic peak. I saw it, so to speak, live. And this means that I saw it in a slightly different way from how a twentyfour-year-old might see it for the first time now, in 2012. So much so that the film I saw was slightly different from the one that a twenty-four-year-old would see now, in 2012. Obviously the difference is not as acute as it would be if you saw a band today who were at their peak twenty years ago. The thing, the product, the work of art stays the same but by staying the same it ages — and changes. It exists now in the wake of its own reputation, not quite in the way that Citizen Kane does, not only as a monument to itself, but trailing clouds of its own glory. And it exists also in the wake of everything that has come in its wake, both the films that have been influenced by it (that’s why Citizen Kane is both ageless and incredibly old-looking; practically everything seems to have come after it) and the ones that treat it with tacit disdain and contempt (Lock, Stock and Two—tediously—Smoking Barrels). The facts are unalterable. When I first saw Stalker it was brand new, the latest thing. I also saw Pulp Fiction live, as soon as it came out, but I didn’t see it as I saw Stalker, when I was at that point of maximum responsiveness or aliveness, when my ability to respond to the medium was still so vulnerable and susceptible to being changed and shaped by what I was seeing. At a certain point, even if you keep up-todate with new releases (books, records, films), even if you keep broadening your horizons, even if you manage to keep up with the latest things, you realize that these latest things can never be more than that, that they stand almost no chance of being the last word, because you actually heard — or saw or read — your personal last word years earlier.
32 Or, of course, to Herzog himself, specifically the famous epigraph—‘Don’t you hear the terrible screaming all around you? The screaming that men call silence’—and shot of wheat swaying in the wind at the opening of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.
33 I got that phrase from an aging acidhead in Santa Cruz, who first tripped back in the days when LSD was still legal. The difference between acid then and now, he said, was that in its earlier incarnations it produced ‘open-eye hallucinations’ (as opposed to closed-eye hallucinations and open-eye distortions). An open-eye hallucination: there are worse definitions of cinema.
34In Mirror the mother reads a poem by Tarkovsky’s father:
Everything on earth was transfigured, even
Simple things: the basin, the jug…
This is exactly what we get in Tarkovsky’s films and in…But let’s go back a bit, to the moment where Writer says, rather Tarkovskyly, that we are here — on earth, he means — to create works of art. Elide this claim with the lines of Tarkovsky’s father and we get something close to the passage in the ninth of the Duino Elegies, where Rilke wonders if
Perhaps we are here to say: house,
bridge, stream, gate, jug, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower…But to say them, you must grasp them,
oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves
had never dreamt of being.
The poet ‘says’ these things; Tarkovsky shows them, enables us to see them more intensely than we can with the naked, non-cinematic eye. Rilke continues, sketching his poetics of the Zone:
Here is the time of the sayable, here its home.
Speak and avow. More than ever
the things that might be experienced are falling away, for
what ousts and replaces them is an imageless act.
Tarkovsky is preserving or making visible exactly what Rilke claims is disappearing — ironically, as it turns out, as a result of the amazing ubiquity of the image (‘our overcrowded gaze’, the poet terms it a few lines earlier). The Zone: refuge of meaning, hope of the unvanished. (This overlapping of Tarkovsky and Rilke is not as arbitrary as it might seem. Having immersed himself in Russian literature and thought after travelling through the land in 1889 and 1900, Rilke, in the words of one commentator, ‘came to feel that he could be that country’s voice. As he put it more than a decade later: “All the home of my instinct, all my inward origin is there.”’)