1 There’s a wonderful moment in Tempo di Viaggio, the documentary Tarkovsky made about his time in Italy, researching what would become Nostalghia with scriptwriter Tonino Guerra. The two of them are sitting there, chatting. The phone rings and Guerra answers: ‘Si… Oh, Michelangelo…’ Antonioni has called up for a chat! It’s the twentieth-century, cinematic equivalent of those entries in the Goncourts’ Journals: ‘A ring at the door. It was Flaubert.’
2 Tarkovsky constantly reiterated his admiration for and love of these two, especially Bresson, with whom he shared a special Grand Prix du cinéma de création (for Nostalghia and L’Argent respectively) announced by Orson Welles, in Cannes, in 1983. Quite a trio. Bresson declines to give any kind of acceptance speech, Tarkovsky shrugs and says ‘Merci beaucoup’; neither behaves with any graciousness. Maybe both are a little miffed at having to share the honour with the other.
3 Tarkovsky’s wife, Larissa, wanted this part and the director-husband was eager to give her the role. He was persuaded to drop her in favour of Alisa Freindlikh by other crew members, chief among them Georgi Rerberg, director of photography on Stalker—initially — and Tarkovsky’s previous film, Mirror. In making an enemy of Larissa, the seeds were perhaps sown for Rerberg’s later leaving the film.
4 And the Gulag, let’s not forget, has its own allure and semiromantic mythology. On a couple of occasions, in Paris, I have attended dinners where the guests included men who had been ‘in the camps’. Both had about them the quality of election by experience, were assumed to be in possession of a truth about the toll exacted by the mere fact of being alive — of being born in a certain place at a certain time — in the twentieth century. They had been tested. Something had been revealed or vouchsafed them that was simultaneously beyond comprehension and quite routine. Both of them joked compulsively and had no desire to enter the serious political debates that often raged around the dinner table and which I could not participate in — or even follow — because my French was so poor, but I do remember thinking, when one of the women said that she and her husband were going to have a poster of Lenin above their bed, that that was something so ridiculous, so preposterously French, it might have been a quote from a Godard film, one of the ones he made after Sympathy for the Devil with the Rolling Stones, an experience that led Mick Jagger to remark of the great auteur, ‘He’s such a fucking twat.’
5 Cf. the second resurrection of Hari, in Solaris, coming back to life, so to speak, in a see-through shorty nightie after drinking liquid oxygen.
6 Printed in the Observer alongside a review by the film critic Philip French, a still from this sequence was actually one of the things that persuaded my friend Russell and me to see the film in the first place. When I was a boy, growing up in Cheltenham, stills were displayed outside the ABC, the Coliseum and the Odeon as a way of luring you in and it was always a significant moment when you saw the still image in motion. (The ABC and the Coliseum are long gone and the Odeon is now derelict, though I still think of it as the Odeon, just as my parents always referred to it and the ABC by their earlier incarnations and names — the Gaumont and the Regal respectively— thereby suggesting that these places were the sites of some kind of mythic prehistory, an impression heightened by the fact that I saw the film adaptation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods in one of them.) It confirmed that you were within the experience advertised outside, even though it was almost impossible to pin down the precise moment when the still was taken (we didn’t realize, back then, that a still was not a frame lifted from the flow of images, but a different, independent entity), or at least the slight lag between ‘seeing’ the still and recognizing it as such meant that it had morphed into a slightly different image. A still, it seemed, was not still at all, more like the aftermath of a more specific but still elusive tingle of déjà vu.
7 In interviews Tarkovsky often strikes one as a bit priggish but there are occasional touches of comedy in his films. One of them—Nostalghia—contains a terrific joke. A man comes across another man, apparently drowning in a slimy pond. He pulls him out, saves him, whereupon the rescued man says, ‘What are you doing? I live here.’ I guess that’s what is meant by Nostalghia. Is this joke about Tarkovsky looking back at his time in the slimy pond of the Soviet Union? Having got out of it, having freed himself from the stifling restrictions of its filmmaking institutions and processes, he now looks back on it quite fondly. My favourite comic moment, however, is in Tempo di viaggio, when Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra are scouting locations. They arrive in Lecce by car and the great director gets out wearing a pale yellow T-shirt and the shortest, cutest, tightest little pair of white shorts imaginable. He looks like he’s flown straight in from the Castro Street Fair!
8 Rerberg’s alleged drinking and womanizing were contribu tory reasons for his getting sacked from the film; Rerberg doesn’t deny this, though he does suggest that, as far as drinking goes, he was just keeping up with the director. Certainly, drinking on set was a widespread problem, especially during the periods when something went wrong (something was always going wrong) and there was nothing to do but wait for it to be sorted out. A snowstorm in June threatened to shut down the production completely. Then Tarkovsky announced, out of the blue, that shooting would begin again at seven in the morning. Sound engineer Vladimir Sharun went to Solonitsyn’s room to let him know and found the actor and his makeup man ‘totally out of it.’ The makeup man immediately asked for three kilograms of potatoes so that the peel could be applied to Solonitsyn’s face and reduce the swelling caused by ‘the two-week binge.’ (Not two days, two weeks.) The potatoes were procured and the potion mixed. Sharun returned to Solonitsyn’s room to find the makeup man flat on his back, and the star applying this peasant version of a Kiehl’s product to his face.
9 A sentiment shared by many men on this thirsty earth of ours. When I was a boy my dad would come home from work, after the summer holidays, full of disgust for his workmates, who had been on holiday somewhere and had spent the entire time at the bar or round a swimming pool, drinking, either in Spain or some other place where the licensing laws were not as repressive as in England. That was their deepest desire and wish. We rarely went anywhere on holiday because my dad’s deepest desire was always to save money and the best place to do this, to avoid the temptations of knickerbocker glories and overpriced choc-ices, was not to leave our home, the room where money came in, very slowly, but left even more reluctantly. (I am aware that this is not the first time that I have referred in print to my dad’s fear of the overpriced chocice. Albert Camus believed that ‘a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’ This certainly seems true of Tarkovsky, especially in Mirror. In my case, it seems that one of these images is a chocice and my dad reluctantly forking out for it. I am being unfair, or at least am referring to chocices in overpriced holiday destinations such as Bournemouth or Weston-super-Mare. My father had a friend who worked at the local Walls factory, in Gloucester, who was able to get chocices cheap. I asked him once if these chocices were stolen — hot, as they say in America. ‘It’s a perk,’ my dad said with a look of immense inward satisfaction.)