10 I had intended breaking this little book into 142 sections — each separated from the one preceding and following it by a double space — corresponding to the 142 shots of the film. That’s a very low number of shots for a long film and it worked well at first but then, as I became engrossed and re-engrossed in the film, I kept losing track of where one shot ended and another began. This forgetting or not noticing is an authentic and integral part of watching any film — and this book is an account of watchings, rememberings, misrememberings, and forgettings; it is not the record of a dissection.
11 We can’t actually see what time it is. If we could, then part of this scene might have found its way into Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), a video montage of moments of glimpsed time grabbed from thousands of films. The Clock lasts twenty-four hours and is synched precisely so that every minute of screen time — as revealed by clocks, watches or dialogue — is exactly the same as the local time of wherever the film is being screened. Tarkovsky expressed distaste for ‘montage cinema’, but Marclay’s sampled narrative is like an extrapolation of many of the points he makes in the ‘Time, rhythm and editing’ section of Sculpting in Time. (Actually, it’s possible that this moment of Stalker glancing at his wife’s watch is in The Clock somewhere — I’ve only seen about ten hours of the whole thing — floating free of the relentless anchoring of verifiable time as a kind of gestural filler. For the record, I did spot a few bits from Nostalghia and Solaris.)
12 Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 version is obviously and consciously a sci-fi film set in the sci-future. He claimed his film was not a remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris but a refilming of the Stanislaw Lem novel on which Tarkovsky’s film was based. There was certainly scope for this as far as Lem was concerned; in his opinion, Tarkovsky ‘did not make Solaris; what he made was Crime and Punishment.’ Still, in the very first shot of Soderbergh’s film (raindrops on a windowpane, olive green and beigey brown) it’s obvious that memories of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (specifically the transitional shot near the end, taking us back from the space station to earth, of a plant on Kris’s brown-beige window sill) are intent on coming (and are intended to come) back to haunt us. The film is a lot better than Tarkovsky loyalists might care to admit and George Clooney is good as always, even though he looks, as usual, like he’s starring in a (futuristic) advert for George Clooney. The most interesting thing about it, from my point of view, was that from the start Natascha McElhone looked rather like my wife. After a while this became so striking that I whispered to my wife, ‘She looks incredibly like you.’ ‘I know,’ my wife whispered back. This resemblance deepened as the film continued. With every subsequent death and reincarnation of her character, Natascha McElhone came to resemble my wife more and more closely until, about halfway through, it was exactly like watching my wife up there onscreen, constantly getting killed off and constantly coming back with more devotion and more love. Although I was deluded in thinking that it was my wife on-screen, this delusion was encouraged by the film to the extent that I was more deeply implicated in the on-screen drama than I had ever been before. Just as writers sometimes speak of an ideal reader, so, in a way, I was Soderbergh’s ideal viewer. There I was, sitting thinking, ‘My god, it’s my wife’, and there was Clooney being told, ‘That’s not your wife.’ She kept reappearing as he wanted her to be, as he remembered her, as he wrongly remembered her. Star and viewer — Clooney and I! — were suffering from the same delusion. This was not vanity on my part, and the delusion was not all-enveloping: I wasn’t sitting there thinking I’m married to Natascha McElhone, therefore I’m George fucking Clooney. But I wasn’t — we weren’t — alone in thinking that my wife looked incredibly like Natascha McElhone. We once went to a wedding in the Adirondacks where a fellow guest sidled up to my wife and said, ‘I’ve been wondering all weekend if you’re really Natascha McElhone.’ At least two other people made similar observations in the years immediately following the film’s release. We watched Solaris again a few days ago, only to discover, predictably enough, that my wife no longer looks like Natascha McElhone in Solaris—but then neither does Natascha McElhone. We were sitting near her at a lavish fund-raiser for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2010 and although we did not chat we were able to have a discreetly good gawp. Natascha McElhone and my wife have both changed, but have changed differently — in the same direction (they’re older) but in slightly different ways. It doesn’t matter. In the film Natascha McElhone is as she is because that’s how George Clooney remembers her and she looks like my wife because that is how I remember her. Only the film preserves that memory of how alike they were, more alike than the two films of the same book.
13 On the subject of quotation within film: an interesting study could be made — in a sense this book is a catalogue or compendium of proposals for potentially interesting studies — of scenes in films where bits of other films are seen, glimpsed or watched, either at a drive-in, on TV or in the cinema (Frankenstein in Spirit of the Beehive; Red River in The Last Picture Show; The Passion of Joan of Arc in Vivre Sa Vie). Actually, maybe it wouldn’t be that interesting after all; one wouldn’t get far without the word meta cropping up and turning everything to dust. But, as it happens, this sequence in Stalker is used to brilliant effect in Uzak (Distant, 2002) by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Mahmut, a middle-aged photographer, is living in Istanbul. When his clodhopping cousin, Yusuf, comes to the city looking for work Mahmut is obliged to put him up in his apartment. They may be from the same village but they’re worlds apart and Mahmut is not about to compromise his high aesthetic standards just because a dull-witted cousin has come to stay. So when we see them at home, feet up, watching TV, it’s not Top Gear or Turkey’s Got Talent they’re watching; it’s Stalker, the trolley sequence. The two of them are slumped and stretched out in their chairs, in a torpor of concentration and boredom. Mahmut is eating nuts, pistachios presumably. Cousin Yusuf has nodded off. One can hardly blame him; even the most boring night in the village cannot compare with the depths of tedium being plumbed here. Professor, Stalker and Writer are on-screen, on the trolley, heading towards the Zone, faces in tight close-up, while, in the unfocused background, some kind of landscape blurs past. The electronic score echoes and clangs through the apartment. Yusuf wakes up, amazed to discover that he’d been asleep for only a few seconds or, even more amazingly, that after a long nap the TV is still showing these three old blokes drifting along the railroad to nowhere. Peasant he might be, but at some level he has intuited Jean Baudrillard’s insight that television is actually a broadcast from another planet. The evening, evidently, is not going to improve. He decides to go to bed. They say good night. After a decent interval Mahmut gets up, fetches a video, puts it in the VCR and points the remote. Stalker is replaced by girl-on-girl porno. Everything else remains pretty much unchanged. Before, he had one foot on the pouffe, and one hitched up over the arm of the chair. Now he has both feet on the pouffe, otherwise he’s stretched out the same way as when he was watching Stalker. The only difference is that now, instead of this long magical sequence of three men clanging toward the Zone, we’ve got a silicone-breasted woman sucking the enormous tits of a Page Three model. Upstairs, Yusuf telephones home. After a while he comes down again and Mahmut, who has not budged, who is not jerking off, whose fly is not even open, just about has time to flip to a broadcast channel. The fact that the indescribably boring film they were watching earlier has morphed into comedy is not lost on Yusuf — this is much more his cup of tea — and he stands there snickering a bit so Mahmut flips channels again and comes to a kung fu movie — which is exactly Yusuf’s cup of tea. His evening has improved after all but Mahmut’s has taken a decided turn for the worse: no Tarkovsky and no g.o.g action, just him and his moronic cousin watching a kung fu film. It’s late, he says. Let’s turn that off.