Even to describe the black-and-white of Stalker as black-and-white is to tint what we’re seeing with an inappropriate suggestion of the rainbow. Technically this concentrated sepia was achieved by filming in colour and printing in black-and-white. The result is a kind of submonochrome in which the spectrum has been so compressed that it might turn out to be a source of energy, like oil and almost as dark, but with a gold sheen too. As well as the dripping there is a certain amount of creaking and other spooky noises that are not easy to explain. We are in the room now, looking at a bed.
A TABLE, A BEDSIDE TABLE, by definition far lower than the table in the bar. The rumble of some kind of transport causes the contents of the table to rattle. The vibrations are enough to make a glass of water shudder halfway across the table. Remember this. Nothing that happens in Stalker is an accident and yet, at the same time, it is full of accidents. Next to the table, in the bed, a woman is sleeping. Next to her is a little girl with a head scarf, and next to her, the man who is presumably her father. The rumble of the train grows louder. The whole place is shaking. It’s amazing anyone can sleep through a racket like that, especially as the train is also blaring out a recording of the ‘Marseillaise’. The camera tracks across the people in bed and then tracks back, moves one way very slowly and then moves back just as slowly. Antonioni liked long takes but Tarkovsky took this a stage further. ‘If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.’ This is Tarkovsky’s aesthetic in a nutshell. At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last — and no one can concentrate on anything — for longer than about two seconds. Soon people will not be able to watch films like Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze or to read Henry James because they will not have the concentration to get from one interminable scene or sentence to the next. The time when I might have been able to read late-period Henry James has passed and because I have not read lateperiod Henry James I am in no position to say what harm has been done to my sensibility by not having done so. But I do know that if I had not seen Stalker in my early twenties my responsiveness to the world would have been radically diminished. As for Ulysses’ Gaze, in spite of the fact that it starred an implausible Harvey Keitel, it was another nail in the coffin of European art cinema (a coffin, cynics would say, made up almost entirely of nails), opening the floodgates to everything that was not art because anything seemed preferable to having to sit through a film like that, especially since the whole thing could be boiled down, anyway, to a single still photograph — a statue of Lenin gliding along the Danube on a barge, a petrified Pharaoh floating down the Nile of history — by Josef Koudelka.
THE RATTLE OF THE TRAIN subsides and there is just the sound of dripping again and we’re back where we were a few moments ago, looking at the bed. The man wakes up and gets out of bed. Unusually, he sleeps without his trousers but with his sweater on. For a long time I thought that American men always slept in their underwear. It didn’t occur to me that this was a cinematic convention, something that men did in films so that when they got up in the morning, on-screen, they would not be naked. To sleep without trousers but with a sweater does not make sense with regard to any system of conventions. It just seems weird and not terribly hygienic. Another weird thing is that although he is keen not to wake up his wife, he puts on his trousers and his heavy boots before clomping quietly into the kitchen, but I suppose his thinking is that if she can sleep through the train going by and the blare of the ‘Marseillaise’—to say nothing of the ambient creaking, groaning and squeaking — then a bit of foot traffic is not going to make any difference. It’s also possible that she is only pretending to sleep. We see the back of his head. The man — and although we don’t know who he is yet, for the sake of simplicity, I am going to introduce a slight spoiler at this point and disclose that he is none other than the eponymous Stalker — emerges from the bedroom and looks in through the doors, as the camera looked in a few minutes earlier, when he was in the bed, the difference being that he is no longer in the bed. By any standards it’s a slow start to a movie. Officials from Goskino, the central government agency for film production in the USSR, complained about this, hoping the film could be ‘a little more dynamic, especially at the start.’ Tarkovsky erupted: it actually needed to be slower and duller at the start so that anyone who had walked into the wrong theatre would have time to leave before the action got under way. Taken aback by the ferocity of this response, one of the officials explained that he was just trying to see things from the audience’s point of view… He was not able to finish. Tarkovsky couldn’t give a toss about the audience. He only cared about the point of view of two people, Bresson and Bergman. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!2
THE MAN WALKS OFF to the right but the camera stays where he was, seeing what he was seeing, what he no longer sees — which is his wife, getting blurrily out of bed. He goes into the kitchen. Turns on the tap, ignites the boiler, cleans his teeth. A bulb comes on. Nice: you know, brighten the place up a bit and god knows it could do with a bit of brightening up. Tarkovsky has always been opposed to symbolic readings of the images in his film but one wonders about the significance of this bulb: has the man just had a bright idea? If so, it turns out to be not such a good idea: the bulb flares extra-bright and then goes off completely, as if it’s blown itself out. It may not be clear which country we’re in but wherever we are it seems that getting reliable lighting might be a problem.
IN THIS INSTANCE, there’s a more specific problem, and it’s called the wife. Either she was awake all the time, or was woken up by the train, the ‘Marseillaise’, and her husband’s creaking around. She’s turned the dimmer into the opposite of a dimmer, into a brightener, has lit the place up so brightly that a second later it’s plunged into near-darkness again. Their home could do with rewiring, evidently.
You know that expression ‘famous last words’? We are naturally curious about people’s last words but it would be interesting to compile an exhaustive list of the first words — not just sounds, actual words — spoken in films, run them through a computer and subject the results to some kind of processing and analysis. In this film the first words are spoken by the wife and they are: ‘Why did you take my watch?’ Yes, the film’s hardly started, she’s only just woken up and, from a husbandly point of view, she’s already nagging. Nagging him and calling him a thief. No wonder he wants out. But of course we’re also getting the big theme introduced: time. Tarkovsky is saying to the audience: Forget about previous ideas of time. Stop looking at your watches, this is not going to proceed at the speed of Speed but if you give yourself over to Tarkovskytime then the helter-skelter mayhem of The Bourne Ultimatum will seem more tedious than L’Avventura. ‘I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time,’ Tarkovsky has said, ‘whether for time wasted, time lost, or time that is yet to be gained.’ This sentiment is only a couple of words away from being in perfect accord with something even the most moronic cinemagoer would agree with. Those words are ‘a good’, as in ‘What people go to the cinema for is a good time, not to sit there waiting for something to happen.’ (Some people lie outside any consensus of why we go to the cinema. They don’t go to the cinema at all. For Strike, a character in Richard Price’s novel Clockers, a movie, any movie, is just ‘ninety minutes of sitting there’—a remark that could be taken as a negative endorsement of Tarkovsky’s claim.)