35 It was this sequence, apparently, that prompted an official at a Mosfilm screening of the original, damaged version of the film shot by Rerberg to complain that it was out of focus: a rather strange complaint since there was nothing on which to focus.
36 Cf. Bresson: ‘Shooting is going out to meet something. Nothing in the unexpected that is not secretly expected by you.’
37 Tilda Swinton’s character — white wig, white shades, white cowboy hat, white mac — mentions this sequence in Jim Jarmusch’s vacuous The Limits of Control. She was apparently drawing on her own experiences as a student at Cambridge in the 1980s: ‘I saw Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and there’s a scene of that image — of a bird flying through a room of sand. And I’d been having that dream my whole life, or probably since before I was ten. I’ve stopped having it since seeing that film, but it really blew my mind that someone else would have exactly the same image somehow and put it in a film. That really informed my relationship with cinema: the idea that it is what’s unconscious.’
38 I may have wanted to see it again immediately but that was impossible. I had to wait until it was showing at a cinema again. Of course it’s fantastically convenient, being able to see Stalker—or at least to refer to it — at home, on DVD, whenever the urge takes one. But I liked the way that my visits to the Zone were at the mercy of cinema schedules and festival programmes. In London or in any other city where I happened to be living I always looked through Time Out or Pariscope or the Village Voice in the hope that Stalker would be playing. If it was showing somewhere, then seeing it became a priority, an event that gave shape to the surrounding week. Like this, the Zone retained its specialness, its removal from the everyday (of which it remained, at the same time, a part). Getting there was always a little expedition, a cinematic pilgrimage. As was entirely appropriate to the Zone, the film changed slightly, manifested itself differently according to where it happened to be found: the fact that I was seeing Stalker in a tiny cinema in the Fifth arrondissement of Paris — the same cinema, in fact, where I had sat through L’Avventura— made it a slightly different experience to seeing it as part of a Tarkovsky retrospective at Lincoln Center in New York. But what about the possibility of a cinema as semipermanent pilgrimage site? Bresson believed that the riches offered by certain films were so inexhaustible that ‘there ought to be in Paris one quite small, very well equipped cinema, in which only one or two films would be shown each year.’ Taking this a stage further, how about a cinema dedicated to showing Stalker exclusively? (For a less rapturous take on such a possibility see David Thomson on page 159.)
At various times before the advent of DVDs, Stalker was shown on TV and I taped it, to make sure I had a record of the film but, unlike Mahmut in Uzak, I never watched Stalker on telly. That list of things and people I won’t watch on TV does not stop at Top Gear and Jeremy Clarkson. It also includes…Stalker. One cannot watch Stalker on TV for the simple reason that the Zone is cinema; it does not even exist on telly. The prohibition extends beyond Stalker, to anything that has any cinematic value. It doesn’t matter if the TV is HD: great cinema must be projected. It is the difference, as John Berger puts it, between watching the sky (‘from where else would film stars come if not from a film sky?’) and peering into a cupboard. I was so unshakeable in this rule, at a time when fewer and fewer classic films were being shown at the cinema, that I was in danger of eliminating much of film history from my life. I would permit us to watch only romcoms at home, films whose defining characteristic was an absolute lack of cinematic value. So we bought a DVD projector and it was wonderful, even though the setup each time we wanted to watch a film — setting the aspect ratio, clambering through the complexities of the menu tree, shifting stereo speakers, lowering the blinds to eliminate light from the street — often reduced me to a state of such fury that the screening had to be aborted. All of this was, perhaps, to be expected. The unexpected problem was that so many of the classic films of the past actually turned out to be pretty terrible. Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Belle de Jour sucked. Godard’s Breathless was unwatchable, and not only because of the smoking. Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Véronique made straightahead porn seem tasteful by comparison. Getting through Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest was a bit of a struggle too. Still, at least we could watch Tarkovsky. Except Nostalghia, a film I saw and was disappointed and bored by when it first came out, was even worse than I remembered it, so bad—so far up itself — that I thought it best to leave The Sacrifice on the video shop’s shelves of memory.
39 Scope, also, for an allusive YouTube-style redub: Professor answers the phone and says, ‘Ah Michelangelo!’
40 Tarkovsky toyed with the idea of a ‘subsequent film’ in which Stalker himself develops some of these tendencies and ‘starts forcibly to drag people to the Room and turns into a “votary”, a “fascist”. Bullying them into happiness.’
41 As is the film itself. Stalker has long been synonymous both with cinema’s claims to high art and a test of the viewer’s ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett’s enthusiasm—‘every single frame of the film is burned into my retina’—attests not only to Tarkovsky’s lofty purity of purpose but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement. So a certain amount of blowback is inevitable and desirable. Having given Tarkovsky short and rather grudging shrift in the various editions of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson was moved, in 2008, to include Stalker (mentioned but not discussed in the Dictionary) in his pantheon of the thousand best movies, ‘Have You Seen…?’ But he remained dubious about the much-hyped Room at the heart of the Zone, suspecting that it would turn out to be ‘an infinite, if dank enclosure in which an uncertain number of strangers are watching the works of Tarkovsky. Equally, it may be that as malfunction of one kind or another covers the world, we may have a hard time distinguishing the Room, the Zone, and the local multiplex.’ This is infinitely preferable to the reverence that Tarkovsky tends to invite from his admirers — including himself. I have little instinct for personal reverence and, though I’ve not exactly been inundated with offers, I know I would hate to be revered myself. One of the things that I thought I would love as a writer, one of the perks of the job, would be having people come up to me to say how much they loved my books. And I do like it. For about ten seconds. After that I am desperate for the conversation to move on to any other topic. Actually, I need to slightly qualify what I just said about my own capacity for revering. I have a sizeable capacity for admiring people’s work but I suspect that the verb ‘to revere’ describes a relation to people rather than things. Let’s say I greatly admired your work and, at some point, had the chance to meet you. I would be overjoyed and would not be shy about expressing my admiration. But after a very short time, if I felt that you were interested in this as a basis for any kind of interaction, if you wanted to extend the reverence beyond what was considered politely necessary — if, in other words, you didn’t get bored by being revered almost as quickly as I would be bored by revering — then I would start thinking you were a dick.