The end of The Banishment echoes the beginning with a shot of an almond tree and a car winding its way along the road that runs beside it. Except this is not quite the same as the beginning, for the camera then tracks to the side to some peasant women — who seem to have stepped out of a Brueghel painting (which carries with it the tacit suggestion that they have also stepped out of a Tarkovsky film, at one remove). Suddenly we’re in a different film. It’s as if, playing alongside the movie we’ve just seen, was another, which we now have the option of watching.
This artful if rather distracting sideways shift into another movie alerted me to something that I had, as it were, known but not realized about Tarkovsky. Like all the greatest filmmakers he immerses you so completely in his world that it never occurs to you — unless it is by design, à la Godard at the end of Le Mépris (a deliberate limiting that serves also as a deeper immersion) — that the world on-screen ceases to exist at the edges of screen. The best directors all invert Coriolanus’s claim that there is a world elsewhere. No, the world beyond the screen is just a continuation of the world we are seeing. To either side and behind there is more of the same. We are not even in a cinema; we are in a world. Or, rather, there is nothing but cinema; there is only the Zone.
45 If she’d asked me I’d have said yes in an instant. I’d love to have a dog. Or would I? The fact that my wife and I have not got a dog despite thinking about getting a dog, mulling it over and talking about nothing else for five years, suggests that maybe we don’t want a dog. In some way, though, this dog — a dog that looks more like a concentrated idea of dog than any particular breed of dog — is there to remind me that I do want a dog, that it’s not for nothing that we spend all our time talking about getting a dog and looking at dog websites and that we already have a name for the dog that we’ve not got around to getting: Monkey, named after Stalker’s daughter, even though this is a potentially confusing name for a dog, just as Cat or Fish would be. But then — this is why we go round in circles the whole time — we also know that the reason we have not got a dog yet is because there is only one dog we want, Dotty, our friends’ lurcher. That would be my deepest wish: for our friends suddenly to say, ‘You’ve been such good friends to us over the years that we’ve decided to give you Dotty, even though a lurcher needs lots of open space and you don’t even have a garden and she will miss us and the Kent countryside so badly that she’ll probably just pine away and die in a fortnight.’
46 Looking back on the sequence when Stalker is lying in water and the dog comes up to him, director of photography Knyazhinsky remarks fondly that this ‘fantastic dog’, who only understood commands in Estonian, ‘literally worked miracles’: a real Zone dog!
47 In a sense Stalker’s book collection is also Tarkovsky’s: ‘Only that which I would like to have in my home has the right to find itself in a shot of one of my films,’ he said in an interview. ‘If the objects are not to my liking, I simply cannot allow myself to leave them in the film.’ (Bresson puts the emphasis on the things themselves: ‘Make the objects look as if they want to be there.’)
48 It’s also further evidence of what Tarkovsky said about only using things in his films that he would have in his own house: the same cuckoo clock puts in an audio appearance in Mirror when the children run out of the house to see the fire.
49 A lovely offer, reminiscent of the one my mum once made on behalf of my dad. Owing to an unlucky turn of events at school I seemed, in the sixth form, to have no friends. I had no one to go to the pub with and my mum said that my dad would go out for a drink with me, an idea I knew would not appeal to him as it would have involved spending money, which he hated, and going to the pub, which he never liked.
50 That Tarkovsky intended something like this — Stalker and his wife as stand-ins for his own sense of persecuted devotion — seems especially likely given that he wanted Larissa to play the part but was dissuaded by Rerberg and co., who lobbied successfully for Alisa Freindlikh. Her tocamera monologue was originally intended to go at the beginning; only late in the process of shooting the third version did Tarkovsky decide to put it here, as a kind of epilogue.
While Tarkovsky may have seen himself as a Stalker — a persecuted martyr taking us on voyages into a Zone where ultimate truths are revealed — he also became identified with the destination itself. There is a poignant moment in an interview with the terminally ill production designer Rashit Safiullin, who, when asked about the Zone, recalls the time he spent living, working and talking with Tarkovsky: ‘Here you live being your inmost self…it’s somewhere where you can talk with somebody, something unfathomable.’ The interviewer asks him to clarify. Does he mean…? ‘Yes, speaking with god. When Andrei was no more I was bereaved of a person with whom I could talk about the most important things. That room vanished.’ ‘So he was the Room to you?’ asks the interviewer. ‘Yes.’
51 Bjork got the lyrics to her song ‘The Dull Flame of Desire’—on the album Volta—from the English translation of this poem, acknowledging Stalker as the source.
52 Extraordinary, the way that this film continues to creep into my life in the most unexpected ways. In the last several years I’ve taken to listening to ambient music— William Basinski, Stars of the Lid, that kind of stuff— while working (the drone, the lack of beat, is an aid to concentration). I’d listened to the Lids’ album The Tired Sounds Of dozens of times and had always liked the funny moment, on ‘Requiem for Dying Mothers, part 2’, when a dog starts whining (just as I’d liked the dog barking on one of the recordings of Dylan’s ‘Every Grain of Sand’). I assumed a dog had somehow strayed into the studio and the Lids had decided to retain the intrusion as a random bit of canine backing vocals. Then, listening to it as I was writing about this scene, I realized the sound of the dog whimpering was preceded by a slight scraping noise. I listened to it again. And again. There could be no doubt, there was nothing accidental about it: the Lids had sampled the sound of the dog whining in response to the glass moving along the table!