AS THE JEEP turns a corner they hear the sound of a revving motorbike and hit the deck, the damp deck. On release Stalker was billed as a sort of sci-fi film and this is the beginning of the most sci-fi-y sequence in the movie, even if, overall, Tarkovsky was pleased with the way that he’d been able to get rid of most of the elements that made it look like sci-fi, in a way that he had not been able to do with Solaris, which remained within the confines of genre (difficult to avoid with a movie set in the future, on a space station) and was, for this reason, Tarkovsky’s least favourite among his films.12
The motorcyclist is a guard, patrolling a perimeter or a premise. He’s wearing leathers and a white helmet and looks like a guard from Metropolis or 1984. Inevitably, now that certain seminal dates in the calendar of sci-fi projection—1984, 2001—have come and gone, faded into history, large parts of the genre have acquired an antiquarian quality, have become a future-oriented subset of costume drama. One possible interpretation of this sequence, then, is that Stalker and his mates are trying to escape from the clutches of history itself, from the ruinous vision of the future announced by Marx, which, a little more than a decade after the film was made, would finally declare itself obsolete and bankrupt.
There follows a cat-and-mouse car chase through what looks like an incomplete Artangel project in an abandoned warehouse from back in the days when I first saw Stalker, when there were abandoned warehouses all over London. I say car chase but there’s only one car — a car that is actually a jeep — and it’s a bit confusing in terms of where exactly Stalker is going or trying to reach. In other words it’s a car chase in classic mode in that it exists not in order to achieve anything in particular but in order to bring into existence and be part of the vehicular ritual called a car chase. While the jeep nips in and out of all this postindustrial dejection the gates are opened for the freight train whose lonesome whistle we have heard blowing. Like Luger the barman, the guy who opens the gate is smoking a cigarette. He might be Stalker’s inside man, a believer in the Zone who, for some kind of cut, has agreed to help them get through. Once the gates are open and the jeep has slithered through he runs off, to alert the authorities, presumably, so that, along with everything else, Stalker has the possibility of a double-cross to bear. We really could be in a heist movie — a sci-fi heist movie.
The big ole freight train hoves into view, bearing components of an electricity generator or something of that ilk, something huge, state-funded and probably harmful to the environment. The heavy train rumbles to the heavily guarded border crossing. The screen creaks under the weight of everything that is being projected onto it, especially since what is being projected is like a distant memory of the dawn of cinema, of the Lumière brothers and their train arriving at the station in 1895. Bright lights. The guards — dressed like the one we saw earlier on the motorbike — check to see that there aren’t stowaways hidden on or under the train. Stalker has always invited allegorical readings, and since the film has something of the quality of a prophecy, these readings are not confined to events that had occurred by the time the film was made. As the guards scan the train for stowaways, viewers of a particular political bent might be tempted to regard this train as a precursor of the Eurostar, poised to enter the Channel Tunnel, having passed close to Sangatte refugee camp, with the Zone an idealized image of the UK and its generous welfare system: a land of milk and honey with many opportunities for those willing to live in Peterborough and dig vegetables for six quid an hour. According to this reading Stalker is himself an asylum seeker — except he’s seeking asylum from the world. The irony, as Chris Marker points out in One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, his homage to Tarkovsky, is that asylum and freedom lie behind the barbed wire, in the Zone. In a way this is also true of Tarkovsky himself, for while he often felt frustrated by the control exercised by the state over his and others’ artistic freedom, in the West a subtler kind of censorship and tyranny — that of the market — would have made it extremely unlikely that he could ever have obtained permission (raised the funds) to make Mirror or Stalker. (How we loved making this point back in the 1980s!)
There’s a brief pause as Stalker waits for the right moment to make their bid for barbed-wire freedom. Writer takes advantage of this lull to get all maudlin. He doesn’t really care about inspiration, and doesn’t know what he wants or if he really wants what he wants or doesn’t want what he really wants, and he doesn’t even care if the other two are listening — and who could blame them if they’re not?
As the train makes its way beyond the barriers the jeep comes sliding along in its wake, on the coattails of the iron horse. The guards are hardly on the ball but, once the alarm is sounded and the searchlights flick on, they are not slow to open fire. It really is all action at this point — maybe Tarkovsky was right about starting slowly so people who’d come in by mistake had time to leave. There are ricochets and everything. Things get blown apart and the jeep crashes through a pile of crates. They come to a halt in another part of what seems an infinite warehouse complex, though the part they’re in seems not unlike the part they were in a few minutes earlier. The air is full of the cawing of birds. Instead of the lonesome whistle, there is the busy moan of foghorns. Whatever else it may be this is obviously a major transportation hub. Stalker tells Writer to see if there’s a trolley. In a few minutes we will see that he means a little diesel-powered thing that takes them along a narrowgauge railway track but at this point the word suggests that they are in one of the world’s more decrepit airports or an outpost of Sainsbury’s that has long since gone belly-up. Obediently, if rather grudgingly (later it will be all grudge and very little obedience), Writer goes looking for a trolley but finds only a volley — of fire from the guards. He is sent sprawling into a spongy safety net of botany. By this point he is possibly regretting all those drinks he downed before setting out on what is proving to be a quite dangerous escapade, not the well-oiled caper that he had envisaged. The sober Professor says he’ll go instead, into another even wetter and more ruined part of wherever-the-fuck they are. Shots are fired at him too but they miss and land in the water, leaving pale oblongs of light — reflections of windows, the world outside — to sway and settle and eventually, after the camera has moved on, to resume their shapely place in the brackish water’s scheme of things. Professor finds the trolley car and waves the others towards him, through the water that he’s just walked through, the water that is being dripped into by more of itself. You can see why Stalker didn’t mind about that puddle outside the bar: they all have wet feet now! Another hail of bullets, but harmless, Where Eagles Dare-ish in their harmlessness. They clamber onto the trolley car, hunched and seated, and they’re off, the three of them, chugging out of sight, screen left.