THERE FOLLOWS ONE of the great sequences in the history of cinema. First there is Writer’s head in tight close-up while, in the unfocused background, some kind of landscape blurs past. The camera moves from Writer to Professor (in his bobble hat, the texture of his coat in sharp focus) to Stalker and back as they scrutinize their surroundings with concentration, perplexity, foreboding and, in the case of Writer, a suggestion of hungover befuddlement. These are the faces — the expressions — of travellers anywhere, from Columbus’s crew in search of the Americas to tourists in a taxi on their way from the airport to a city centre that they — Writer and Professor at least — have never visited before. They’re taking everything in even though they’re not sure if what they’re seeing is any different from what they’ve already seen or where they’ve just been. Frankly, they’re not entirely sure that what they’re taking in is worth taking in, a feeling we’ve all had as we make our hyperattentive way through the universally uninteresting, often desolate stretch between airport and the luxurious promise (hotel, cafés) of the city centre. Occasionally the camera permits a focused glimpse of what they are passing through — mist, a brick building, piles of discarded pipes, crates, a river (or possibly a lake) — but even then, even when we can see clearly, we are not sure what we are seeing. Outskirts, periphery, abandonedness. Buildings that are no longer what they were once intended for: sites of decayed meaning that may, as a result, have acquired a new and deeper meaning. It depends. On what? On whether we have entered the Zone yet. Difficult to say as the camera — fixed, implicitly, to the trolley — runs horizontally through this area of in-between-ness and indeterminacy. We are, as Roberto Calasso says of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, ‘on the threshold of a hidden world that one suspects is implicit in this world.’ The threshold is a thin line and it is also ubiquitous. Stalker must know if we are in the Zone — he, after all, has been here many times before. So what are his feelings? His expression of furrowed anxiety, of generalized unhappiness — all the world’s a prison— has not changed since the film began, when he was quarrelling with his wife, in his sweater and underwear. What we do see, quite clearly, is the patch of white on the left side of his closely cropped hair: is it the mark of a Stalker, of some kind of election? The insistent, soporific clack of the rails is gradually infused with and gives way to clangy electronic music, moving from the literal noise of mechanical operation to a dreamy rhythmic soundscape. It’s stood the test of time, this music by Eduard Artemiev with its Indianish drone of flute and stringed instrument (a Persian tar, to be precise) fed through a synth and washing over the steady — and steadily distorting — clang and clack of the rails. It still sounds far-out, has hardly dated at all. Give it a slight remix, put it through a system with some hefty subwoofers and there’d be more than a hint of Basic Channel or one of those other minimalist electronic outfits about it.
In his poem ‘The Movies’, Billy Collins says he’s in the mood to watch a movie in which ‘someone embarks on a long journey, / a movie with the promise of danger.’ I like movies like that too, whether the journey is by boat (Apocalypse Now, Deliverance), train (Von Ryan’s Express) or car (take your pick). The idea of the road movie is almost tautologous in that all movies are — or should be — journeys, it’s just that some of them are so tedious you’d rather be on a bus from Oxford to London. Stalker is a literal journey that is also a journey into cinematic space and — in tandem — into time.
Collins doesn’t care what dangers are encountered in the film he’s watching since he will just be sitting there, watching. So they’re our representatives, these three middle-aged men, sitting there watching, still and still moving, while the endless grey-black imagery slides past their eyes and into their heads. This long tracking sequence, following the trolley as it clanks and clangs along, is the most straightforward journey imaginable— horizontal, flat, right to left, in a straight line — and full of all the promised wonder of cinema. That’s what we are being sold in the trailers that precede what used to be called the ‘feature presentation’. Unfortunately this has become some of the most debased wonder in the history of the earth. It means explosions, historical epics in which the outcome of the Battle of Hastings is reversed by the arcane CGI prowess of Merlin the Magician, it means five-year-old children turning suddenly into snarling devils, it means wrecking cars and reckless driving, it means a lot of noise, it means that I have to time my arrival carefully (twenty minutes at least) after the advertised programme time if I am to avoid all this stuff which, if one were exposed to it for the full hour and a half, would cause one’s capacity for discernment to drop by fifty percent (or, conversely, one’s ability to tolerate stuff like this to increase a hundredfold). It means sitting there shaking one’s middle-aged head; it means that one is wary about going to the cinema. It means that there are more and more things on the street, in shops, on-screen and on telly from which one has to avert one’s ears and eyes. With television I have my strict rule, a rule applying to Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand, Graham Norton and a whole bunch of others whose names I don’t even know: I won’t have these people in the house. It’s not— as Stalker claimed — that all the world’s a prison; it’s just that a lot of what’s being shown on the world’s screens— televisions, cinemas, computers — is fit only for morons. Which is another reason why, in the long years since I first saw Stalker, I am as badly in need of the Zone and its wonders as any of the three men on the trolley as they sit there and the blurry landscape clangs past. The Zone is a place of uncompromised and unblemished value. It is one of the few territories left — possibly the only one — where the rights to Top Gear have not been sold: a place of refuge and sanctuary. A sanctuary, also, from cliché. That’s another of Tarkovsky’s virtues: an absolute freedom from cliché in a medium where clichés are not only tolerated but, in the form of unquestioning adherence to convention, expected. There are no clichés in Tarkovsky: no clichés of plot, of character, of framing, no clichés of music to underline the emotional meaning of a scene (or, as is more usually the case, to compensate or make good for an emotional meaning that would be absent were it not for the music). Actually, we need to qualify this slightly: there are no one else’s clichés in Tarkovsky. By the time of his final films, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice, however, he is reliant both conceptually and incrementally on Tarkovskyan cliché. Bergman said that, towards the end, Tarkovsky ‘began to make films that copied Tarkovsky.’ Wim Wenders felt exactly the same way about Nostalghia, that Tarkovsky was ‘using some of his typical narrative devices and shots as if they were between quotation marks.’13 The guru became his own most devoted disciple.