We are in no hurry for this sequence to be over with, partly because it’s difficult to keep track of how long it lasts. Writer’s appearing to nod off suggests that, on this most linear of journeys, we are drifting into nonlinear time, are entering dream-time, but a dream-time where everything, every treasured detail is anchored firmly in the real and the now. This is not like the flashing psychedelic rhetoric—’Beyond the Infinite’—of the closing phase of 2001; this is strictly within the finite; it’s just impossible to say how long this finitude might extend. We never know when we’re going to die, we learn in Solaris, and because of that we are, at any one moment, immortal. I read Stanislaw Lem’s novel to see if that line was in the book or if it was something added by Tarkovsky. As far as I could tell — I skimmed — it wasn’t there, but years later I came across a similar sentiment in a poem by Auden: ‘Happy the hare at morning for he cannot know the waking hunter’s thoughts.’ What are their thoughts, the thoughts of these three men, as they travel into the Zone? Professor and Writer are thinking — wondering — exactly the same thing that we are, the question we asked as children on every journey with our parents: Are we there yet? Is this the Zone? Is this it? That, perhaps, is a question that can be answered only by the questioner, when he stops asking it. We are in the Zone when we believe we are there. The blurred landscape slips and clangs past. What we are seeing may be the external representation of the dream-flecked remains of Writer’s sleep, a sleep littered with booze-blurred memories of things he has seen a few minutes or hours earlier: abandoned buildings, discarded metals, the man-made poised to return to the natural. Is anything especially worthy of our attention? Everything is, or may be.
IT LASTS LONG ENOUGH, this sequence (a sequence one remembers as a single take, though it actually consists of five), to lull us into a kind of trance. There then occurs one of the miracles of cinema, one of several miracles in a film about an allegedly miraculous place. It’s not a jump cut or fade but suddenly and gently — the clanging and echoey clank of the music and trolley are still on the sound track — unambiguously, we’re in colour and in the Zone.14 You can watch the trolley car sequence again and again, can refuse to succumb to its hypnotic monotony, and you can never predict where it will come, this moment of subtle and absolute transition. Camera and trolley continue clanking forward for a few moments and then come to a halt. The camera pauses and moves back.
We are there. We are in the Zone.
It is every bit as lovely as Stalker claims — and, at the same time, quite ordinary. The air is full of the sound of birds, of wind in the trees, running water. Mist, muted greens. Weeds and plants swaying in the breeze. The tangled wires of a tilted telegraph pole. The rusting remains of a car. We are in another world that is no more than this world perceived with unprecedented attentiveness. Landscapes like this had been seen before Tarkovsky but — I don’t know how else to put it — their beingness had not been seen in this way. Tarkovsky reconfigured the world, brought this landscape — this way of seeing the world — into existence. Many forms of landscape depend on a particular artist, or writer or artistic movement to render them beautiful, to make the rest of us see what has always been there (as the romantics did for mountains, or John C. Van Dyke for the deserts of the American West). But it’s not only the unchanging, eternal, natural world that needs to be mediated in this way. Walker Evans opened our eyes — Stalker himself will soon use that very phrase of his own teacher and guide — to the sagging shacks, wrecked cars and fading signs of America in the thirties. To that extent Evans anticipated Bresson’s reminder to himself, in Notes on the Cinematographer: ‘Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.’ A little later Bresson added a mediumspecific twist to this ambition: ‘Quality of a new world which none of the existing arts allowed to be imagined.’ Two related questions, then: would we regard this landscape of fields, abandoned cars, tilted telegraph poles and trees as beautiful without Tarkovsky? And could it have been brought into existence by any medium other than film?
If Stalker had not been the first Tarkovsky film I saw I might have recognized elements of this landscape from Mirror—the cross T’s of the telegraph poles, the greens (made more lush, somehow, by being subdued), the distinction between the man-made and the natural being eroded before our eyes. If I had seen Mirror I might have recognized this landscape, these elements, as Tarkovskyland, might have echoed the first words uttered by Stalker: Here we are. Home at last.
And yet, at some level, I must have recognized or at least been familiar with a modest and local variant of this kind of landscape — which perhaps accounts, in part, for why the film has made such a deep impression on me.
There is just one train station now in Cheltenham, where I grew up, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s there were four. One of these, Leckhampton, was only a five-minute walk from where we lived. My father used to take me up there when I was a toddler to watch trains steam in and out. The line and the station closed down in 1962, when I was four. I have no recollection of going there with my dad (only of his telling me that we used to go there) but I have strong memories of heading off to this abandoned, brambly zone to play with a couple of friends, when we were eight or nine. The windows of the disused station building had been smashed and the rain had seeped in; it looked as if it had long ago fallen into decay. (It may have only been three of four years previously that the station closed down but this, to me, was half a lifetime ago.) Faded, rain-buckled, the timetable was still displayed — a memorial to its own passing. An empty packet of Player’s cigarettes, the ones my mother smoked, with the face of the bearded sailor on the front, gone to a watery grave at the bottom of a puddle: frog-spawny, rust-coloured, pond-size, cloudy with gnats. The tracks had rusted, were overgrown with weeds, grass, stinging nettles, dandelions. Sometimes we followed them for a while, beyond the ends of the platforms, but never as far as the next station along the line — also abandoned — a couple of miles away, in Charlton Kings.
Here we are, says Stalker. Home at last.
THE ZONE PARTS of Stalker were filmed in or near two abandoned hydroelectric power plants — one of which had been partially blown up when the retreating Red Army was trading space for time in 1941—on the Jägala River, about fifteen miles from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. This was not Tarkovsky’s first choice for the Zone. He initially intended to film around an old Chinese mine in the Tian Shan foothills near Isfara in Tajikistan. Apart from the single-line railroad track curving through it this earlier version of the Zone has almost nothing in common with the place in the actual film. It’s more like the badlands of Death Valley (where Antonioni got the name for and shot the final scenes of Zabriskie Point): devoid of vegetation, pale yellow and desert-dry, stark.15 Tarkovsky loved everything about the original location, but when an earthquake devastated the region before filming could begin, an alternative had to be found. As Rerberg put it, ‘The first stone thrown out of the wall of the script was the location.’ Footage exists of the original location: one can see how it might have served Tarkovsky’s purpose, though the film would have been quite different, would have lacked the damp, drippy, almost-ordinariness of the Zone in its final incarnation. Alien, unearthly (a word applied to a surprising number of places on earth), it lends itself perfectly to sci-fi but lacks the subtle magic of the more temperate Zone. As such it would have rendered that line of Stalker’s—‘Home at last’—rather odd.16