888 Stalker

[swo17]

I'm impressed with how much activity this thread has seen in such short time, but I'd like to read more of people's interpretations of the film, less debates over whether the film is allowed to be interpreted. We're all grown ups, this is the internet, let's share our opinions here.

[bunuelian]

I think MikeB has found a fancy new way of saying, "shut the fuck up, noob." Such creativity! =D>

I'm not sure that there are many interpretations for Stalker available after reviewing what Tarkovsky wrote on the topic and considering the film in the wider context of his work. I find it difficult to articulate in simple terms my my understanding of Tarkovsky's religious perspective, but terms like "spiritualist" or "mystic" flirt with it.

The Stalker is a spiritual guide in the tragic tradition of Christianity, one that can't get through the day without feeling pain for the sufferings of others, which he tries to alleviate by leading the sufferers through the Zone (as a way to help his family, since he otherwise has no prospects, apparently).

The Stalker's two clients go through a series of trials in which they come face to face with death and powers beyond their understanding, and learn humility. Their decision to not enter the room arises from their internalization of this humility.

The ending has to be understood within the science fiction context of the whole. The Zone is something of alien origin, which undoubtedly in Tarkovsky's view is a God origin, rather than one of little green men. The Zone is triggering an evolutionary shift that people born before it existed struggle to understand. The wish-granting power of the room is a source of ego-gratification to the essentially atheist intellectuals led to it, and hence can be as much a source of destruction as redemption. The characters of the film find redemption and hence avoid the danger, but they still haven't understood the fundamental mystery of the Zone (God), which the child comprehends intuitively through her astonishing powers. The soundtrack's industrial noise during this sequence reinforces the idea that despite all our industrialization and the resulting loss of religious life, the God-mystery remains.

There are earthier elements also. The social life of the professor doesn't extend past his professional world, and his discourse is one of intellectual isolation. The writer has a more promiscuous character, shown by the woman he shows up with, clearly with the idea of impressing her rather than out of a deeper connection with her. His alcoholism underscores his bitterness and sense of alienation. The Stalker, meantime, has a conventional family - hugely imperfect (an invalid daughter, a despairing wife), but nonetheless devoted to the notion of family rather than self.

[MichaelB]

I think MikeB has found a fancy new way of saying, "shut the fuck up, noob." Such creativity!

Well, that wasn't actually the intention - but before making sweeping statements about whether or not something's "incomprehensible", it's a good idea to do some basic research into what Russians of Tarkovsky's generation made of it.

And since Tarkovsky explicitly raises this issue in Sculpting in Time, the core text on his work, there's very little excuse for not being aware of it.

Mirror is certainly difficult, but it's absolutely not incomprehensible. For a good comparison, see Yuri Norstein's Tale of Tales (1979), a largely non-narrative 30-minute animation that attempts a similarly elliptical memory-collage - and, again, it speaks to Russians of a certain age as clearly as the most moronically signposted three-act structure.

[Robin Davies]

And I'm not surprised that no-one rose to my challenge to name the film that Tarkovsky saw in London in 1981 - but it was James Glickenhaus' The Exterminator, chosen because Tarkovsky specifically wanted to see an example of an indefensibly crass piece of violent exploitation (of a kind that he'd have been unable to see in the USSR), and that particular film was a media cause celèbre at the time.

I think Tarkovsky had an interest in SF/horror movies, and in his diaries he mentions seeing several.
"Yesterday I saw The Last Wave, science fiction. Not up to much, of course, just a story."
"We saw Zombie II - science fiction horror film. Ghastly; repulsive trash."
"Saw an unspeakably revolting film called Possession. An American mixture of horror film, satanism, violence, thriller and anything else you like to name. Monstrous. Money, money, money... Nothing real, nothing true. No beauty, no truth, no sincerity, nothing."
I could understand him trying The Last Wave but surely he must have known before he saw them that Zombie II and Possession were not exactly going to be his cup of tea!
I wonder if Lucio Fulci saw any Tarkovsky films...

[colinr0380]

I wonder if Lucio Fulci saw any Tarkovsky films...

Not sure about Fulci, but Richard Stanley included a scene in homage to Mirror in his horror film Dust Devil - here's an interview quote from 1997:

Offscreen: All this reminds me somewhat of Lev Tolstoi, and his great transformation in art after he converted to Christianity, wrote What is Art? and denounced all his earlier great works in favor of his later works which were lesser works of art but contained more direct moral messages. I think someone like Andrei Tarkovsky got it right with his balance between great art and morality.

Richard: I think Tarkovsky was also losing it toward the end, I hate to say that, but I don't like The Sacrifice much, you know, it's his least work. It's a good film by anyone else's standards, but it's a strange progression from Nostalghia because in Nostalghia the character burns himself and in the next movie he burns his house, and it struck me as a kind of anti-climax. If he would have shot them in the opposite order it might have been different, but it struck me that by the time he got to The Sacrifice he wasn't saying anything new and at the same time saying it with less power than he did before, which was a bad sign. Even Nostalghia I didn't like quite as much as Stalker and Mirror, which are amazing works. But, of course, on days when I don't think Stalker is the greatest movie ever, it's Mirror. I wish Tarkovsky had made [Mihail] Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, I'd love to have seen what he would have made out of a devil movie. But I was disappointed when I saw The Sacrifice.

Offscreen: I still like it very much

Richard: I still like it, by anyone else's standards it's great. It's the same as what's happened to Werner Herzog, he's also completely lost it, in that Scream of Stone and Cobra Verde, are very disappointing compared to the earlier works. But at the same time, Cobra Verde by any other filmmaker is still a good movie. One can't complain too much. Dario is sort of the same, I mean Stendhal Syndrome while bad is ultimately better than the average American horror movie. Which is being extra hard on these people but it's because they're really capable, and it sort of is sad to see them at anything less than full power.

Offscreen: We're doing this for their own good!

Richard: It is rather, Dario I always want to somehow jolt him or blast him, or write some material for him, or do something, I can't believe he's lost it for good, it's too depressing, and Opera's such a short time ago, it seems like a very rapid decline.

Offscreen: I was thinking of Tarkovsky, and relating him to your work, I could see quite a bit, snippets of him, especially in Dust Devil , like in the scene where the devil visits the boy at the military shooting range, which is right out of Mirror.

Richard: It's interesting that you should say that.

Offscreen: I may be the only person who noticed that!

Richard: Because of course it's also one of the scenes in the movie which is most true to life for me, but obviously Mirror touches me deeply, possibly because there are elements in it that are very similar to bits of life which one recognizes, and that scene is very much based on an incident which happened to me when I was that boy's age.

Offscreen: There are many other instances of Tarkovsky emerging in your films, like the naming of the "Zone" in Hardware, the scene of the burning house and encircling car, and the incongruous telephone ringing in the abandoned house in Dust Devil. I was intrigued when I read in your Dust Devil diaries that you kept a copy of Tarkovsky's book Sculpting in Time on the set with you to consult in times of duress. In what way do you find inspiration from Tarkovsky?

Richard: Well, Andrei really is for me like a patron saint, a guiding light in the midst of chaos. When everyone else is running around losing their heads, freaking out about the pressures of time, saint Andrei speaks to me in a still voice and gives me an idea of what really matters, of what it was that we really got involved in this medium for in the first place. His films demonstrate the potential for this medium to reach people, to touch people's souls and hearts and to somehow communicate something of the essence of what it is like to try and be alive in this world.

I know this is extremely woolly, and Tarkovsky himself would have had a very hard time explaining his own work, but a great number of things the man did and labored towards are inspirational. In some respects even the essential ambiguity of his work and the way he labors toward the situation of maximum ambiguity as opposed to the way an American would work and the way people insist that everything should be nailed down to just one meaning and one definition.

Offscreen: Nice. I guess I could use this idea of maximum ambiguity as a lead in to the final shot of Dust Devil, which you've jokingly referred to as your Tiananmen Square shot. Could you talk a bit about this final ambiguous, almost mythical image?

Richard: As scripted at the end of the film, the main character having survived various tribulations in the plot is meant to find a way out of the desert to the nearest road and be rescued. But once we came to shoot the scene of course this seemed rather simplistic; and as we had at our disposal a convoy of armoured cars lent to us by the Namibian defense force I started to imagine the traffic on the road as representing the future. The road itself seemed to represent a linear time line moving through the spiralling chaos of the film. The plot structure is very much a spiral and the road is kind of a straight line right through that, but nonetheless, I had chosen in the end to portray the vehicles in the road in such a threatening manner that they scarcely seemed to be rescuing her, just as the red light up ahead scarcely promises salvation but promises something quite frightening further down the line.

At the same time we're not even sure anymore whether she's the heroine or whether she's the devil incarnate. I'm not sure whether she's going to be rescued by them or whether she's going to kill them, or whether they are going to kill her. I went to some lengths to cut out of the scene before the vehicles even started to slow down because I didn't want to resolve it one way or another. I wanted to leave it hanging on the edge as much as possible so the audience could make up their own mind as to whether she was a heroine or bad guy, whether she was being rescued or going to be killed, or what was going to happen next.

I wanted to leave it more or less so anyone could take home from the movie whatever it was they wanted to feel. Which is something that saint Andrei was very, very good at, in that every single time that I see Mirror it seems to mean something entirely different to me, full of varying different messages and no one of them seems to be the actual explanation. I think in that way I attempted to produce a situation of maximum ambiguity. I mean for me ultimately, magic is something that can't be described. If I had in my hand an object which was indescribable, which could be any object, then presumably it could appear to be all things to all people. One person would think I were holding a cigarette, someone else would think it was a knife, someone else might think it's a flower; but if someone had something which could be infinitely ambiguous, then you'd have something which is truly magic, which every single person could interpret in their own way, to have some personal meaning which was unique to them. I'm getting lost here, so I'll stop!

[zedz]

really? so they brought people to see a 53 minute film, then a 105 minute film? Isn't that a little disproportionate? Didn't it premier and run as one piece?

Not quite like that. One of the more arcane aspects of the arcane world of Soviet film funding was this notion that some (expensive) productions needed to be counted as two films, even if there was never any intention of screening them in two parts. I think both Andrey Rublyov and Solaris fall into this category. With Stalker, I believe the problem was that, when the first version shot proved unusable, the only way to justify the funding for the reshoot was to retrospectively turn the film into a two-parter (thereby accessing additional funding), hence the arbitrary central titles. To the best of my knowledge, the film was never shown (and was never expected to be shown) in two parts, and this probably didn't happen with Solaris either.

[aox]

really? so they brought people to see a 53 minute film, then a 105 minute film? Isn't that a little disproportionate? Didn't it premier and run as one piece?

Not quite like that. One of the more arcane aspects of the arcane world of Soviet film funding was this notion that some (expensive) productions needed to be counted as two films, even if there was never any intention of screening them in two parts. I think both Andrey Rublyov and Solaris fall into this category. With Stalker, I believe the problem was that, when the first version shot proved unusable, the only way to justify the funding for the reshoot was to retrospectively turn the film into a two-parter (thereby accessing additional funding), hence the arbitrary central titles. To the best of my knowledge, the film was never shown (and was never expected to be shown) in two parts, and this probably didn't happen with Solaris either.

thanks for the info Zedz.

And I haven't read Sculpting in Time. Can someone quickly summarize Tarkovsky's thoughts on Stalker, and maybe any interesting trivia he reveals?

[Svevan]

Yesterday I saw The Last Wave, science fiction. Not up to much, of course, just a story.

It's more than a little disappointing to hear that Tarkovsky said this; how could he not relate to the rationalism/spirituality conflict (a conflict present in Stalker through the metaphorical "Scientist") or the ambiguous "cosmic destiny" ending? Perhaps Weir explained too much for Tarkovsky's taste or was too literal at times. I hope he got the chance to try Picnic at Hanging Rock.

[MyNameCriterionForum]

Can someone quickly summarize Tarkovsky's thoughts

No offense, but those words made me LOL

Yesterday I saw The Last Wave, science fiction. Not up to much, of course, just a story.

It's more than a little disappointing to hear that Tarkovsky said this; how could he not relate to the rationalism/spirituality conflict (a conflict present in Stalker through the metaphorical "Scientist") or the ambiguous "cosmic destiny" ending? Perhaps Weir explained too much for Tarkovsky's taste or was too literal at times. I hope he got the chance to try Picnic at Hanging Rock.

I can understand his not liking Last Wave (though I like it myself) -- it's his dismissal of Possession that pains me. Clearly he has no sense of humor, and precious little imagination outside of "established" classical education, political thought and psychological analysis. I was going to ask if he ever saw any of David Lynch's films before he died... lord knows what he would have made of Eraserhead.

[zedz]

Mirror was a great example of this, it was an incomprehensible film for anyone other than him, to whom it meant something.

I'm sorry, but this is just flat-out wrong. That film generated a greater personal postbag than any of Tarkovsky's other films, all from people who claimed that the film had touched them more deeply than anything else they'd seen - and a frequent meme was "How did you know so much about me?"

Yes, indeed, and the film is far from 'incomprehensible', even in the non-subjective / personally reflective sense: there's linear development of a central conflict that's resolved at the end of the film, even if that development is expressed in an extremely original way.

Moviscop actually got close to the heart of the matter when he referred to the film as "stream of consciousness". If you take that idea seriously and ask yourself "whose stream of consciousness?" and "why?" then you can start to piece together the film's psychological and narrative logic.

[aox]

Can someone quickly summarize Tarkovsky's thoughts

No offense, but those words made me LOL

Yeah, I can see why. I just didn't want to ask too much of people in terms of typing.

[sdk83]

There are earthier elements also. The social life of the professor doesn't extend past his professional world, and his discourse is one of intellectual isolation. The writer has a more promiscuous character, shown by the woman he shows up with, clearly with the idea of impressing her rather than out of a deeper connection with her. His alcoholism underscores his bitterness and sense of alienation. The Stalker, meantime, has a conventional family - hugely imperfect (an invalid daughter, a despairing wife), but nonetheless devoted to the notion of family rather than self.

I do largely agree with this reading but also find it fascinating how we are the only ones who witness Monkey's telekinetic powers. You can begin to read that Stalker too cannot 'see the wood for the trees' becoming too focussed on the Zone itself rather than the Zone's actual influence. Indeed he leaves his family to be within the Zone even when his Wife pleads with him to stay. He wants to be there... and when he does return he speaks of his anguish for others 'not seeing' while in the room next door his daughter is moving glasses around with her mind...

[Banana #3]

Is there any concrete information or evidence concerning the "first footage" of the film, the same footage that was destroyed in the lab?

I read somewhere, it was probably just Wikipedia, that the original film was more literal and closer to the novel.

Why would the incident at the lab not only change his approach to the film but also push it in the direction it ended up at?

And one thing I'd like to say is, I feel that Mirror is more stream-of-conscious than Stalker. They are both kind of voice-over/monologue driven (just in the sense that we here plenty of personal philosophy on the part of whoever is speaking), although Mirror is entirely within itself a "monologue of memory" if you will, in that no literal, "heard" voice is driving it, but I do believe it takes place within one man's head.

Anyway, I got off course there. My point is, do you feel one is more in the vein of stream of conscious narrative than the other, are they comparable in this way, do you think?

[Robin Davies]

I can understand his not liking Last Wave (though I like it myself) -- it's his dismissal of Possession that pains me. Clearly he has no sense of humor, and precious little imagination outside of "established" classical education, political thought and psychological analysis.

Well he slagged off a few art movies too:

Saw Bertolucci's La Luna. Monstrous, cheap, vulgar rubbish.

We watched Ozu's Autumn on television. I don't remember precisely what autumn. Dreadfully boring; rather like a Mendeleyev table.

Tonino and I went to see Rosi's Tre Fratelli. It was awful. Better than Christ Stopped At Eboli but still bad. Disjointed, meaningless.

In fact Tarkovsky grumbles about almost everything and everyone in his diaries. I suppose they provided a cathartic release for him but I find they make rather depressing reading.

[chaddoli]

Saw Bertolucci's La Luna. Monstrous, cheap, vulgar rubbish.

Totally spot on about that one.

[miless]

I suppose they provided a cathartic release for him but I find they make rather depressing reading.

does this mean they're collected somewhere? I'd love to read them if you know where they may be available.

[Barmy]

La Luna is great precisely because it is monstrous, cheap, vulgar rubbish. This Tarkovsky chappie sounds like a bit of a sadsack.

[Robin Davies]

I suppose they provided a cathartic release for him but I find they make rather depressing reading.

does this mean they're collected somewhere? I'd love to read them if you know where they may be available.

It's called Time Within Time and is easy to find on internet shops.

[zedz]

Is there any concrete information or evidence concerning the "first footage" of the film, the same footage that was destroyed in the lab?

I read somewhere, it was probably just Wikipedia, that the original film was more literal and closer to the novel.

Pure speculation here, but the novel is so radically different from the film (it's almost all outside the Zone, if I remember correctly) that this seems unlikely: he wouldn't have even been able to rely on the same locations, sets and actors, which doesn't sound particularly feasible for a reshoot under such budget pressures.

Re: Tarkovsky's diaries. A very revealing read, almost too revealing: he doesn't come out of them as a particularly admirable person (snobbish, misogynistic, flaky and paranoid - but maybe the last of these is justified).

[Greathinker]

I wonder how it became authorized for his diaries to be released. I haven't read them myself, but I fail to see what purpose they would have. A person's writing can be so disposed to caprice, knee-jerk reaction etc. when it is of no apparent consequence. It seems almost vulgar to me for it to be made public, especially if not approved by Tarkovsky; but then maybe he did allow it.

[solaris72]

It seems almost vulgar to me for it to be made public, especially if not approved by Tarkovsky; but then maybe he did allow it.

I can't say for certain, but I wouldn't be surprised if he wanted the diaries to be public. The title he gave them was "Martyrlog."

[Banana #3]

My edition of his diaries notes that he made text corrections, as well as added a final chapter pertaining to The Sacrifice, shortly before his death.

That, plus the fact that his relatives would have had to approved the publishing, means that perhaps it was not a malicious, for-profit act.

The strangest thing about his diaries are the many different versions and the omissions and inclusions in each version.

There's a good breakdown of these at Nostalghia.com.

[Bürgermeister]

Does anyone have any more info on the Intermission between part 1 and part 2?

[MichaelB]

Does anyone have any more info on the Intermission between part 1 and part 2?

What do you mean? The fact that there was an intermission (caused by a funding scheme that required the film to be made in two parts), or what was actually shown between each part?

[Bürgermeister]

Does anyone have any more info on the Intermission between part 1 and part 2?

What do you mean? The fact that there was an intermission (caused by a funding scheme that required the film to be made in two parts), or what was actually shown between each part?

What was actually shown.