“Nostalghia” - Andrei Tarkovsky (1983)

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was a gifted filmmaker noted for his uniquely expressive style.  Working in Russia under restrictive conditions, he was only able to make seven feature films over his last twenty-four years, but each was a fascinating and challenging work of cinematic expression.  In particular, Tarkovsky was progressively more sensitive to the possibilities of cinematic expression transcending the limits of textual expression and directly invoking the wider range and complexity of human consciousness.  Increasingly, his films became more and more attempts to directly represent his own personal feelings, with minimal reference to schematic models or thoughts. One of the most extreme examples of this tendency was his penultimate film, Nostalghia  (1983).

I have discussed Tarkovsky’s aesthetics in connection with his earlier films – Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979)  – and we could probably say of these, the film most directly comparable to Nostalghia is his most inward and personal work, The Mirror.  Both of these films abandon conventional plot structures entirely and seek to conjure up a state of mind.  In this connection, Tarkovsky once commented that his aesthetic intentions for cinema lay in an off-the-beaten-track direction [1]:

“I don’t follow a strict narrative development and logical connections. I don’t like looking for justifications for the protagonist’s actions. One of the reasons why I became involved in cinema is because I saw too many films that didn’t correspond to what I expected from cinematic language.”

And he added on another occasion that what he wanted was to capture a state of mind [2]:

“I was not interested in the development of the plot, in the chain of events – with each film I feel less and less need for them. I have always been interested in a person’s inner world, and for me it was far more natural to make a journey into the psychology that informed the hero’s attitude to life, into the literary and cultural traditions that are the foundation of his spiritual world.”

You might think, okay, so Tarkovsky wanted to abandon plot structures, but surely he must have had specific ideas that he wanted to present to his viewers.  We don’t always have to restrict ourselves to stories; we can just present our thoughts and ideas.  But think again, because Tarkovsky also wanted to eschew explicitly articulated ideas in his artistic creations, too.  He had higher aims, as he once remarked [3]:

"The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good."

And presumably Nostalghia is an instantiation of these anti-narrative inclinations of Tarkovsky’s.  Nevertheless, there is something of a story to Nostalghia.  It concerns the activities of a Russian poet and writer, Andrei Gorchakov, who has come to Italy to do research for a book he intends to write on the experiences of an 18th century Russian composer who lived in Italy for a few years.  While in Italy, Gorchakov feels ‘nostalghia’ – a custom term for the special longing Russians feel for their homeland when they are away.  But more generally, Gorchakov feels alienation, and that is the primary theme of this film.  Alienation emerged as a major cultural theme, and a key notional element of Existentialism [4], in the twentieth century, and it has represented the quizzical sense of absence and frustration for some people that has come along with modernity [5].  I have earlier discussed how alienation has been a particularly important characterological theme in film, notably in the works of Michelangelo Antonioni, and we can say that Nostalghia is yet another work that adds to this aesthetic collection [6].  Concerning his artistic intentions on these  matters, Tarkovsky was explicit [2]:

“Ultimately, I wanted Nostalghia to be free of anything irrelevant or incidental that would stand in the way of my principal objective: the portrayal of someone in a state of profound alienation from the world and himself, unable to find a balance between reality and the harmony for which he longs, in a state of nostalghia provoked not only by his remoteness from his country but also by a global yearning for the wholeness of existence.”

For this voyage into existential alienation, Tarkovsky chose some collaborators with experience in this area.  His screenplay collaborator was Tonino Guerra, who had co-scripted a number of films with Antonioni: L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L'Eclisse (1962), Red Desert (1964), Blow-Up (1966), and Zabriskie Point (1970).   And he also cast in a prominent role, Erland Josephson, who appeared in 14 Ingmar Bergman films.  Tarkovsky tells this tale with 

• careful attention to the insertion of atmospheric ambient sounds and 
• many moody 3-to-4-minute tracking and very slow zoom shots,

which, despite their often seemingly random appearance, must have required careful planning in order to execute effectively. 

The story of Nostalghia, such as it is, passes through four phases.

1.  Andrei and Domiziana in Italy

As already mentioned, the Russian writer Andrei Gorchakov (played by Oleg Yankovsky – he played the father of the main character in Tarkovsky’s The Mirror) has come to Italy to write about an 18th century Russian composer, Pavel Sasnovsky, who lived in Italy for a few years before returning to Russia (where he committed suicide).  Gorchakov is accompanied by his attractive translator, Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), and we soon see that these two embody contrasting types.  Eugenia embraces modernism; while Gorchakov is alienated from the world he sees around him.  When she invites him to go look at Piero della Francesca’s famous painting “Madonna del Parto”, he glumly responds by saying, “I’m tired of these sickeningly beautiful sights.”  Later when Eugenia is reading some poetry (written by Andrei Tarkovsky’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky) in translation, Gorchakov remarks that “poetry is untranslatable, like all art.”  This suggests to us that Gorchakov perceives insurmountable cultural barriers as part of his nostalghia problem.

Later they check-in to a hotel, where in a long 4-minute shot Gorchakov is shown listlessly falling asleep in his bed and lapsing into dreams (shown in sepia-toned monochrome images).

2.  Domenico

The next day Gorchakov and Eugenia stop by St. Catherine’s hot pool, where people seeking cures for their ailments wade in the steaming water.  The people in the pool gossip about a man, Domenico (Erland Josephson) walking by the side of the pool, who they say is mad.  They say that in anticipation of the apocalypse, he once kept his wife and children locked up in his home for seven years.  Curiously, Gorchakov takes an interest in the reclusive Domenico and wants to talk to him.  After some persistence, Gorchakov arranges to meet Domenico in his severely leaky home, where he listens to the alleged madman’s odd pronouncements.  Domenico tells him,    

“Before, I just wanted to save my family.  Now I want to save the whole world.”

Domenico then tells Gorchakov that if he can walk the length of St. Catherine’s Pool holding a lighted candle, it will save the world.  But the people there assume he is crazy and won’t let him enter the pool, so he begs Gorchakov to assume his world-saving task.

3.  Eugenia and Dreams

Back with Eugenia at the hotel, Gorchakov tells her about Domenico’s lighted-candle task.  But Eugenia, who has been hoping that Gorchakov would take a romantic interest in her, doesn’t want to hear  about his odd obsessions.  In a dramatic four-minute monologue, she complains that he is only interested in Madonnas and not interested in engaging with real life.  Afterwards, they engage in a bitter quarrel.

After Eugenia storms out, Gorchakov, who seems to be in declining health, lapses into further sepia-toned dreams, which indicate that Gorchakov identifies himself with Domenico.

4.  Desperation

With Eugenia having left him, Gorchakov decides to return home.  But just before he is to leave,  he gets a phone call from Eugenia, who is now in Rome.  She tells him that Domenico has come there and is making cryptic speeches at a city monument.  She also says that Domenico wants to  know if Gorchakov has carried out the lighted-candle ritual in the pool.

We now move into parallel action, with Domenico shouting out his concerns for a fallen world and Gorchakov headed for St. Catherine’s Pool to carry out his postponed ritual.  Domenico’s raving remarks implicitly contain elements condemning rationalism and modernity for promoting individualism and disconnecting people from an organically connected world.  Some examples of this are:

    “Society must become united again instead of being fragmented.”
    . . .
    “Just look at nature and you will see life is simple.”
    . . .
    “We must go back to the main foundations of life.”

Then he pours gasoline over his body and immolates himself.  So the character of Domenico emerges as the bearer of Tarkovsky’s main message, and Tarkovsky has commented about this [2]:

“The character of Domenico, at first sight somewhat puzzling, has a particular bearing on the hero’s state of mind.  This frightened man to whom society offers no protection, finds in himself the strength and nobility of spirit to oppose a reality he sees as degrading to man. Once a mathematics teacher and now an ‘outsider’, he flouts his own ‘littleness’ and decides to speak about the catastrophic state of today’s world, appealing to people to make a stand. In the eyes of ‘normal’ people he appears mad, but Gorchakov responds to his idea—born of deep suffering— that people must be rescued not separately and individually but all together from the pitiless insanity of modern civilisation…”

Finally, in the film's penultimate, nine-minute, shot, we see that Gorchakov has arrived at the pool when it has been drained for servicing.  Nevertheless, he painstakingly and desperately carries out the ritual, anyway; and he finally manages to place the lighted candle he has been carrying at the far end of the pool just before collapsing.

The final shot seems to be a dream image showing Gorchakov sitting on the ground with Domenico’s dog in an imaginary setting that combines a modernist foreground with a cathedral backdrop – seemingly the desired metaphorical resolution of the divisive cultural forces that had driven his symptoms of alienation.  Concerning that mysterious final shot, Tarkovsky had this  to say [2]:

“I would concede that the final shot of Nostalghia has an element of metaphor, when I bring the Russian house inside the Italian cathedral. It is a constructed image which smacks of literariness: a model of the hero’s state, of the division within him which prevents him from living as he has up till now. Or perhaps, on the contrary, it is his new wholeness in which the Tuscan hills and the Russian countryside come together indissolubly; he is conscious of them as inherently his own, merged into his being and his blood, but at the same time reality is enjoining him to separate these things by returning to Russia.”

Overall, Nostalghia is so slow-moving and enigmatic as to sometimes seem almost catatonic.  Nevertheless, it has a haunting feeling and addresses an important malaise of our times [7].  As critic Kalvin Henely pointed out [8]:

“Tarkovsky’s films remain so important today because of their ineffable spirituality, which has all but vanished in today’s technological world marked by information, science, and an increasing detachment from nature.”

★★★

Notes:

1.  Patrick Bureau,  “Andrei Tarkovsky: I Am for a Poetic Cinema” (1962), from Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews, (John Gianvito, ed.), University of Mississippi, Jackson, (2006), quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Conversations About Great Films: Andrei Tarkovsky NOSTALGHIA (1983)”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XXXV:8), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, (17 October 2017).   
2. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, University of Texas Press Austin (1986, 2000), quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Conversations About Great Films: Andrei Tarkovsky NOSTALGHIA (1983)”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XXXV:8), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, (17 October 2017).   
3. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, University of Texas Press, Austin (1986, 2000), quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Conversations About Great Films: Andrei Tarkovsky The Mirror 1974”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (IX:13), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (16 November 2004).    
4. Steven Crowell, “Existentialism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (9 March 2015).   
5. David Leopold, “Alienation”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (30 August 2018).       
6. See, for example, the following articles that discuss alienation on this site:
• The Film Sufi, “Existentialism in Film 1", The Film Sufi, (15 July 2008).   
• The Film Sufi, “Cinematic Expression in ‘L’Avventura’”, The Film Sufi, (27 August 2010).   
• The Film Sufi, “‘Taxi Driver’ - Martin Scorsese (1976)”, The Film Sufi, (30 November 2012).  
• The Film Sufi, “‘In the Mood for Love’ - Wong Kar Wai (2000)”, The Film Sufi, (10 May 2016).   
• The Film Sufi, "’L’Eclisse’ - Michelangelo Antonioni (1962)”, The Film Sufi, (14 August 2010).  
• The Film Sufi, “‘Badlands’ - Terrence Malick (1973)”, The Film Sufi, (12 June 2012).   
7. J. Hoberman, “A Man Without a Nation, in Italy”, The New York Times, (24 Jan 2014).   
8. Kalvin Henely, “Nostalghia”, Slant, (30 May 2013).    

“Solaris” - Andrei Tarkovsky (1972)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s third feature film, Solaris (Solyaris, 1972), is by some accounts his most straightforward and accessible film and thus less encumbered by his usual brooding undercurrents of existentialist anxiety.   Based as it was on a 1961 novel of the same name by well-known Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem, the film took on the trappings of a standard science fiction piece, albeit with Tarkovsky’s signature mise-en-scene.  In fact it was seen by many as something of a Cold War Russian response to Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [1,2].  But I would say Solaris is very much in line with Tarkovsky’s main themes, similar in some ways to his later Stalker (1979), and in fact it is one of the legendary filmmaker’s finest works [3,4].

As Tarkovsky himself remarked [5]:

“As for Solaris, my decision to adapt it to the screen is not at all a result of some fondness for the [science fiction] genre. The main thing is that in [the novel] Solaris, Lem presents a problem that is close to me: the problem of overcoming, of convictions, of moral transformation on the path of struggle within the limits of one’s own destiny. The depth and meaning of Lem’s novel are not at all dependent on the science fiction genre, and it’s not enough to appreciate his novel simply for the genre.”

This is not to suggest that Solaris and 2001 are not comparable.  Both films use the vastness of outer space and the confinement within a space capsule to evoke feelings of man’s existential loneliness and separation from ultimate fulfillment.  But Solaris focuses much more on the inner space of human consciousness – which is the primordial reality.  No matter how much modern science may help us build better models of and help us to understand the physical world, we must keep in mind that all of this is grounded on human consciousness.  Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of neural activity  in the brain; it is the ground on which all understanding, including that of the brain and its neurons, is based [6].  Solaris raises this issue as a central theme.

Indeed how should one go about exploring this theme that transcends the logic of the written word?  Well, there is music and art.  But even better, there is film, whose narratives can comprise music, artistic expression, and words over temporal sequences.  Although sound films began as essentially recorded stage plays, which were mostly just words, modern filmmakers have gone well beyond that to incorporate other modes of expression.  This is what makes all of Tarkovsky’s work especially precious – the use of cinema’s unique modes of artistic presentation to conjure up conscious feelings that go well beyond what can be expressed by the written word or modeled by text-based logics.  He touched on this explicitly when he said [7]:

 "The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good."

And so his creative process in making a film did not start with a script, but more with a feeling or mood that he wanted to realize in cinematic form [8]:

“Directing starts not when the script is being discussed with the writer, not during work with the actor, or with the composer, but at the time when before the interior gaze of the person making the film and known as the director, there emerges an image of the film: this might be a series of episodes worked out in detail, or perhaps the consciousness of an aesthetic texture and emotional atmosphere, to be materialized on the screen.”

Tarkovsky’s cinematic expression featured a number of characteristic mechanisms to evoke the moods he wanted to convey. This often entailed the conveyance of the vital otherness of the natural world.  In Solaris this included long shots and sounds in natural settings of

• a horse running through a wooded landscape
• images of underwater reeds moving in the water flow
• the natural sounds of running water

In addition, the action is variously presented in sequences that are colored, black-and-white, or sepia-tinted.  These color-tonal variations serve to shift things (when the move is to black-and-white or sepia) to a more introspective focus.  This was all reinforced by evocative music and even naturalistic expressionist paintings shown, such as Peter Bruegel the Elder’s atmospheric painting “Hunters in the Snow” (1565).

Also, in contrast to the theater, which does not normally have many sequences without words, Tarkovsky often reminds the viewer that our conscious experience of the world frequently encompasses extended passages without dialogue (with just ambient sounds present), during which we may reflect on our circumstances.  In fact we know that the authentic tempo of life is normally different from what we see on stage, films, and TV, and this is what Tarkovsky tries to capture.  This slowed-down Tarkovskian approach and narrative pacing can make some viewers impatient; but I find that once you settle into his moody narrative rhythm, everything proceeds organically.  In fact I am one of those people who find Tarkovsky’s atmospheric films improving on repeated viewings.

In addition, when Tarkovsky shoots conversations, they are often portrayed in long, carefully orchestrated moving-camera shots with the shifting subjects shown mostly in closeup.  This immerses the viewer in the conversation more naturally than the conventional manner of back-and-forth cuts to opposing over-the-shoulder perspectives.  Tarkovsky’s technique in this respect also has a claustrophobic effect that enhances the feeling of isolation and confinement in the Solaris’s satellite setting.

The story of Solaris concerns a trip sometime in the future that a cosmonaut psychologist, Kris Kelvin (played by Donatas Banionis), makes to a satellite laboratory orbiting the planet Solaris.  The planet  has been the subject of a decades-long study of its peculiar properties – it is completely covered by a turbulent, viscous ocean that seems to be a living organism.  The long study has made little progress, however, and the satellite laboratory that was built to accommodate 85 personnel now has only three remaining scientists, who have not communicated useful findings for some time.  Kelvin’s mission is to go there and see if the scientific mission should finally be terminated.

Although the nature of Solaris’s ocean is ultimately beyond human comprehension, we learn that the ocean has the power to read the minds of the scientists within its field of influence and then construct embodied people based on how they are understood in the minds of those scientists.  In particular the mental material that is mined always concerns people who weigh on the subjects’ consciences.  Since these embodied presences suddenly appear as new inhabitants of the satellite, they are referred to by the scientists as “guests”.  These guests are associated with people who persist in a person’s memory due to issues of conscience.  And so this identifies a key perspective concerning the nature of consciousness that is covered in this film – that the concerns and feelings of guilt that we may have in our memories seem to lie at the heart of who we really are.

The logical nature of conscience has been widely discussed in terms of the theoretical structure it may have [9], but the nature of the experiential phenomenon of conscience, as an important aspect of consciousness, is not so well covered.  This film explores that neglected but profoundly important territory.

Thus we can say at the core of Solaris are two key themes:

• The contrasting perspectives offered by (a) the Objectivist view of reality that is grounded on the modern physical sciences, in which the potentially prejudiced views of a subjective observer are excluded, and (b) the Interactionist view that is grounded on human consciousness (and thus subjective observation) [10].  The Objectivist view cannot find human consciousness within its purview, because it is looking for an objective mechanism that could generate it [6].  On the other hand, the Interactionist view sees human consciousness, not as a byproduct of some objective agency but as the primordial phenomenon. According to this view, human agency is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “inter-being” [11].
   
• The degree to which conscience and concern for others are important core elements of consciousness and help characterize human existence. 

Solaris’s narrative can be considered to progress through four main phases.

1.  On Earth, before the mission

The opening 43 minutes of this 2-hour-and-46-minute film contain material not present in Stanislaw Lem’s novel and represent something of a prologue.  They show Kris Kelvin’s visit to the country home of his estranged father (Nikolai Grinko) on the day before his trip to Solaris. The opening shots show Kelvin contemplatively walking in the sylvan natural environment outside the home, and this will contrast later with the mechanical and claustrophobic confines of the Solaris space station.  His father has also invited on this occasion a visit from his old friend, the former cosmonaut Henri Berton (Vladislav Dvorjetzki), who many years ago visited Solaris and witnessed some bizarre phenomena on the planet which he wants to discuss with Kelvin. They watch an old videotape of Berton’s testimony to the government authorities, where his account was dismissed as hallucinatory.  Berton insists to Kelvin that there is something important going on at Solaris and that the scientific mission there should be continued.  But Kelvin, who is an Objectivist cynic, thinks it likely that the remaining Solaristic scientists there are only engaged in irresponsible daydreaming.  It is clear during this sequence that Kelvin and his father are barely on speaking terms and that Kelvin wants to cut himself off from his past.

It should be mentioned that there is very little futuristic paraphernalia shown in this film.  People are shown using equipment and driving cars characteristic of 1970.  Perhaps the most futuristic environment visually evoked is when Berton is shown driving through a vast superhighway complex, which consisted of shots of an actual freeway in contemporary Tokyo.

2.  Arrival at the Solaris space station
When Kelvin arrives at the disheveled and cluttered space station, the three reclusive inhabitants do not greet him, and he has to seek them out in their separate quarters.  He learns that one of the three, his old friend Dr. Gibarian (Sos Sarkisyan), has already committed suicide.  So now there are only two people left, Dr. Snaut (Jüri Järvet) and Dr. Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn).  Sartorius proves to be a hardcore and exploitative Objectivist.  Snaut, on the other hand, is a little more open-minded and curious.

In Gibarian’s old room, Kelvin watches a video that was prepared for him by Gibarian just before his suicide to warn Kelvin about strange phenomena on the satellite and telling him they are all about conscience. Then Kelvin gets occasional glimpses of other people on the satellite – a momentary glimpse of a young woman disappearing down a corridor, for instance.

The next morning Kelvin awakens in his room to see his wife Hari (movingly played by the beautiful Natalya Bondarchuk), who had committed suicide ten years earlier.  Hari is totally loving and affectionate, but Kelvin is in a state of shock.  He knows that this is one of the bizarre phenomena.  Hari seems to know some things about her past, but not everything.  Almost in a disturbed trance, Kelvin bundles his trusting wife into a space shuttle and has her rocketed off into outer space.  Now he is presumably rid of this apparition.

Later, in a single Tarskovskian four-minute take, Sartorius explains to Kelvin that after the scientists had bombarded the Solaris ocean with exploratory x-rays, the ocean seemed to have responded by extracting “islands” from the satellite inhabitants’ memories and creating the human-like phenomena onboard in order to haunt them.  These human forms are not apparitions; they have real physicality.  Sartorius, Snaut, and Gibarian all have, or have had, their own guests, although we only get brief glimpses of them.

3.  Kelvin and Hari
Later Kelvin sees Hari again, lovingly getting into bed with him.  It seems that the Solaris ocean has created another Hari for him.  These “guests” also have unusual properties.  When the distraught Hari, not wanting to be left alone without Kelvin, tears through a metal door to follow him, she appears to get severe injuries.  But before Kelvin can rush to her aid, she miraculously self-repairs and recovers from her wounds.

In another meeting, the dour Sartorius explains to Kelvin that the Solaris guests are not constructed out of ordinary matter.  Instead they are constructed out of neutrinos and can only exist in stable form when they are within the influence of the planet’s force fields.

Gradually Kelvin finds himself irresistibly drawn to the beautiful and loving Hari.  Although his own indifference and negligence had led to her suicide ten years earlier, he is now falling in love with this woman guest. Sartorius dismisses her as an artificial construction, but Kelvin finds her becoming increasingly developed as a full-fledged person the more she interacts with him.

But Sartorius and Snaut have disruptive plans.  They plan to bombard the Solaris ocean with an x-ray image of Kelvin’s own neural encephalogram in the hopes that that will mollify the mysterious being.  Also Sartorius has been working on some unseen equipment he calls “the annihilator”, which is to be used to permanently destroy all the guests.

Then there is an interesting birthday party for Snaut held in the satellite’s ornately decorated lounge and which Sartorius, Kelvin, and Hari attend.  Snaut arrives late and inebriated, whereupon they launch into a discussion ranging over issues concerning the pursuit of physical knowledge and the neglect of the human “inter-being” existence.  Along the way, these scientists cite and quote from the works of Cervantes, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky. Sartorius insults Hari to her face by telling her she is a manufactured thing, not a person. But with Hari progressively learning about herself and the world around her and thereby becoming more human, the viewer is likely to conclude that she is more of a person than Sartorius is.   Moreover, Kelvin is now fully involved with Hari and assures her that he will never go back to Earth and leave her alone.

4.  Return
Kelvin becomes weak and is taken to bed, where he has haunting dreams of his mother and the original Hari, during which he merges their images.  When he recovers, Snaut informs him that Hari voluntarily submitted herself to the annihilator so that her sacrifice would enable her love to return to Earth [12]. Snaut also tells him that he and Sartorius transmitted the encephalogram to the Solaris ocean, and since then no “guests” have appeared in the space station. Instead the ocean seemed to be creating small islands on its surface.  Kelvin becomes resigned to these developments and agrees to return to Earth.

In the final scenes, Kelvin is apparently back on Earth and again visiting his father’s country home.  When he sees his father, he bows down in a humble embrace, seeking reconciliation.  But as the camera pulls back we see that this scene takes place on an island in the Solaris ocean.  

There have been several suggested interpretations of that final scene.  One is that the planet’s ocean, which is now equipped with a full encephalogram of Kelvin’s brain, has been able to construct a physical replica of Kelvin’s entire mental world, including a “guest” realization of Kelvin, himself.  Under this interpretation, the real Kelvin is somewhere else (perhaps now back on the real Earth), and a full guest realization of Kelvin and his world reside on an island in the Solaris ocean.  A second interpretation would have the real Kelvin ensnared in a guest realization of his home life on the island in the ocean.  You may have other suggestions.

Although the principal character and center of focalization is Kris Kelvin, the most compelling character in the story is his wife Hari.  Natalya Bondarchuk’s performance in this role is sensitive and convincing.  She portrays a woman whose initial self-understanding is limited because it has been constructed only out of her husband’s memories of her.  Thus in the early stages she is not even aware of her own earlier suicide, because that was not part of Kris’s direct experience.  In fact in the beginning is she is seen only as a clinging, desperately in love marriage partner.  But as the story progresses, she learns more about herself and develops more as a person.  This development in fact worries Kris, because as she becomes more sophisticated, he wonders if they will have more arguments and grow further apart.  But Hari is not becoming more argumentative; rather, a key aspect of Hari’s progressing humanity is the development of her conscience.  In fact her voluntary “self-annihilation” at the end is directed by her developed conscience: she wants to free Kris from a potentially imprisoned life on the satellite space station.

In any case, we know that conscience is a crucial aspect of our own identities.  When we truly love, it involves a fundamental interaction of our inner being.  So, too, is the case when we feel true compassion for our dear ones.  And many of us are lastingly haunted by memories of occasions when we failed to respond fully to the call of love from dear ones. These were missed opportunities for full self-realization, and we may still wonder how we can reconcile what happened and our actions back then with our true selves – and how those events ultimately changed ourselves.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Phillip Lopate, “Solaris: Inner Space”, The Criterion Collection, (24 May 2011).   
2. Roger Ebert, “Solaris”, Great Movie, RogerEbert.com, (19 January 2003).   
3. Richard Eder, “Film::'Solaris,' Russians in Space A Science-Fiction Parable on the Nature of Mankind”, The New York Times, (7 October 1976).   
4. Acquarello, “Solaris: Exploring the Frontier of the Subconscious”, Cinémathèque Annotations on Film, Issue 4, Senses of Cinema, (March 2000).   
5. Andrei Tarkovsky, “Dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on the Screen. Naum Abramov / 1970”, from The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky A Visual Fugue”, Vida T. Johnson & Graham Petric. Indiana University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1994, quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Conversations About Great Films: Andrei Tarkovsky Solaris 1972”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XIX:11), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (9 November 2009).   
6. Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Oxford University Press, (2012).
7. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema,  University of Texas Press Austin (1986, 2000), quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Conversations About Great Films: Andrei Tarkovsky The Mirror 1974”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (IX:13), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (16 November 2004).      
8. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time Reflections on the Cinema, University of Texas Press Austin, (1986), quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Conversations About Great Films: Andrei Tarkovsky Solaris 1972”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XIX:11), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (9 November 2009).    
9. Alberto Giubilini, “Conscience”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (14 March 2016).   
10. For more discussion on Interactionism vs. Objectivisim, see my reviews of:
• “Avatar” - James Cameron (2009), The Film Sufi, (16 May 2010).   
• “The King and I” - Walter Lang (1956), The Film Sufi, (30 March 2017).  
• “Memento” - Christopher Nolan (2000), The Film Sufi, (1 April 2010).     
11. Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living, HarperOne (2017).
12. We assume here that Snaut is telling the truth and that the good-bye letter from Hari that he reads to Kelvin is authentic.  An alternative hypothesis would be that Sartorius and Snaut selfishly coerced Hari into the annihilator.

“The Mirror” - Andrei Tarkovsky (1975)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s fourth film, The Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975), was his most personal work, and perhaps that partly accounts for its great popularity among his admirers [1].  For the British Film Institute’s 2012 polls of critics and film directors concerning the all-time greatest films, The Mirror was ranked 9th on the directors’ poll [2] and 19th on the critics’ poll [3]. Tarkovsky’s own comments about the film reflect how special the film was for him [4]:

"As I began work on Mirror I found myself reflecting more and more that if you are serious about your work, then a film is not the next item in your career, it is an action which will affect the whole of your life. For I had made up my mind that in this film, for the first time, I would use the means of cinema to talk of all that was most precious to me, and do so directly, without playing any kinds of tricks."

In fact the film is virtually a testament to Tarkovsky’s insistence that the film medium transcends the limitations typical of textual narratives and engages the viewer on a direct existentially experiential level.  However, the film’s loose, nonlinear structure also makes it difficult to follow for the average viewer.  Many people only come to appreciate The Mirror after several repeated viewings. 

The subject matter of the film concerns the memories and reflections of a 40-year-old man, Alexei, who has been diagnosed with a terminal health condition. These are told in the form of various separate vignettes from the man’s childhood as well as from his present circumstances, and the sequences jump back and forth in time without much motivation or explanation.  So somewhat like the films created by Tarkovsky’s friend Sergei Parajanov, it is up to the viewer here to assemble these pieces into something meaningful – but we must bear in mind that Tarkovsky did not have a hidden (textual) “message” behind these elements.  They were put together by Tarkovsky from his own personal experiences in an intuitive manner to reflect his feelings rather than thoughts.  This approach led him to specifically use some elements from his own personal life in the filming:

• The film features a number of poems that were written, and recited on the soundtrack, by his father, Arseny Tarkovsky, who was a famous Russian poet.  In addition the actor who appears in the film as Alexei’s father looks quite a bit like Arseny Tarkovsky did at the diegetic times (30-40 years prior to the filming) of his appearances in the story.
• Andrei Tarkovsky’s own mother appears in a small but important role in the story.
• Tarkovsky’s second wife, Larisa Tarkovskaya, also plays a small but significant role in the film.

But though he incorporated elements from his own life, Tarkovsky was still unsure how to structure the tale.  Even working with screenwriter Aleksandr Misharin, they entered into the filming process with many issues structurally unresolved [4]:

"The scripts of my earlier films were more clearly structured. When we started work on Mirror, we made it a deliberate point of principle not to have the picture worked out and arranged in advance, before the material had been filmed."

This is a dangerous way for a filmmaker to operate, particularly for a director like Tarkovsky who employed lengthy moving camera shots that must be mapped out prior to shooting (in the case of The Mirror, there are only about 200 shots making up the 100-minute film [4]).  Nevertheless, Tarkovsky had his own instinctive cinematic devices, and he once again employed atmospheric sound effects, such as the sound of dripping or slushing water and brisk wind-blowing noises, to provide a moody, contextually-grounded feeling to the film.

The story elements of the film are set in three distinct time periods associated with Alexei’s life:

• Time1 – this appears to be 1935, when Alexei was about five years old.  Alexei lives in a country home with his mother, Maria, and his younger sister.  Alexei’s father, we later learn, had abandoned the family just prior to this time.
   
• Time2 – some time during World War II, perhaps around 1942-43.  Alexei’s family has been evacuated to another area and live in a small cottage.
   
• Time3 – around 1969-70.  Alexei is ill, and his face is never shown in the film.  He is divorced from his wife Natalie, and they have a son, Ignat, who is an early teenager.

The story elements appear out of chronological sequence without evident narrative motivation and are shot sometimes in color, sometimes in black-and-white, and sometimes in a sepia-toned monochrome.  Further complicating the viewer’s discernment is the fact that two key actors play multiple roles in the film:

• Margarita Terekhova  plays two key roles
• the thirty-something mother Maria in Time1 and Time2 and
• the similarly-aged Natalie in Time3. 
• In addition the same actor, Ignat Daniltsev, plays the young Alexei in Time2 and Ignat in Time3.

There is basically nothing done in terms of makeup or hairstyle to distinguish these multiple roles, so the viewer is clearly invited to partially merge these commonly-acted characters – something that presumably took place in the narrator Alexei’s imagination.  In fact Tarkovsky admitted that his conception of the film went through various stages as he thought about this film project over a number of years [4].

1. His first conception was to make a film of his personal reminiscences “full of elegiac sadness and nostalgia for my childhood” [4].
2. He later decided to incorporate his mother’s perspective by interspersing material he planned to obtain by conducting interviews of her.
3. He finally decided to merge material from his own thoughts and his mother into a complex psychological fabric. 

And then it was only at the last minute that he and Aleksandr Misharin went further and decided to bring together the two major feminine rolls by having Margarita Terekhova play both of them.  This was a most important aesthetic decision, because it essentially makes the feminine roll of Terekhova into the film’s major visual focus.  Although the film consists of Alexei’s reflections, the major subjective theme is his mother and the effect she had on his consciousness.  Even Alexei’s failures with Natalie are cast in his mother’s shadow.

Although any identifiable plot structure to The Mirror seems to be obscure at best, we can say that the film does go through several phases of focus.

1.  Maria
The first phase of the film comprises several sequences, mostly set in Time1.  The focus here is on Maria, Alexei’s mother.   Initially, in a color sequence, she encounters a doctor who has lost his way and wandered over on to her homestead area.  In their brief conversation, the doctor tells her that people are rushing about everywhere and are missing out on the richness of their present existence.  He complains, reflecting Tarkovsky’s own spiritual views, that in this constant rush towards a future, we are not trusting the nature inside us.

Then in black-and-white, Alexei dreams of his mother having her hair washed in slow motion.  Maria here gazes at her reflection in the tiled wall and sees herself as an aged woman (from Time3).  So although the focalization is on Maria, we are reminded that this is all really Alexei’s vision.

After a telephone conversation between Alexei and his mother in Time3, there is an extended and atmospheric sequence showing Maria working for a publisher and being concerned over a possible editing error she has made after a publication has gone to print.  There is a sequence of four lengthy (~one-minute-long) tracking shots of her rushing past the working printing presses and looking for a final-edit copy that she can examine.  She is finally relieved to find out that she had not erred, but shortly thereafter she is reduced to tears when her close colleague unexpectedly and abusively tells her off and calls her a hopelessly selfish person whose ex-husband was right to abandon.  This sequence gets us into Maria’s character, a woman who can worry over work-time issues but can still stop and smile at life’s absurdities, such as subsequently when the water shuts off in the midst of her shower.

2. Alexei   
The next phase of vignettes shifts over more directly to Alexei.  There is a sequence in Time3 when Natalie and Alexei (who, of course, is never seen on camera) argue over who should have custody of their son Ignat. At one point later when Ignat is left alone in the house, he sees an unexplained (as to what her relation to the others in the film may be) woman asking him to read a passage from a book quoting Pushkin’s famous 1836 letter to Chaadaev:

“The division of churches separated us from Europe. We remained excluded from every great event that has shaken it. However, we had our own special destiny. Russia, with her immense territory, had swallowed up the Mongol invasion. The Tartars didn’t dare crossing our western borders. They retreated to their wilderness and Christian civilization had been saved.  To attain that goal we had to lead a special kind of life, which while leaving us Christians, had made us alien to the Christian world.”

This view of the Russian Slavic people’s unique character was undoubtedly a subject in which Tarkovsky, himself, had a strong interest, so he included it in this, his personal work.  After reading this passage, Ignat has to answer a knock on the front door, which reveals a woman that appears to be his grandmother, Maria. But neither the woman nor Ignat recognize each other, and the woman apologizes for knocking on the wrong door.  This brief segment is not only confusing to the viewer, it was confusing even to Tarkovsky [5]:

"There are many complications there which I don't even completely understand myself. For example, it was very important for me to have my mother in some scenes. There is one episode in the film in which the boy, Ignat, is sitting . . . in his father's empty room, in the present, in our times [Time3] ....And as he is sitting there we hear the doorbell, he opens the door. This is my mother. And she is the grandmother of this boy who opens the door for her. But why doesn't she recognise him, why doesn't the grandson recognize her?...one has completely no idea. That is...firstly, this wasn't explained by the plot, in the screenplay, and secondly...even for me this was unclear."

Clearly this was a moment when Tarkovsky’s intuition was dominating his rational faculties. 

This is then followed by material covering the period in Time2 when Alexei and his fellow teenagers were being trained by the Russian military to be snipers.  There is also black-and-white newsreel footage showing the famous Russian military crossing of Lake Sivash in the Crimean WWII campaign (Time2), as well as newsreel coverage of Russian atomic bomb blasts and also the Sino-Soviet conflict (Time3). Finally, there is a scene showing Alexei’s father returning from the war front and having a brief reunion with his children (Time2).

Most of these elements show us that Alexei’s concerns were more with external, real-world events in those days than with issues important to his own family.  In fact during another quarrelsome conversation with his divorced wife Natalie, she tells him about a writer she is considering marrying.  But Alexei dismisses the man, whom he calls “Dostoyevsky”, because he hasn’t published anything and is therefore a nobody.

3.  Visit with Nadezhda

The next (and perhaps oddest) phase of the film returns the focus to Maria and Time2.  She and the teenage Alexei go to visit the home of the doctor shown at the beginning of the film. Nadezhda is interested in purchasing some pearls from Maria, and the way she is portrayed appears to make a clear reference to Vermeer’s famous painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (1655).  Again we have a portrayal not of objective reality but of a colored and emotional landscape as remembered by the narrator.  The focus, though, is on Maria, her exhaustion in those moments, as well as her disturbed feelings when she is asked to slaughter a cockerel. 

Inserted in this section is a black-and-white dream shot from Time1 showing Alexei’s father stroking his wife’s hand while she floats in mid-air above her bed. 

4.  Closure
The final phase shows a growing conflation of Alexei’s memories as he nears death.  The young Alexei of Time1 is shown talking to his mother, Maria, in the yard, but when he looks at her he sees an old woman, the Maria of Time3.  There is also a memorable 90-second panning shot in Time1 that comes to rest on Alexei’s father and the presumably pregnant Maria lying in the grass and thinking about what will be the sex of their expected child. So Alexei’s reflections have finally come all the way back to the womb, back when he and his dear mother were one.

The final shots, including a contemplative 90-second panning shot to close the film, show the old Maria (Time3) walking with the young children and Maria of Time1.  All of Alexei’s memories have now converged into a jumble of impressions and feelings.

So what we have in The Mirror is a relatively unstructured look into the fragmented thoughts of a man’s consciousness.  For Tarkovsky, this kind of exploration was an example of what he considered to be the raison d’etre of aesthetic creativity [4]:

"The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good."

With specific regard to The Mirror, Tarkovsky said [4],

"I wanted to tell the story of the pain suffered by one man because he feels he cannot repay his family for all they have given him. He feels he hasn’t loved them enough, and this idea torments him and will not let him be."

Did Tarkovsky really succeed in this effort to probe and portray the raw essence of conscious experience?  I have my reservations about that, and I think what he has presented in this film does not quite compensate for the absence of an identifiable narrative journey.  Nevertheless it was to my mind a bold and innovative undertaking on the authors’ parts.  And it was immeasurably assisted by the magnetic performance of Margarita Terekhova in the two key emotive roles.  She evinces all the complexity and vitality that invigorates the life around us – if we only take the time to engage in it fully with all our love and compassion.
★★★

Notes:

1. Jugu Abraham, “146. Russian maestro Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Zerkalo” (Mirror/The Mirror) (1975)”, Movies that make you think, (2 June 2013).
2. “Directors’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).
3. “Critics’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).  
4. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema,  University of Texas Press Austin (1986, 2000), quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Conversations About Great Films: Andrei Tarkovsky The Mirror 1974”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (IX:13), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (16 November 2004).
5. Matthew Sheldon, “Mirror, The (1975)”, Classic Art Films, (31 July 2015).        

“Stalker” - Andrei Tarkovsky (1979)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) is a critic’s favorite among the works of the esteemed Russian director, with a reputation that continues to grow over the years [1,2,3,4,5].  On the British Film Institute’s 2012 poll of 846 international film critics for the 50 greatest films ever made, Stalker was ranked 29th [6,7].  What fascinates these critics is not so much any kind of gripping plot line, but more the film’s reflective immersion in existential speculation.

Of course a moody ambiance is something that invariably emerges from Tarkovsky’s unique mise-en-scene. His long, slow tracking shots often confine the viewer’s gaze, as they follow a character in closeup as he, himself, is gazing.  In general this film is a mixture of closeups and long shots, sometimes with both in the same moving-camera shot, and with very few medium shots [8].  Tarkovsky was a meticulous craftsman, and it was said that he often spent two days planning such shots before an actual take.  Much of Stalker is composed of these long-duration shots, and the film has only a total of 122 shots in its 163-minute running time [1].

Working in this way on location settings would undoubtedly be difficult, but the production of Stalker was apparently particularly arduous [9].  Tarkovsky first shot much of the film in Tajikistan, but an earthquake ruined that effort, and he had to start over somewhere else.  Later he found an apt location in an abandoned hydroelectric power plant in Estonia.  But after shooting much of the film again, Tarkovsky didn’t like the developed film that he saw, and he started over again at the same location.  This Estonian location had other problems, too – it was downstream from a highly polluting chemical plant, which is alleged to have been the cause of Tarkovsky, his wife Larissa, and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn all dying of cancer within the following decade [9].

Stalker was scripted by Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky, who based it on their 1971 novella Roadside Picnic, a science-fiction tale set in the near future.  The movie’s final script, though, included substantial changes from the novella that were introduced by Tarkovsky. The background of the story, which takes some time to be revealed to the viewer due to Tarkovsky’s employment of slow disclosure, concerns activities around a site known as “The Zone” in an unknown country where a meteorite is said to have crashed and devastated the local area some twenty years earlier.  When people and government soldiers had gone to investigate what happened there, many of them disappeared.  So the government cordoned off the area with military fencing and guards.  After awhile, rumors arose that within the Zone there was a mysterious place known as “The Room” that had mysterious powers – anyone who entered the Room would have their deepest wishes miraculously granted. 

Naturally, the government’s use of lethal force to prevent anyone from entering the Zone only fueled more belief in the magical powers of the Room.  There were many people who wanted to get to the Room and were willing to risk their lives to do so.  Out of these circumstances there arose a shady profession known as “stalking”.  Stalkers (actually “Trackers” might have been a more apt English translation of the Russian word) would offer their services at a high price to guide those people past the armed-police lines so that they could gain entry to the Room.  This film is about one such stalker who escorts his two customers into the Zone in order to enter the Room.

These circumstances may sound like they set the stage for all sorts of spectacular, mind-bending  events to happen.  But, actually, not a lot of action does happen in this slow-moving story, and many people find the film empty and boring.  What does happen takes place on a more imaginative plane, and this is where you might find satisfaction, depending on your tastes.

Thematically, Stalker features a multi-faceted investigation into what is real.  This involves extended disputation among the three main characters, each of whom has an initial and distinct perspective on how the world is constituted and how one should lead one’s life within it.  As the story unfolds, these characters argue with each other about what should be done – not only about what should be done in the immediate circumstances, but also about what should ultimately be done in life as a whole.  To a certain extent the Zone represents a fourth, inscrutable character,  and I will discuss more about that below.

Stalker unfolds in five acts, the first and fifth of which are outer bookends for the inner tale.

1.  The Stalker takes on a new job
The opening of the film, shown in sepia-tinted monochrome, is very slow, as the camera moves in on the Stalker (played by Alexander Kaidanovsky) sleeping with his wife and daughter on a large bed.  He is about to take on a new stalking job, even though he has just gotten out of prison for doing this work, and his wife (Alisa Freindlich) throws a fit about it.  He leaves his cramped apartment and goes to a dingy bar, where he meets his two clients, who are not previously acquainted with each other.

Noone gives their real name in these circumstances, and the two clients are only identified as the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko).  The Professor is a physicist and says he wants to go to the Zone to investigate its properties scientifically.  Throughout the film he is clearly a rationalist who seeks to identify the objective properties of the world around him.  As such, he is similar to all those who believe in the efficacy of science to ultimately discover all that is intelligible about the world.

The Writer, on the other hand, is an intellectual from the humanities side of academic thought.  His method is dialectical disputation in the manner of the postmodernists.  By doubting everything and always looking at things from a critical perspective, he has become a cynical nihilist: nothing is true absolutely, and there is only an answer that is “more correct” for a given context than the other possibilities.  When we first meet the Writer, before his first encounter with the Stalker, he is talking somewhat flirtatiously to a classy woman about the Zone and its mysteries, and he assures her that there is no god and that the world is ruled by cast-iron laws.  But this seems to be more of a pose than a true belief.  He doesn’t know what those cast-iron laws might be. 

The Writer soon engages the Professor in a contentious discussion about their contrasting modi operandi.  He tells him that searching for truth (as a physicist does) is boring, because objective truth is always hiding and the scientist keeps searching for it.  On the other hand while he, himself (the Writer), is digging for truth, so much happens to it – the act of digging changes it.

2.  Getting to the Zone

Now the Stalker gets his clients into a jeep as they attempt to sneak through the military fencing and enter the Zone.  They pass in by closely following a train that is allowed to enter the Zone, and then they dodge gunfire from the guards who see them passing.

While finding a breathing moment at one point, the Writer continues his commentary to the Professor, this time about the idea of a Room which will give him what he wants, which is inspiration to write great things:

“I don’t give a damn about inspiration. How would I know the right word for what I want? How would I know that actually I don’t want what I want?. . .They [truths] are elusive things: the moment we name them, their meaning disappears, melt, dissolves like a jellyfish in the sun.  My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world.  And my subconscious is yearning for a piece of meat.”

Eventually they make it into the Zone on a motorized railroad trolley, and once they are inside, the previously sepia-tinted world shifts to color.  During another pause in their movements, the Professor fills the Writer in on some facts that he knows about the Zone. He tells him the following:

• Their Stalker has served several prison sentences and has been harmed in the Zone.
• The Stalker’s daughter, who is known as “Monkey”, is a crippled mutant.
• Their Stalker learned everything about the Zone from his mentor stalker, known as “Porcupine”. 
• Stalkers are not supposed to go into the Room, but evidently Porcupine did go in there and afterwards became fabulously wealthy.  However, within a week he committed suicide.

This is further evidence that getting what you want might not be the best thing for you, and it reminds me of the three proverbial Chinese curses, the most malevolent of which was: “May the gods grant you all your wishes” [10].

3.  Wandering in the Zone

The world outside the Zone that the viewer has been shown up to this point is a detritus-filled industrial dystopia.  It is a dark and dank man-made world of ruin and garbage.  Inside the Zone, though, everything is green and lush.  There is still debris and broken artifacts strewn around from human habitation, but it is being reclaimed by nature. 

The Stalker says he loves the Zone for its natural purity, but he warns his two clients that the Zone is also dangerous and unpredictable.  It continually changes itself in response to human presence and has no static reality.  To successfully get to the Room, one must follow a different ad-hoc course each time.  Although they soon come to a point where the building with the Room is only a couple of hundred yards away from them, the Stalker stipulates that he must chart a twisted course to it by (a) throwing a metal bolt nut tied to a thin piece of cloth in a random direction, (b) walking over to where the cloth string had landed, and (c) repeating this process many times.  He believes that pure on-the-fly intuition is the only way to safely reach the Room.

At another stopping point in the Zone, the Writer, continuing his disputational conversation with the Professor, wonders aloud what would happen if he were to be granted his wish of being a great writer:

"A man writes because he’s tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and to the others that he’s worth something. And if I know for sure that I’m a genius, why write then?"

And scornfully dismissing the worthiness of science and engineering, he says that all the engineering artefacts are just extensions, artificial limbs so to speak, and have no higher purpose. Art is a higher calling.

“Mankind exists in order to create works of art.  Unlike all other human activities, this one is unselfish.”

After they lie down along a little stream and rest (during which the Stalker mysteriously goes into a sepia-tinted dream), the Stalker wakes up and adds his own thoughts about art as a calling:

“You were speaking of the meaning of our life, . . . .of the unselfishness of art.  Take music, for instance. Less than anything else, it is connected to reality.   Or if connected at all, it’s done mechanically, not by way of ideas, just by sheer sound, devoid of any associations.  And yet, music, as if by some miracle, gets through to our heart.  What is it that resonates in us in response to noise brought to harmony, making it the source of the greatest delight which stuns us and brings us together?  What’s all this needed for?  And most important, who needs it?”

The Stalker represents a third component of this triangular discussion that is going on between the Writer, the Professor, and himself.  In general, though, the Stalker expresses more wonder than certainty in these exchanges, unlike his more intellectually-minded clients.

Continuing with his bolt-tied cloth tossing, the Stalker guides his companions through different places in the Zone near the Room.  Along the way, the Writer and the Professor sometimes stubbornly defy the Stalker’s dire warnings about what will happen to them if they don’t follow his instruction precisely.  But nothing bad does happen to them on these occasions, which proves that the Stalker’s knowledge of the Zone is limited.

Eventually they pass through a large tubular water channel and then into a notorious (to the Stalker) sand-dune-filled chamber known as the “Meat Grinder” before finally coming to a small chamber just outside the Room.

4.  Before the Room
Having reached their precious destination, the obedient Stalker won’t go in, but he urges the other two to go ahead, and advises them that the most important thing for them at this point is “to believe”.  But belief is precisely what the cynically skeptical Writer doesn’t have.  He hesitates.

When they turn to the Professor, he reveals to them that he brought along  in his knapsack a miniature 20-kiloton atomic bomb to destroy the Zone and all that is in it.  He says that the existence of the wish-granting Room is too dangerous for mankind, because there could always be some hate-filled fanatics who might use it to bring on the apocalypse.  The Stalker immediately tries to forcibly take the bomb away from the Professor.  While the Professor thinks the existence of the Room is a threat to mankind, the Stalker says that hope is all the people have and that this is the only place they can hope to come to. In the ensuing fistfight the Writer, who doesn’t believe in fairy tales like hope, defends the Professor, and after an inconclusive struggle the exhausted combatants pause to catch their breath.

The dialectical -minded Writer is, as you might expect, of two minds.  If one’s innermost wishes actually do come true here, he ponders, what will happen?

“Coming true here is only in line with your essence, of which you know nothing. But it’s there in you, directing you all your life.”

On the other hand, the Writer doubts whether the Room really works at all and gets the Stalker to admit that he has never verified that it has made anyone happy. 

Now they are all paralyzed by incertitude and left despondent. In a mournful shot of 4:48 duration, the Professor begins dismantling his bomb and throwing the pieces into a pool of standing water, while they all sit down and stare dejectedly.

5.  The Aftermath
Although the quest for the Room has ended in fear-induced paralysis, there are still more than twenty crucial minutes left to this story, and now the focus shifts over entirely to the Stalker.  Back at the dingy bar and with the image color returning to sepia-tinted monochrome, the Stalker’s wife enters and modestly urges him to come home.  At home he complains to her about the uselessness of “intellectuals”.  In a slow in-tracking shot of 2:30, he says the world is too cynical and he’s not going back into the Zone again.  She soothingly offers to go with him to Room, but he says no, “what if it didn’t work with you, either?”

Then we shift to a 3-minute shot of his wife speaking straight into the camera and, referring to the Stalker in the third person, defending her decision to spend her life with him.  Like her husband, she, too, says that life is all about hope.  There are ups and downs in life, she says, that are not only unavoidable but essential.

Finally, in a mysterious 4-minute shot to close the film, Monkey is seen in her room, and in color, reading some poetry to herself.  Then she slowly and contemplatively uses telekinesis to move some drinking glasses about on the table in front of her.


One of the fascinating things about Tarkovsky’s Stalker is that his characteristic mise-en-scene is not only an effective vehicle for telling the story, but is also an essential thematic element of the film.  Through various cinematic means, he conveys a sense of almost claustrophobia-inducing confinement.  This is not just the feeling of being in a closed room, but the feeling that reality itself is impinging upon us.  He does this in several ways:

• There are frequent tracking shots of people in closeup gazing at something; but we don’t, at least initially, see what they are looking it.  This makes us want to see beyond the visual frame, which is confining our view.
   
• Similarly, there are numerous offscreen sounds that are heard of activities that we cannot see.  These noises are not essential to the action, but they give the viewer a sense that things are going on around us that are just out of our view.  Again, the viewer feels that the world is encroaching upon him from unseen sources.  A notable example of these unseen noises that occurs several times in the film is the thunderous sounds heard from inside the Stalker’s apartment of a train passing close by.  The sounds of the rushing train are mixed with the energetic sounds of an anthem being played.  These noises also have an unnerving claustrophobic effect on the viewer, giving one the feeling that life, itself, is rushing by without him or her.
   
• The music in the film is a curious mixture of instrumental and electronic music that is sometimes made to blend in with the real, story-based noises heard.  This blending of sounds gives a further eerie feeling to the world presented.
   
• Tarkovsky’s fascination with water is in strong evidence here. The world is drenched in water, as the film’s participants repeatedly slog and wade through swampy, rain-soaked conditions.  This water is intrusive, too, weighing everything down and further confining  and hindering movement.

The reason why these techniques are thematically significant is because the film’s main theme concerns the very nature of reality. How do we discern meaningful elements out of this phantasmagoria of images that is presented as conscious experience? Tarkovsky seems to be saying, perhaps in line with the later Heidegger [11], that the technological landscape that we have constructed  with our scientific mindfulness has led us to a blinkered dystopia.  This dystopia is the squalid sepia-tinted monochromatic world shown outside the Zone. But true reality, in all its richness, is what is shown in the Zone – and that is its secret gift.  The outside world is limited and static.  We name things, as the Writer says, but as soon as we name them their meaning disappears.   The Zone, on the other hand, is overflowing with life.  It is unpredictable, but always vital and interactive..

The film features several discussants concerning these issues, and this kind of triangular discussion is characteristic of a number of Tarkovsky films, such as Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and Andrei Rublev (1966).  Let us return to the four discussants and their perspectives here.

• The Professor represents the objectivist, scientific view of reality that tries to reduce everything to mechanical reasoning.  This mechanical reasoning has undeniable power in connection with divide-and-conquer problem solving, but its soul-crushing reductionism leaves us with an impoverished view of life’s possibilities.
   
• The Writer is also a rationalist, but he relies on postmodernist pragmatic reasoning.  This is situationally useful, but it is also frustrating and leads to disheartening cynicism. 
   
• The Stalker, and also his wife, believes in putting his faith in uncertain hope.  As such he is another instance of the Holy Fool that was present in Andrei Rublev.  Unfortunately, he has no compass beyond his hope and the rituals that he has faithfully committed himself to follow.
   
• Monkey is a fourth view that finally emerges as an embodied agent of the Zone in the final act.  She represents the vital complexity of the Zone, itself.  Monkey, like the Zone, is serene and natural appearing, but her utter mystery may encompass menace, too.

To a certain extent I would guess that Tarkovsky envisioned himself as sometimes like the Writer and sometimes like the Stalker.  But here he is glimpsing into the unfathomable richness of the Zone, itself.  As he once remarked on this notion [12],

“From a symbolic point of view, [the little girl’s powers] represent new perspectives, new spiritual powers that are as yet unknown to us, as well as new physical forces."

The Writer might say that the Zone represents the intricacies and hidden cavities of the mind, or mental consciousness. But since we do not really know what the mind is, it is more phenomenologically authentic to say that the Zone represents the dynamic interactive vitality of true, existential reality.
★★★½ 

Notes:

1. Murtaza Ali Khan, “Stalker (1979): Russian maestro Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic masterpiece that deals with existentialism, spirituality and self-confrontation”, A Potpourri of Vestiges, (1 June 2012).
2. Roderick Heath, “Stalker (1979)", Ferdy on Films, (2011).
3. Brad Weismann, “Stalker”, Senses of Cinema, (September 2013). 
4. Matthew Pridham, “In the Zone: An Excursion into Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film Stalker”, “Weird Fiction Review”, (24 July 2013). 
5. Ewan Wilson, “Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’: Deep as a Mirror”, The Artifice, (15 January 2014). 
6. “The Sight & Sound Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time”, Wikipedia, (March 2016). 
7. Christie, Ian, (ed.), "The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time", Sight & Sound (British Film Institute) (1 August 2012). 
8. It is interesting to compare Tarkovsky’s themes and his use of tracking shots with those of Carl Dreyer.  Cf.
• The Film Sufi, “‘Ordet’ - Carl Dreyer (1955)”, The Film Sufi, (19 May 2016). 
9. Geof Dyer, “Danger! High-radiation arthouse!”, The Guardian, (6 February 2009). 
10. Though probably apocryphal, the three Chinese curses, in increasing order of devastation, were
• #3: May you live in interesting times.
• #2: May you come to the attention of people in high places.
• #1: May the gods grant you all your wishes.
11. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper Torchbooks, (1977).
12. Andrei Takovsky, Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, ed. by John Gianvito (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), p. 59, quoted in 
• Ewan Wilson, “Tarkovsky’s 'Stalker': Deep as a Mirror”, The Artifice, (15 January 2014).