“It is so quiet out here. It is the quietest place in the world.” - Stalker
“So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.” - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
“It’s just three bald men walking around in a field!” - Angry IMDB user
It has become something of a critical commonplace to associate Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction classic, Stalker, with an event that occurred seven years after it was originally released. On 26 April 1986, at 01:23 Moscow time, reactor four at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine suffered a power surge, resulting in a series of fierce explosions in the reactor core that released large quantities of radioactive material into the atmosphere. In his book on the subject, The Legacy of Chernobyl, Zhores A. Medvedev states, “According to observers outside Unit 4, burning lumps of material and sparks shot into the air above the reactor. As a result of the damage to the building, airflow was established by the high temperature of the core. The air ignited the hot graphite and started a graphite fire.” The people of Prypiat, the nearest city to the disaster, were evacuated only after radiation levels were detected at the Forsmark Nuclear Plant in Sweden, more than fifty-five hours after the initial disaster; the Soviet government originally refused to accept that there was any immediate danger involved in a nuclear incident, especially one for which they’d systematically ignored all the warning signs. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, 237 people in the surrounding area suffered from acute radiation sickness, and 31 people died from direct exposure to fatal levels of radiation, an estimated four hundred times more than was released by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (though only around 1/100 of that released into the atmosphere by intensive atomic weapons development and testing throughout the 1950s/60s). A resident of Prypiat, interviewed years later, put it perhaps most succinctly: “Fuckers covered it up. Only started admitting what really happened when radiation was reaching Western Europe.”
In the fifteen years following the catastrophe, 350,400 individuals were evacuated from the most severely tainted areas, in modern day Belarus, Eastern Russia and Ukraine, a thirty-kilometre area which became universally known as the Exclusion Zone, or, simply, ‘The Zone’. As of 2007, save for 400-600 generally unaccounted-for residents and 3,000 workers still employed or living in or around the area, the Zone is home only to сталкер, or ‘stalkers’, individuals who brave the effects of enormous radiation loading on the body to offer tourism services to inquisitive visitors, legal or otherwise. About 300 separate incidents of Zone stalking are recorded annually by law enforcement agencies, a number which has steadily increased thanks to portrayals of the Exclusion Zone in popular culture, most recently, and notably, inCall of Duty: Modern Warfare.
It is difficult to deny that there is something inherently romantic in the idea of these solitary, forsaken figures traversing the ghostly emptiness of the Zone. Their personal chronicles are almost poetry in themselves, echoing the words of the eponymous Stalker of the film. States one: “This is simply the most unique place on the planet, a vast territory, which was immediately left by all the people …I feel alive there. There I am a man who depends only on himself…” It is difficult, in the same manner, to deny Tarkovsky’s revelatory vision; Cate Blanchett once stated, “Every single frame of (Stalker) is burned into my retina”; itrecently came a close second, behind Blade Runner, in a BFI poll for member’s personal favourite movies, illustrating not only that BFI members like their films almost profoundly simplistic in their purest conception, but also that they don’t pander to the tastes of the movie-going public; Tarkovsky has never really captured the imagination of the majority in the way that even other cinematic ‘outsiders’ like, say, Terence Malick has been able to over the years.
Stalker was also reportedly Tarkovsky’s personal favourite of all of his movies. After the distracting difficulties of Solaris, and only four years after the unparalleledZerkalo (Mirror), Stalker represents a return to the untainted thematic essence of science fiction; in some ways, it is perhaps Tarkovsky’s most readily accessible film. Tragically, however, it was arguably the problematic shooting of Stalker that eventually killed not only its director, but also both Anatoly Solonitsyn, who plays the Writer, and, perhaps most heartbreakingly, his own wife, Irma Raush. After spending a whole year filming a version of the Zone scenes, apparently completely different to the final vision, the footage was discovered to be completely unusable when brought back for development in Moscow, leading Tarkovsky into a power struggle with the Soviet film boards, as well as his cinematographer Georgy Rerberg, regarding the future of his vision.
When asked about the second round of filming, Vladimir Sharun, sound technician, offers insight into the wretched events; “We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris.”
Such tragedy only adds to the myth of the film itself; Stalker resonates with the misfortunes and coincidences of its creation and legacy. Though directors, of all artists, will elucidate ceaselessly upon the singularity of their vision, art obviously cannot be absolutely autonomous, disassociated with, or entirely uninfluenced by, real-life events. Tarkovsky himself repeated that the plot of Stalker interested him the least about the entire project, stating, in his book Sculpting With Time: “People have often asked me what The Zone is, and what it symbolises…The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone. It’s life.” The existence of this pseudo-spiritual world utterly dominates the film, a desolate but beautifully emerald world, a kind of post-nuclear Oz, bursting in to vivid colour after the monochrome murmur of an unnamed, and probably fabricated, totalitarian country. In the original novel on which the film was based, the phenomena of the Zone is more explicitly explained as an alien visitation, yet in Tarkovsky’s urban desert, this is superfluous. Writer prophetically claims that it is the product of a ‘breakdown in the fourth bunker’, eerily foretelling the Ukrainian disaster seven years later. Similarly, the effects of the Stalker’s constant excursions into his beloved ‘Zone’ on his only daughter, ‘Monkey’, are visibly reminiscent of the effects of radioactivity on the children of the next generation of Chernobyl sufferers. The inverted physical laws of the Zone, described by Stalker himself as a ‘deadly and complicated system of traps’, render certain apparently tranquil areas completely impassable, navigated only by the primitive technique of tossing nuts to scout ahead; how can one not envision the toxic inheritance of radioactivity that plagues the real-life Exclusion Zone to this day?
Tarkovsky, however, strayed from his source material in more ways than one. Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s original novel Пикник на обочине, Piknik na obochine(Roadside Picnic) depicts the Zone as home to a ‘Golden Sphere’, which grants an individual’s innermost wish; in Stalker, this is changed to simply a ‘Room’, glimpsed, yet never truly understood. The simplicity of a Room, as opposed to a glowing sphere, which would immediately indicate intelligent creation, only adds to the ambiguities of Tarkovsky’s Zone; the Room, for risk of spoiling the plot, is never entered by any character, and we never discover if it grants wishes or not. Similarly, the audience is constantly filled with doubt as to whether the Zone, with its air of ambient mystery, is truly a place of magic, or even danger, in the most purely physical sense of the words. There are bizarre occurrences, such as a phone-call out of nothingness in an abandoned warehouse, and the unexplained appearance of a totemic black dog, who subsequently follows Stalker back into the ‘real world’. And, while there has evidently been some immediate catastrophe in the Zone (the wanderers stumble upon a pair of skeletons still entwined in the act of love, bringing to mind the frozen figures of Pompeii), the constant threats of mortal peril are never realized, not even in the harrowing scene at the ‘Meat Grinder’. For all Stalker’s preaching, his cautionary threats, the Zone never reveals itself; it appears to the viewer as almost utterly tranquil, an organic subterranean landscape depicted by Tarkovsky almost in real-time, subject to its own skewed form of linearity. Film-time, as we have come to understand it, does not function in this Zone: “If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.”
Thus in Stalker there are no lapses between shots; substantial jumps in space and time do not occur, and neither do they follow conventional laws. As viewers, we experience time as Writer, Professor and Stalker experience time. The Zone itself is ever-changing, a transitory landscape filled with the broken shells of automobiles and buildings; as Tarkovsky leads us through its labyrinthine geography in real-time, the viewer experiences the disconnected inversions of its geography just as his three characters do. Writer, initially sceptical of Stalker’s claims regarding the Zone, attempts to bypass the labyrinth and aim straight for the Room across what appears to be a peaceful field, but is suddenly halted in his tracks by a disembodied voice. Space, it seems, is inaccessible. Only time, in the Zone, propels one forward. Yet time, manipulated by Tarkovsky, is immeasurable, as labyrinthine as space. In this manner, over its 163 minute run-time, Stalker is a completely unique cinematic experience, something of an endurance test for the uninitiated or unprepared. One of the most celebrated sequences in the film is a trancelike four-minute tracking shot (the whole thing is basically a series of interconnected and introspective tracking shots, bustling with an almost ridiculous degree detail and activity) beginning with the prostrate form of Stalker, panning away from his upturned hand through a submerged world of artefacts, broken remnants of the former inhabitants of the Zone, syringes, goldfish, religious iconography, paraphernalia of a devastated world, before returning, illogically, to the unmoving hand of Stalker. All of the above is accompanied by the haunting lilt of the ‘tar’, a traditional Azjerbijan instrument, heightening the sense of pure wonder that Tarkovsky wrings from every seemingly inconsequential detail. (A sunken calendar glimpsed during this scene reads the date ‘December 28’, which would be the last day of Tarkovsky’s life; he died on December 29 1986).
Paradoxically, it is the commanding sense of tranquillity that renders the Zone so unknowable, so inaccessible. Tarkovsky once dismissed the notion that water plays a prominent role in his films, stating that it recurs only because it rains all the time in Russia. Yet water dominates Stalker, as it arguably does many of his films; the Zone is a saturated world, controlled perhaps by the constructive power of water as a first principle. I could not help but thinking of this passage in Aristotle’sMetaphysics in reference to the instability of The Zone: “That from which is everything that exists and from which it first becomes and into which it is rendered at last, its substance remaining under it, but transforming in qualities, that they say is the element and principle of things that are.” My favourite scene in the movie occurs halfway through, when the travellers lose themselves amidst the subterranean caverns of the Zone, the scenery fluctuating around them, water giving way to fire bubbling up through the rocks that form the foundation of the world, indicating that water is the true transformative element, keeping the Zone in its constant state of flux. The film’s sound design, too, is dominated by water; it is a world engulfed in the overemphasised sounds of dripping, gushing, flowing above everything else, above the deathly, depthless silence that greets the three as they reach the Zone’s outer limits. Tarkovsky stated: “I would like most of the noise and sound to be composed by a composer. In the film, for example, the three people undertake a long journey in a railway car. I’d like that the noise of the wheels on the rails not be the natural sound but elaborated upon by the composer with electronic music. At the same time, one mustn’t be aware of music, nor natural sounds.”
The railway car sequence referred to in the above quote is also a masterful lesson in pure filmmaking, serving as the transition scene between the festering sepia tones of the industrial world and the shimmering colour-explosion of The Zone. Shunning any outside interferences save for the clunking chime of the tracks as the three travellers are shepherded toward the unknown, Tarkovsky’s camera, like Sergio Leone’s, lingers lovingly on the hardened and limitlessly captivating faces of his actors, specifically that of Solonitsyn, the Writer, whose presence provides much of the emotional clarity within the film’s framework. Save for the Zone, which is the true presence at the centre of the film, these three characters represent the primary philosophical debate inherent within the narrative, despite being distanced from the audience by their impersonal monikers; Stalker, filled with an utter belief in the supernatural supremacy of the Zone, clings to his faith, a New Testament idealized Orthodoxy that he laments as absent to these men of the world, wandering seekers lost in their own sense of self-importance. The character of Stalker is also the closest to Tarkovsky himself, as we know him from the seven films he has left us; he represents man’s alienation in a godless age of mechanisation. ”Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing,” he laments. “Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world.” These reflections, often represented in rambling narrative form, come to govern the film, unifying the converging intentions of its characters, offering the hope of redemption even in the face of overwhelming doubt.
Professor, on the other hand, is a man of empiricism, logic, pure science, who nevertheless seeks to destroy the Room, denouncing it as a place that “will never bring happiness to anyone…” By the close of the film, he has finally come to regard the Room as part of Nature, and therefore the embodiment of some hope; if it is a failure on his part, it is a type of failure that can be, perhaps must be, celebrated. Writer also fails; he fails simply in his quest to enter the Room, noting that one cannot possibly not know what your innermost wishes are before you enter: “My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world. And my subconscious is yearning for a piece of juicy meat. But what do I want?” It is he who provides the main source of contention within the film, embodying the ‘man of passions’ that Stalker so wilfully prays for; he is a drunken, broken man of immense wealth, proclaiming proudly that, “technology is a crutch and artificial limb. Mankind exists in order to create works of art”.
Yet it is perhaps also Writer who seems to come to embody the improbable Christ-like figure in what may be Tarkovsky’s most evocative religious parable. Gregory Halvorsen Schreck has recognized in Stalker the labours of a man in religious turmoil, possibly more so even than in his second and most obviously religious feature, Andrei Rublev. Tarkovsky once propounded that his films were about one thing only: “the extreme manifestation of faith”. If the film is a corporeal vision of a perceived apocalypse, then it is of a religious nature, as illustrated by the inclusion of Revelations 8:7-11, whispered hoarsely by Monkey as her father navigates the netherworld of the Zone. Only water, as Schreck observes, is “symbolic of baptism, cleansing, birth, rebirth, and satisfied thirst” within the film, though water can also be corrupted, perverted, made impure, as illustrated by the deaths of those who created the film. Nothing, it seems, cannot be devastated by sheer human carelessness. “So lately,” stated a recent Guardian article, “for all the repeated assurances that nuclear history isn’t repeating itself, I’ve found it impossible not to see the dying concrete husk of Fukushima 1 and picture the forsaken world of Stalker as the conclusion.”
By the close of the film, as the three men sit alone just beyond the reach of the Room, and the camera pans inside to catch a confined, yet beautiful, rainstorm, the feeling is one of intense disillusionment, perhaps of utter failure. Having been unsuccessful in converting the sinful, in the guise of Writer and Professor, Stalker finally expresses his doubts as to the power of his true home, his beloved Zone. Returning to the totalitarian world, he departs from his companions, amidst the purity of falling snow, with his wife and child, the colourless desolation of his world receding for a few moments, adopting the colour scheme of the Zone. The totemic dog returns with Stalker, a guide for the guide, a companion for the lonely stalker, a vestige of the Zone returned to the real world.
However, there is also great hope in the final scenes of the film, an escape from the ‘insufferably boring’ world ruled ‘by cast iron laws’, as the Writer describes the colourless land from which they have fled, and, inevitably, returned to. Despite her wildly sexual temper tantrum earlier in the film (Tarkovsky really has a thing for writhing women), Stalker’s wife reasserts her devotion to her wayward husband in a consummate climactic monologue, delivered directly to the camera, exemplifying, maybe, at least one of Tarkovsky’s multiple assertions that, if the film can be reduced to one simple element, it is simply the capacity to love. In addition, Monkey’s supposed ‘psychic abilities’, pushing a glass across a table using only her mind, perhaps illustrate something about suffering as a method of humanity’s ability to transcend its narrow margins, when faced with something beyond understanding, a Kubrickian 2001 moment of sorts.
Stalker was to be Tarkovsky’s final film made in the Soviet Union. His dramatic stand for, simply, purely, the human spirit was never destined to be well met in a land of atheism and monolithic thought process. “The methods by which cinema affects audiences can be used far more easily and rapidly for their moral decomposition, for the destruction of their spiritual defences, than the means of the old, more traditional art forms,” writes Tarkovsky in Sculpting In Time, illustrating his knowledge of the fact that cinema was increasingly falling into the hands of the wrong people. And Stalker is his most ferocious lament for man as man should be.
