Stalker

After viewing Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker a second time, I cannot say with any certainty that I understand it more than I did the first: even by the master's standards, its symbolism is impenetrably opaque, its pacing slow and its dialogue more concerned with subtext than telling a coherent story. Yet, this time, I accepted its density and stopped trying to figure everything out as it happened. As a result, I found this viewing infinitely more rewarding, a genuine experience.

As with Tarkovsky's earlier Solaris, Stalker is a science fiction film, and like Solaris, it's sci-fi insofar as its setting is the only aspect that plays into the typical notion of science fiction. Stalker takes place in a decrepit future where technology has seemingly degraded to crumbling communist buildings and bulky, rundown cars; an opening text scroll attributed to a fictional Nobel laureate informs us that a meteorite crashed years ago, and that a team of inspectors sent to investigate it never returned. The government cordoned off the area, known as the Zone, and placed military police around the area to prevent anyone from getting in, with deadly force if necessary.

Naturally, some of the more dedicated truth-seekers found a way. Known as stalkers, these adventurers discovered a room in the epicenter of the meteorite blast that granted one's innermost desires. So, these stalkers decided to ferry hopefuls through the mysterious, (officially) dangerous Zone in exchange for a certain fee. The caveat: a stalker must never enter the Room himself, or at least so we're told.

We meet one of these men, known only by his profession, as he prepares to return to the Zone. His wife begs him not to go: he only just got released from prison after being caught by authorities the last time, their daughter, whose deformities are all but explicitly blamed on whatever effect the Zone might have on those who traverse it, just got used to the sight of her absent father. Stalker rebuffs her pleas and heads to a tavern to meet his latest clients.

Tarkovsky introduces one of them, identified as Writer, in the middle of a rant to a young female companion about the insufferable boredom of the world. He mocks the simplicity of mankind, yet he also mourns the lack of fun and freedom of the Middle Ages. "The world is ruled by cast-iron laws, and it's insufferably boring," he gabs, as though feudalism was one big orgy. The other companion is the considerably quieter Professor. Stalker doesn't ask what these men want from the Room because he does not care; he also recognizes that what desires they might express out loud likely have little to do with what they truly want.

With sepia bronzes and the dank, broken-down buildings of the Soviet-era Estonian shooting location, Tarkovsky presents us with a sickly vision of the future. For all of the writer's incessant jawing, he's got a point when he calls this drab world boring. Even when the three board a Jeep, creep through the patrolled outskirts of the fenced-off Zone and drive through a military roadblock narrowly avoiding machine gun fire, the director's long-take structure and its color filtering prevent Stalker from morphing into a thriller.

The turning point arrives when the trio reaches a motorized draisine that will take them along railway tracks into the Zone proper. Even as machine gun rounds are still intermittently flying around them as the police lob bullets into the area they saw the trespassers last, and despite Stalker's constant warnings about the danger of the Zone, the draisine ride is filmed not with foreboding long shots of these men headed into the mist that permeates the area but with extreme close-ups on each character's face, probing their contemplative faces as they sit in silence. It signifies that, like all of Tarkovsky's work, the protagonists' journey will be spiritual, not physical.

Upon reaching the Zone, the film switches to beautiful color, though if one said, "We're not in Kansas anymore," when stepping into this world it might not be as hopeful. Presenting the Zone in color could obviously be a representation of the area's supernatural or alien power, but it also symbolizes what the Zone means to Stalker. At home he is a poor ex-convict, saddled with a nagging wife and a crippled child. Here, he is one of the chosen few who can navigate a place of hope and magic. In a world of people like Writer, here is a place that can contradict Writer's views of the rigidity of the modern world and the listlessness of mankind. The first thing he does is lay down in the grass contentedly.

The journey to the Room is arduous and lengthy, drawn out by Stalker's warnings and rules about traversing the Zone: before making any significant movements, he throws handkerchiefs tied to steel nuts ahead of the group to ensure the path is not booby-trapped. He cautions that backtracking in the Zone is suicide. And yet for the hour and a half these three wander the Zone, nothing happens to them. What suspense exists at all comes chiefly from Stalker's earnest assurances of danger and his frantic pleas to stop whenever the others grow weary of his unproven assertions (the rest can be attributed to the natural dread of the takes, which drag on so long we're programmed to expect something to happen). That nothing ever actually does happen to the men is largely inconsequential, as the subtle, disorienting nature of the Zone tests them not with adventure movie booby traps but spiritual musings.

Each of the characters suffers a crisis of faith as their philosophical conversations bring out their true feelings. Writer, so arrogant and flippant toward the Zone, wonders what will happen if the Room really does grant wishes. He came to the Zone because he was crippled by writer's block, but, in a brilliant monologue, he notes that if the Zone grants him genius, he might be even less inspired. "A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he's worth something. And if I know for sure that I'm a genius? Why write then? What the hell for?" When he is sent ahead of Stalker and Professor to ensure a path is safe, he goes too far in a room filled with sand dunes and birds (the most beautiful shot of the film) and collapses, tormenting himself suddenly over how he buckled under fame and how even his most ardent fans will simply move on to the next big thing after he dies.

When the reach the area of the Room, the professor, heretofore respectful of Stalker's commands and generally contemplative, opens up the knapsack he so carefully guarded the entire time and reveals materials for a bomb. If the general population knew that this place was real and it could grant our wishes, he argues, what would stop evil men from coming there and becoming the next Hitler? Stalker pleads like a wretch, begging on hands and knees not to destroy this place, that it gives hope to the hopeless. Professor appears to ignore him, but before he can destroy the place, he has a crisis of conscience and decides that his colleagues were right and that the Zone should remain unharmed. Neither of Stalker's clients enters the Room, and instead they all sit on a dry part of the floor of a flooded chamber as fresh rain falls around them, filling the room with golden light.

When they return, Stalker has his own breakdown, lamenting how his clients had no faith and how they are representative of the rest of the world. Yet there's a certain falsity to his rant, sincere though it is. If not entering the Room constitutes a lack of faith, then Stalker is guilty of hypocrisy. He maintains that a stalker cannot enter the Zone with an ulterior motive, yet he also notes that his mentor Porcupine went into the Room and had his wish granted; Porcupine won the lottery as he wished, but the Room also granted his innermost desire, which was for his brother to die. In anguish, Porcupine hanged himself. But the moral of that story clearly isn't that a stalker cannot enter but that we have no idea what thoughts lie deep within us. If Stalker does not enter the Room it is because, he, like his two clients, is afraid of what might happen.

The question then is whether this represents a lack of faith. I believe it is quite the opposite: rather than enter the Room with materialistic desires, Writer and Professor respected the potential power of the Room by leaving it be. They leave the Zone believing in its power without experiencing it. This might explain why a dog from the Zone follows them home: we first see the black dog as Stalker whispers Biblical passages about God walking with believers without making Himself known to them, and perhaps by following the people out of the Zone the dog signifies the Zone's "approval" of their faith.

For all the stalker's dialogue about faith, however, it's the wife who offers up the most illuminating and touching reflection upon the subject. She describes to her husband the pain of being married to a stalker, how she knew beforehand about the inevitable jail time, the poverty, how it affected any offspring (revealing that the Zone is indeed responsible for Monkey's deformities and drawing disturbing parallels to the future Chernobyl incident). Yet she married him anyway, out of love. The film then ends on a coda in which Monkey sits at a table and seemingly moves glasses through telekinesis, or is it just the passing train? What this means I'm not sure; obviously, some part of the Zone has been passed onto her, but I don't know what significance this has for the world Tarkovsky's created. It's just one of many parts of the film I cannot get my head around, and that's half the joy of Stalker: whether it upholds or bitterly rejects Tarkovsky's notion of the spirituality of man is largely in the eye of the beholder, but this moving, cryptic "sci-fi" film is one of the great masterpieces of foreign cinema, and it offers new challenges and delights with each viewing.

Andrei Rublev

From the beginning of cinema, people used films to espouse beliefs. Though the Russian Constructivist movement generally receives credit for promoting the idea that cinema could be used for a purpose rather than simply entertainment, directors like D.W. Griffith (with the racist imagery of Birth of a Nation followed by the inclusive Intolerance) and Charles Chaplin (with shorts like The Immigrant) had used their films to promote their ideologies before Eisenstein ever picked up a camera. Artistic propaganda goes back to the stage itself, with Shakespeare's plays in particular coming about as close to anti-royalty could in the age of patronage. But of all the opinions, emotions and philosophies espoused on the stage and screen, none is so hard to capture than faith. It makes sense; after all, anyone can talk about a belief, but what about belief itself?

It's something that's eluded the religious community greatly in their ongoing filmic endeavors. Films like Fireproof, C Me Dance and some new film on the horizon about high schoolers arguing over abortion in moot court for no reason all attempt to capture the power of faith and religious values in an increasingly secular world, but they all fail primarily because the protagonist never really has to face anything truly horrific and faith-challenging. The films that do examine faith in the face of amoral horror (The Last Temptation of Christ, for example) are dismissed by the Christian community as sacrilegious and sinful.

I wonder, then, what the consensus is on Andrei Tarkovsky's opus Andrei Rublev. Arts and Faith's list of the 100 Most Spiritually Significant films ranks it an impressive 10th, but that does not necessarily reflect the views of the community at large. Frankly, anyone who sits down with the 3-1/2 hour epic has their work cut out for them: episodic in nature, it loosely follows the life of icon painter Andrei Rublev, who lived from around 1370-1430 and about whom little is known.

That biographical uncertainty grants Tarkovsky great freedom: Andrei Rublev is not simply the story of the most celebrated medieval Russian icon painter (man, that's a lot of qualifiers); it is a haunting meditation on the nature of faith and art in a cruel world. Tarkovsky, who grew up under Stalin's nightmarish reign, knew full well the brutality of man and how little we've come since the so-called Dark Ages, and he fills the movie with terrible images of torture, murder, pillage and destitution.

Through this world wanders Rublev, a monk who paints icons along with two of his colleagues, Danil and Kirill. Andrei is the finest of the three, using his meticulous observations to craft beautiful, humanistic work; Danil, like Andrei, is withdrawn, but more worn down and disillusioned with the world; and Kirill serves as Andrei's foil, lacking talent but desperately seeking acclaim. He's intelligent enough to impress Theophanes, a renowned artist, but when the Greek sends for Andrei and not Kirill, the wrathful monk quits the monastery in a rage.

Kirill drifts in and out of the story, as does Danil. Clearly the focus is on Andrei, who begins to suffer an artistic crisis when the world around him becomes so terrible that he's afraid he can no longer paint peacefully and instead must reflect troubled times. Indeed, the cruelty of this barbaric world is so ingrained that Tarkovsky calls attention to the terrible ennui of it all. When royal soldiers gouge out the eyes of the artisans who built the prince's palace (so that they might never again create something so beautiful), they do so with indifference and do not react to their victims' terrible screams. A jester specializing in obscene social commentary is apprehended by guards and knocked out against a tree by a soldier who looks perfectly contented with his line of work.

Elsewhere, Tarkovsky lets his camera linger over images of beaten dogs; rotting, half-eaten animal carcasses; and a horrifying raid led by the aforementioned prince's brother. Tarkovsky's camera style has always had an unsettling quality to it, lingering over seemingly innocuous objects until they became nearly unbearable, but the imagery here is certainly his darkest. As Andrei explores the world around him, these gastly sights engender a crisis of faith reflected by his increasing self-doubt. When he inadvertently kills a soldier attempting to rape a young woman, he is so crushed that neither paints nor even speaks for 16 years.

Yet just as his faith died with his art, so does his creativity return when a simple act rekindles his belief. The son of a dead bellmaker must finish his father's project despite knowing next to nothing about the craft. But he has faith (and a good bit of luck), and casts the bell perfectly. The lad's success shows Andrei that an artist can make something beautiful in this world; he needs only the confidence not to be influenced by evil.

Despite the immense length, this is easily the most accessible of the three Tarkovsky films I've seen, and also the most rewarding. Like any genuinely rewarding spritual film, the focus is not on religious faith but faith itself. Andrei Rublev is as much a medieval coming-of-age tale as it is an argument for goodness in the face of great evil (be it the feudal rule of petty kings or the viciousness of totalitarian dictators). The arc of Rublev's creativity reminds me how so many faith-based films fail: at the start, when Rublev and the other two monks wander with little impediment and stay at the monastery, Andrei thinks his work triumphs over evil, but he has yet to become truly immersed in it. Only when he sees the world in all its violence and lust and greed does his art suffer.

That's the problem with religious films: they never make it out of the monastery, so to speak. Sure, something may go wrong there (such as Kirill's tirade), but they've still walled themselves off from the realities of the world. The film ends with a montage of Rublev's work, the only portion of the film in color. As the beautiful images flash on the screen, it's impossible not to substitute the Andrei in front of the camera with the one behind it: Tarkovsky lived through horrors so unimaginable that we still don't speak of Stalin's reign, at least not with the horrific clarity of the Holocaust, which took far fewer lives. His work was constantly censored, even buried either by those who didn't understand his style or understood it enough to know that the director was subtly attacking them.

Nonetheless, he continued to work, making ever bolder statements with his films and increasing his finesse with the camera. That is not to say, however, that his cinematography here was in any way lacking; the bell-raising sequence is one of the all-time great moments of cinema, a technical triumph that conveys both skill and emotion deftly. I'm merely saying that Tarkovsky never gave up and, like Rublev, he left behind some of the greatest pieces of art of this or any other period. If the term "masterpiece" cannot be applied to this film, I know not what it could possibly describe.

Solaris (1972)

When legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky saw Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, he hated it for its coldness. In response, he adapted Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel Solaris, a film regarded rightly as an anti-2001. However, such an easy description unwittingly pigeonholes the film into some narrow vision of a pithy comeback, failing to mention its endless depth and Tarkvosky's ability to suck you in to the story as much as Kubrick kept you at arm's length.

Tarkovsky, like just about every great Russian director stretching back to Soviet propagandist Sergei Eisenstein, endured nothing but hardships from Soviet censors, even though most of these directors (especially Eisenstein and the Constructivist directors) made movies that celebrated Soviet ideals. Tarkovsky, however, was doomed from the start. He couldn't make the film he wanted because the censors proclaimed it too "personal"--this was an ardently socialist empire, remember--so the director returned with a copy of Solaris. After all, the masses could get behind a science fiction film, couldn't they? The censors agreed, and sent Tarkovsky on his way. Oh, if I could just see their faces when they saw the final product.

Eisentstein set down the unofficial rules of Russian cinema with his pioneering use of the montage, but Tarkovsky moves in the polar opposite direction, crafting a series of long takes that, like the work of Yasujiro Ozu but with moving cameras, linger before and after the scene's action, giving us enough time to collect our thoughts. We need that time, too, because Solaris is an endlessly layered trip through the human mind, providing us with possibility on top of possibilty from which to choose.

Tarkovsky takes his sweet time from the start; we begin with Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, walking around his father's land before he meets with a retired cosmonaut, Burton. Kelvin finally goes inside to speak with Burton, and we discover some strange anomalies about the cosmonaut's mission. Sent to the liquid-covered planet Solaris, he went down to the surface to find a missing comrade. We see a tape of Burton's debriefing upon his return many years prior, as he tries to explain what he saw on the surface to a group of dismissive bureaucrats (undoubtedly Tarkovsky's slam against those who perennially kept him down). The camera footage contains nothing but shots of the planet's barren, liquid surface, but Burton maintains they are not hallucinations.

At last Kelvin prepares to leave for Solaris himself. He is played by Donatas Banionis, a stoic man with a shock of prematurely white hair and a look that balances between unkempt and professional: he has a paunch and he needs a shave, but there's a fierce intelligence behind his look of self-defeat. To gaze upon him inspires a seemingly contradictory mixture of pity and respect. We learn before he leaves of his wife Hari, whose suicide haunts his dreams, and he understand him more.

We do not see Kelvin's journey to Solaris, and while I'm sure budgetary and technological reasons exist for this, I imagine Tarkovsky wants to take the "space" out of the equation and force the audience to pay attention. He arrives on the aging space station orbiting the planet and meets the two remaining scientists, Snaut and Sartorious. A third, Kelvin's friend Dr. Gibarian, committed suicide before Kelvin arrived. The two scientists have little time for their new comrade, and Snaut warns Kelvin not to overreact if he sees anything...unusual.

As Kelvin begins his research, he catches glimpses of a woman moving walking along the station, but she disappears out of sight when he tries to follow her. That night, he awakens in his barricaded room and finds himself face to face with his wife Hari. Soon we learn that Hari, like the child Burton saw on Solaris, is a reflection of memories. When the scientists sent X-ray probes onto the planet's surface, something on the planet probed back.

As a reflection of Kelvin's memories, this Hari has all of his wife's mannerisms and all of their shared memories, but none of her own. Perhaps this is Tarkovsky's way of suggesting we can never really know anyone else, though I don't mean it as bleakly as it sounds. Nevertheless, Kris latches onto this corporeal manifestation of his mind as his wife out of desperation. Here the film, whether it realizes it or not, becomes less like a take on 2001 and more a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo. Kelvin treating this creature as an object that he can mold into that which he failed to protect eerily mirrors James Stewart's obsessive remodeling of Kim Novak's character to make her look like the woman he loved. The knowledge that this Guest (the term they use for Solaris' manifestations) is the reflection of Kelvin, we must ask ourselves how subjective this manifestation is. We know that Hari committed suicide after a vicious verbal fight between the two, yet this Hari is caring and calm. Is this Hari an idealized version of the real wife? A representation of all of his fears? Or is it, in a manner of speaking, the real thing?

What Tarkovsky wants to say with this film is that man's attempt to move ever forward, to find out destiny, serves as a comforting distraction from our regrets and sense of personal isolation. Here, man finally reached the end of the universe, and now he must face those feelings. This knowledge drove Gibarian to his suicide, and it left Snaut and Sartorious teetering on the edge of madness. Sartorious in particular reacts to this forced introspection with great anger; he proposes bombing the planet with high doses of radiation to stop the Guests. It's interesting to see that Hari, created from mere fragments of the human mind, seems infinitely more human than the two scientists.

Though the film presents itself almost like a continuous sequence, two scenes in particular stick out. The first--and likely most famous--occurs when the station momentarily loses gravity, and Kelvin and Hari float in the air as lit candles tumble up with them. The emotional center of the film, it conveys Kelvin's deep longing and his sense of contentment with this copy, the first happiness he's felt at least since being with his real wife, if not before that. The second is the final sequence, in which we learn a twist that makes us rethink everything before it and decide what we want to think about it. It's a moment that the characters themselves do not realize, and the moment thankfully does not insist on only one interpretation.

The censors refused to allow any mention of God, but Tarkovsky's characters reach for a higher power here, as did the scientists in 2001. However, where Kubrick's vision of man's future entailed a combination of man and machine that could explore the universe forever, Tarkovsky believes that man's future is the inevitable reconciliation of his past and present. Our true path is one of spiritual longing, not physical discovery. Solaris represents the literal end of this journey, but it represents the spiritual endpoint of man, where no more distractions exist. Solaris, the God substitute, can only catalyze this self-evaluation. As the characters embrace in their uncertain conclusion, we are left with an unsettling question: can man ever truly understand himself and evolve, or are we forever trapped by our regrets and uncertainty?