BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA:
Film title: Stalker (Russ. Сталкер). Director: Andrei Tarkovsky. Year of production: 1979; country of production: USSR; language: Russian; length: 162 minutes.
GENRE:
Feature drama
SYNOPSIS:
Stalker shows us an open-ended journey of faith, of despair, and of hope for the possibility of moral/spiritual growth. Three men evade armed guards to enter a dangerous “Zone” – a “complex maze of … death traps” – of unspecified, perhaps extraterrestrial, origin. The Stalker is a paid guide who knows how to enter and navigate the Zone as safely as possible. His two clients seek to reach a mysterious Room, which is said to grant the deepest wishes of those who enter it. The two are a writer, seeking to resolve doubts over his status as an artist, and a scientist, who turns out to be on a personal mission to destroy the Room with a bomb. Throughout their journey, the Stalker assesses his clients’ moral and spiritual worth. He tells them that a false step could kill them, as has happened to many others. After a surreal journey, the three men arrive outside the Room. The Writer chooses not to enter it. The Scientist chooses not to bomb it. The Stalker says he is “forbidden” from entering it. Viewers never see inside it. The three return to the bar outside the Zone where their journey began. The Stalker arrives home frustrated, telling his wife how hard it is to find people who will have faith in the Room’s promise: “The most important thing is to believe.” The film ends with a shot of the Stalker’s daughter manifesting psychokinetic powers: moving glasses across a table with her mind. As the Scientist told us, when the men first arrived in the Zone, “His daughter is a mutant, a so-called Zone victim.” This prompts viewers to look back on the film and ask a key question: just what is the transcendent promise symbolized by the Zone?
BACKGROUND/CONTEXT:
Tarkovsky’s inspirationfor the film was Roadside Picnic, a 1972 novel by Soviet SF authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. They later wrote the screenplay, in constant consultation with Tarkovsky. The novel’s premise is that sites of abandoned alien technologies, left in our world, would be incomprehensible and dangerous. “Stalker” was their term for those who enter these sites in order to retrieve alien technologies and to sell them.
Tarkovsky was not interested in the novel’s SF elements, but in the moral complexity of his very different Stalker:
I have always wanted to tell of people possessed with inner freedom despite being surrounded by others who are inwardly dependent and unfree; whose apparent weakness is born of moral conviction and a moral standpoint and in fact is a sign of strength. The Stalker seems to be weak, but essentially it is he who is invincible because of his faith. (Tarkovsky 1989, 181)
Tarkovsky repurposed Roadside Picnic by blurring the external (material, science fiction) and inner (psychological, esoteric) themes of the novel. He uses the Zone as a tool for exploring the characters’ moral/spiritual development. In his words, “The existence in the zone of a room where dreams come true serves solely as pretext to revealing the personalities of the three protagonists”: “It’s just as well if it is all a … fantasy – that would not affect the main point at all” (Tarkovsky 2006, 50, 55).
KEYWORDS:
Andrei Tarkovsky, Anthroposophy, esoteric film, fantastic fiction, Rudolf Steiner.
ACADEMIC COMMENTARY:
Stalker is esoteric in two senses.
First, it must be read between its lines. Its meanings are hidden, accessible only to those who work hard and who – through that work – have an experience of expanding horizons, like the characters in the film.
Stalker is a work of the fantastic (not of science fiction) because it places viewers in an open-ended interpretive position. We are challenged to make sense of a film that is carefully constructed to thwart all easy answers. The fantastic is characterized by “a special causality, pan-determinism; multiplication of the personality; collapse of the limit between subject and object; and lastly, the transformation of time and space” (Todorov 1973,120). Works of the fantastic propose impossibilities that “challenge the receiver to explain them while simultaneously blocking any possibility of reducing them to any form of natural or supernatural framework beyond the fictional universe itself” (Reisz 2001, 209).
This first sense of “esoteric” challenges us to pay close attention to Tarkovsky’s complex use of extended film technique. There are no special effects. He evokes a sense of wonder – and carefully avoids giving clear answers – by creative use of mise-en-scène, editing, set design/selection, lighting, sound, film stock etc. In this light, Stalker itself is the viewers’ Zone.
Second, Stalker is esoteric because it is shaped by esoteric writings. In late 1978, as he worked on Stalker, Tarkovsky was reading two books by German esoteric thinker Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the founder of Anthroposophy (Tarkovsky 1994,156). Tarkovsky said, “Steiner offers us a world view that explains everything – or almost everything – and provides human development an appropriate place in the spiritual domain” (Federovsky 1985). (Stalker also resonates with the ideas of Russian esoteric thinker George Gurdjieff [1867–1949], though Tarkovsky’s most intense study of Gurdjieff took place after he finished Stalker [Tarkovsky 1994, 275, 277, 289].)
Steiner describes “some of the regions of the supersensible world,” including the seven regions of “Spiritland”:
The pilgrimage through ever purer forms of morality and religion is a perfecting process. … The student meets with horrible powers threatening life at every turn and from every side. …The spatial relationships and the time lapses … are quite different there from those obtaining in the physical world. … Having penetrated to the sphere of the supersensible, the soul’s experiences are of such a nature that descriptive expressions cannot so easily be found for them. (Steiner 1922, Preface, ch. 4, ch. 1.2; 1947, ch. 11, ch. 9, Appendix)
Tarkovsky shows us seven distinct regions of the Zone: (1) its threshold, where the three men arrive; (2) a circuitous walk through a field of tall grass, within sight of their final destination, the Room of wishes; (3) a crumbling industrial landscape, through which a long journey leads the characters repeatedly to the same place, without recognizing it – a decayed doorway, framed by a crumbling wall with broken ceramic tiles; (4) a waterlogged channel with a series of sodden hummocks, where the characters nap and (perhaps) dream; (5) the “meat grinder,” a long, curved, dark and echoing muddy tunnel, where water drips and translucent stalactites hang; (6) the most famous setting of the film, a hall of low, firm sand dunes, where space and time are strangely distorted (yet, this is not the Room that grants wishes); and (7) the anteroom of the Room, with three doorways opening off a walkway along a wall that the camera faces, with a pool of muddy, cluttered water and a patch of waterlogged soil in the foreground.
There are many similarities between Tarkovsky’s seven regions of the Zone and Steiner’s seven regions of Spiritland. For example, in Tarkovsky’s fourth region, we see a long sepia dolly shot, looking down in close-up on a series of objects lying in shallow, algae-ridden water on a tiled floor: machine parts, a syringe, an icon of Christ, a vase, a gun, etc. In Steiner’s fourth region of Spiritland, we find “the archetypes of … purely human creations…. [of] all that we develop during earthly life in the way of scientific discoveries, of artistic ideas and forms, of technical conceptions…” (Steiner 1922, ch. 1.4).
Tarkovsky shows the Stalker’s self-sacrifice, his insistence on the faith of his clients, and his warnings against materialistic motives. Steiner tells us that the spiritual teacher places “selfless devotion and self-sacrifice before all other qualities. They never actually refuse anyone, for even the greatest egotist can purify himself; but no one merely seeking an advantage for himself will ever obtain assistance…” (Steiner 1947, ch. 11).
The final shot of Monkey’s psychic reflects Steiner’s views of “the higher faculties slumbering in every human being”: “The powers and faculties to be developed are of a most subtle kind” (Steiner 1947, ch. 1). Stalker’s sound director, Vladimir Sharun, recounted that Tarkovsky declared, “here is the ending for Stalker!” upon seeing footage of a famous psychic, Ninel Sergeyevna Kulagina, who was able to move items on a glass table while gazing at them (Tyrkin 2001).
There is no simple one-to-one mapping between Stalker and Steiner, of course. There is no single key to interpreting “the meaning” of the film or the Zone. Tarkovsky sought in Stalker, as in all his films, to “achieve the specific, many-faceted significance of actual truth” (Tarkovsky 1989, 73–74). Steiner was just the most esoteric (in the second sense) of many resources used to construct this esoteric (in the first sense) classic of the fantastic.
Bibliography:
Federovski, Nathan. 1985. “From an Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky.” What Is Happening in the Anthroposophical Society, July/August. https://is.gd/cAx9qv
Reisz, Susana. 2001. “Las ficciones fantásticas y sus relaciones con otros tipos ficcionales.”InTeorías de lo fantástico, edited by David Roas, 193–221. Arco/Libros.
Steiner, Rudolf. 2011 [1904]. Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man. Rudolf Steiner Press.
Steiner, Rudolf. 1947. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, 3rd ed. Anthroposophic Press.
Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris. 2012 [1972]. Roadside Picnic, translated by Olena Bormashenko. Chicago Review Press.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1989 [1985]. Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. University of Texas Press.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1994. Time within Time: The Diaries, 1970–1986, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. Faber and Faber.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. 2006. Interviews, edited by John Gianvito. University Press of Mississippi.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1973. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated by Richard Howard. Case Western University Press.
Tyrkin, Stas. 2001. “In Stalker Tarkovsky foretold Chernobyl.” Nostalghia.com. https://is.gd/eWYAjw
