Journal Entry: Stalker (1979)
I don’t often make a whole essay about a specific film, but last week I watched for the second time Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and thought it was worth collecting my thoughts on. One thing I would like to start doing is revisiting certain films over and over again to develop a relationship with them. As I do this, I may start writing about them here. These are also the films I am slowly collecting on Blu-Ray.
I showed Stalker to a friend of mine who had never watched it before. I had watched it once previously, but any of my first attempts at watching a movie by Andrei Tarkovsky did not yield much, because I was still learning how to watch them. Ingmar Bergman was certainly right when he proclaimed that Tarkovsky invented a whole new cinematic language. Over time I have learned to love the slow, contemplative pace of his films; so I was very excited to watch it again.
I was surprised to find that not only did it not feel slow to me, it actually felt downright action packed (at least compared to Mirror (1975)). I think this is because Tarkovsky was so much more interested in genre than some other directors in his corner of the film world. I think this is part of why he is so compelling to me as a film maker- although he disagreed with the general principals of film makers that worked in a more Hollywood style, he wasn’t ready to strip everything away that smelled of that world. Stalker has a pretty straightforward plot, the sci-fi elements are very prevalent in the story, and his images are very beautiful.
Before we watched, I told my friend that the images would move a lot slower- Tarkovsky is trying to make you think for yourself, he wants you to lean in and not rely so much on emotions. At the end of the film, my friend pointed out that one of the reasons he was so drawn in to the movie is that everything felt purposeful, so he wanted to pay attention to try and figure out why each shot looked and moved the way it did. Sometimes people can think that slow cinema is about torturing the audience (and some of it is), but I think Tarkovsky represents someone in between extremes who respects the intellect of the audience enough to trust them with their own thoughts, but still wants them to be engaged in the story.
I love how The Zone acts in the film. Unlike popular science fiction movies, it does not appear as any kind of alien form of life trying to get a message to earth from outer space. The Zone’s effects are more felt than seen, almost like the magic of the ring in Lord of the Rings. It develops a relationship with the will of each individual who visits it. Those with weak wills or who have impure desires are broken by The Zone, because only the pure can accept its rules. This is why the job of a Stalker is so important.
A Stalker is a guide through The Zone, specifically to a certain room that is supposed to grant to each person who visits it their greatest desire. In this movie, The Stalker is taking two members of the intelligentsia- a professor and a writer (each named simply by their job title in the script) to visit the room. As these two enter The Zone and try to impose their wills upon it, they learn that The Zone has boundaries. At one point, the Professor is stopped dead in his tracks by some invisible force he feels- he is unable to continue in the way he is going. These two well educated men of society have to learn to follow The Stalker’s path, but as they journey further into The Zone and get closer to the room, a much greater question is raised- how does one know the real desires of his heart?
The Stalker relates the story of another Stalker who made it to the room, but to get there he had to sacrifice the life of his brother. He enters the room intending to ask for his brother back, but the room knows this is not his greatest desire, which is that of great wealth. Wealthy and miserable, the Stalker returned home and hung himself.
It is dark stuff, but the story is told very compassionately. There is a beautiful moment towards the end of the film where The Stalker breaks down and monologues about why he does his work. Tarkovsky has said that this character took a lot of influence from Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of The Idiot. The similarity I see here is how he is guided through the story by his pure heart- maybe not perfectly, and it certainly does not mean he does not suffer or cause suffering to others (The Stalker’s family certainly suffers from the risk he puts himself at), but he has a certain foolishness about him that means he can understand about The Zone what others cannot. The Writer and The Professor have been educated into stupidity- outwardly they are very successful, but they lack the ability to dialogue with The Zone, with the transcendent powers. They are so intelligent that they cannot see their need for faith, and so they cannot navigate The Zone.
And their journey never comes to fruition. The Professor pulls a bomb out of his backpack and informs The Stalker that the intelligentsia wants this room destroyed. After a brief scuffle, the men finally decide not to use the bomb. But despite all they have been through, the two enlightened men explain away the supernatural qualities of the room and refuse to enter, to have it fulfill their greatest desires. For all the danger they went through to get here, it doesn’t matter one bit if they don’t take the final step.
At the end of the film, the three men return to where they came from. The Stalker talks to his wife and bemoans the lack of faith in people of the modern age. She gives a monologue about how she’d rather live an interesting life with danger and suffering than a boring life without. The Stalker’s deformed daughter, another example of someone who suffers but is pure (is a child), uses what seems to be telekinetic powers to push three glasses off of a table.
My two biggest takeaways in terms of theme are that one may not always know what they truly want, or that is to say one may not always truly know themselves. The second takeaway is that faith and belief are a different kind of education than that if the intelligentsia. Spiritual education leads to simplicity. What The Stalker’s wife says is true: our modern age has put a façade up to help us not to think about death, to encourage us to avoid risk or danger. I think modern education could be similar: if one keeps thinking themselves in circles, never accepting a challenge to what they believe, they have the illusion of avoiding risk, which are those thoughts and encounters that awaken our conscience and arouse a need to change within us. The Stalker suffers a lot for his faith, not just because the intelligentsia could arrest him but because even his life of going into and out of the zone is fraught with danger. Every time he enters The Zone, he may never return. But if he stops going, he may lose the spiritual sight that brought him there in the first place. And in our modern world, we certainly need a Zone if we are to keep our sanity and our purity.
I feel like I need to watch Stalker another three times just to get a handle on what all happens in the story and start to understand the characters. It is definitely a challenge to follow the captions of a movie that also demands your full attention on each frame of screen time. If I can get to the point where I can generally know the dialogue without looking at it, I believe I could get a lot more out of studying the images. But I am thankful for the challenge- usually if a movie can be rewatched it is to relive the same experience, but I haven’t found very many movies where they actually change as you watch them, movies that you can develop a relationship with where you talk back to it and exchange ideas with it. The fact that every Tarkovsky movie is like this tells me he is a film maker worth learning from.