Kurosawa, Tarkovsky and Solaris

Solaris (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

‘I was on very intimate terms with Tarkovsky. I always felt like he was my younger brother. Drinking together, we sang the theme of Seven Samurai. His expression of the element of water! It was unique, indeed. Watching this film [Solaris] always makes me want to return to Earth.’ 
- Kurosawa on Tarkovsky

Akira Kurosawa first met Andrei Tarkovsky in Moscow on his first visit to Russia in July 1971 when Kurosawa attended the Moscow Film Festival. Dodeskaden was screened and won the Special Prize. Tarkovsky then went to Japan to re-pay the visit that same fall and the two directors remained friends until Tarkovsky’s untimely death in 1986. Tarkovsky told Kurosawa that he always viewed Seven Samurai before shooting a new film. Kurosawa replied that he would always see Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev before shooting...

Originally written by Akira Kurosawa and published in May 1977 the following article titled ‘Tarkovsky and Solaris’ recalls the early relationship between the two great directors. It was translated for Nostalghia.com by Sato Kimitoshi and was subsequently adapted by Criterion for use in the insert booklet of their Solaris DVD.

I met Tarkovsky for the first time when I attended my welcome luncheon at Mosfilm during my first visit to Soviet Russia. He was small, thin, looked a little frail, and at the same time exceptionally intelligent, and unusually shrewd and sensitive. I thought he somehow resembled Toru Takemitsu, but I don’t know why. Then he excused himself saying, ‘I still have work to do,’ and disappeared, and after a while I heard such a big explosion as to make all the glass windows of the dining hall tremble hard. Seeing me taken aback, the boss of Mosfilm said with a meaningful smile: ‘You know another World War hasn’t broken out. Tarkovsky just launched a rocket. This work with Tarkovsky, however, has proved a Great War for me.’ That was the way I knew Tarkovsky was shooting Solaris.

After the luncheon party, I visited his set for Solaris. There it was. I saw a burnt down rocket at the corner of the space station set. I am sorry I forgot to ask him as to how he had shot the launching of the rocket on the set. The set of the satellite base was beautifully made at a huge cost, for it was all made up of thick duralumin.

It glittered in its cold metallic silver light, and I found light rays of red, or blue or green delicately winking or waving from electric light bulbs buried in the gagues on the equipment lined up in there. And above on the ceiling of the corridor ran two duralumin rails from which hung a small wheel of a camera which could move around freely inside the satellite base.

Tarkovsky guided me around the set, explaining to me as cheerfully as a young boy who is given a golden opportunity to show someone his favorite toybox. [The director] Bondarchuk, who came with me, asked him about the cost of the set, and left his eyes wide open when Tarkovsky answered it. The cost was so huge: about six hundred million yen as to make Bondarchuk, who directed that grand spectacle of a movie War and Peace, gaze in wonder.

Now I came to fully realize why the boss of the Mosfilm said it was ‘a Great War for me.’ But it takes a huge talent and effort to spend such a huge cost. Thinking ‘this is a tremendous task’ I closely gazed at his back when he was leading me around the set in enthusiasm.

Concerning Solaris I find many people complaining that it is too long, but I do not think so. They especially find too lengthy the description of nature in the introductory scenes, but these layers of memory of farewell to this earthly nature submerge themselves deep below the bottom of the story after the main character has been sent in a rocket into the satellite station base in the universe, and they almost torture the soul of the viewer like a kind of irresistible nostalgia toward mother earth and nature, which resembles homesickness. Without the presence of beautiful nature sequences on earth as a long introduction, you could not make the audience directly conceive the sense of having no-way-out harboured by the people ‘jailed’ inside the satellite base.

I saw this film late at night in a preview room in Moscow for the first time, and soon I felt my heart aching in agony with a longing to returning to the earth as quickly as possible. We have enjoyed marvellous progress in science, but where will it lead humanity after all? This film succeeds in conjuring up sheer fearful emotion in our soul. Without it, a science-fiction movie would be nothing more than a petty fancy.

These thoughts came and went while I was gazing at the screen.

Tarkovsky was together with me then. He was at the corner of the studio. When the film was over, he stood up, looking at me as if he felt timid. I said to him, ‘Very good. It makes me feel real fear.’ Tarkovsky smiled shyly, but happily. And we toasted vodka at the restaurant in the Film Institute. Tarkovsky, who didn’t drink usually, drank a lot of vodka, and went so far as to turn off the speaker from which music had floated into the restaurant, and began to sing the theme of the samurai from Seven Samurai at the top of his voice. As if to rival him, I joined in.

For I was at that moment very happy to find myself living on Earth.

Solaris makes a viewer feel this, and even this single fact shows us that Solaris is no ordinary science-fiction film. It truly somehow provokes pure horror in our soul. And it is under the total grip of the deep insights of Tarkovsky.

There must be many, many things still unknown to humanity in this world: the abyss of the cosmos which a man had to look into, strange visitors in the satellite base, time running in reverse, from death to life, strangely moving sense of levitation, his home which is in the mind of the main character in the satellite station is wet and soaked with water. It seems to me to be sweat and tears that in his heartbreaking agony he sqeezed out of his whole being. And what makes us shudder is the shot of the location of Akasakamitsuke, Tokyo, Japan. By a skillful use of mirrors, he turned flows of head lights and tail lamps of cars, multiplied and amplified, into a vintage image of the future city. Every shot of Solaris bears witness to the almost dazzling talents inherent in Tarkovsky.

Mirror (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Many people grumble that Tarkovsky's films are difficult, but I don't think so. His films just show how extraordinarily sensitive Tarkovsky is. He made a film titled Mirror after Solaris. Mirror deals with his cherished memories in his childhood, and many people say again it is disturbingly difficult. Yes, at a glance, it seems to have no rational development in its storytelling. But we have to remember: it is impossible that in our soul our childhood memories should arrange themselves in a static, logical sequence.

A strange train of fragments of early memory images shattered and broken can bring about the poetry in our infancy. Once you are convinced of its truthfulness, you may find Mirror the easiest film to understand. But Tarkovsky remains silent, without saying things like that at all. His very attitude makes me believe that he has wonderful potential in his future.

There can be no bright future for those who are ready to explain everything about their own film.

– ‘Akira Kurosawa: Tarkovsky and Solaris’

Andrei Tarkovsky: Dialogue on Science Fiction

Solaris (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Where 2001 examined the technological progress of man through a notably distant lens from its characters, Solaris devastatingly explores the inner psychology of its protagonist (scientist Kris Kelvin), who is tortured by phantom images of his dead wife aboard a spaceship hovering the Solaris ocean, which is argued to have the special ability to accommodate the most desperate human desires.

Where 2001 can be argued as having a relatively positive view towards progressing space travel and thus forwarding the Apollo agenda, Solaris is quite pessimistic towards human space travel. Where technology in 2001 is intended an awe-inspiring display of choreographed beauty, the technology of Solaris is decrepit and useless, and the halls of the spaceship act as largely abandoned canals of depression and defeat rather than a locale for progressive innovation... Space travel is viewed in Solaris as a largely futile, lonely, and unattractive venture. Human space exploration has not led to a final accomplishment here as much as it has simply come to a standstill...
                             – Landon Palmer:  Kubrick’s ‘2001’ vs. Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’

Solaris (1972) is arguably Tarkovsky’s most approachable film. While it is far from conventional in its story and structure, it stands centrally in relation to his other films: behind him were his impressive debut, Ivan's Childhood (1962), and his first epic masterpiece, Andrei Rublev (1966); ahead of him were the experimental, personal, Mirror (1975), Stalker, a philosophical, bleak work, and finally, two difficult, contemplative films made in exile, Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). 

Tarkovsky had seen Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and reportedly thought it unemotional and cold. Reports at the time suggested Tarkovsky’s film was a direct response to 2001. Tarkovsky undoubtedly uses more individual characters and the human drama is more central than in Kubrick’s film. Nonetheless, Tarkovsky’s film, while a reaction to Kubrick’s cannot hide its influence. Both films establish their narratives in a leisurely manner, with considerable time spent tracking around the space sets; both films employ a widescreen mise-en-scene approach that benefits from superior art direction; and both films generate an aura of mystery that begs for countless explanations. 

Unlike 2001, Solaris, on the other hand, is permeated with sadness, which grips the picture even before it departs from Earth. We watch the protagonist, a space psychologist called Kris Kelvin, gaze at underwater reeds as if they were a drowned woman's tresses in the sombre prologue. Kris, as played by Donatas Banionis, seems perpetually scarred, delayed by some unfathomable sadness. He will depart on a trip to the space station Solaris, a once-thriving experiment that has gone awry; it will be up to him to decide whether or not to shut down the research station. He prepares by watching a video from a scientific symposium regarding Solaris's problems.

Humans seem to be enslaved to equipment and television pictures, disconnected from the natural world around. At Solaris, Kris discovers a dilapidated space station that is empty save for two obsessed scientists while Kris's colleague has already committed suicide, leaving him a recorded warning about hallucinated visitors having "something to do with conscience." Kris's deceased wife, Hari, constantly materialises by his side. Whether she is a doppelganger, the embodiment of a decade's worth of grief-stricken memories, or a delusion, she is real to Kelvin. He has the ability to hold her and talk to her, and hence is the author of her existence. Tarkovsky expands this concept to all of our connections, both past and present, and questions their very existence. Do we adore the people around us, or do we adore our perceptions of them? How much access do we really have about someone, apart from our own mental colouring of their character? 

Tarkovsky often confronts us with such profoundly disturbing concepts, arguing that we may not be the centre of everything after all. Solaris is a picture that not only dazzles and confounds with its visual splendour and remarkable set design, but also with the thoughts that underpin each frame, exhibiting harrowing human concepts into a lifeless environment. 

Tarkovsky's experiments with pace, attempting to "discover Time inside Time," have his camera track up to the sleeping Kris, distorting the moment until we join his dream. In the film's beautiful closing scene, Kelvin returns to his parents in the picturesque country house home shown in the opening scenes – but this reassuring mirage is a huge duplicate manufactured by Solaris's planet-sized brain. Although it seems to be home, Kelvin will never be able to return. 

“The protagonists in Solaris were tormented by disappointments, and the path out we presented them was sufficiently illusory,” Tarkovsky subsequently wrote in his film biography Sculpting in Time. “It was in dreams that they discovered their own roots - those roots that permanently connect man to the Earth that gave birth to him. However, even such connections had become imaginary to them.”

The following conversation is from an interview by Naum Abramov with Andrei Tarkovsky that took place in 1970 while the great Russian director was working on his adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. Initially billed in America as the Soviet Union’s reply to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), at first glance, both films share similar concerns in exploring mankind’s unsettled role in the universe and the consequences of detachment from his natural habitat. However, it’s evident that each film’s view on space, and mankind’s role within it, are quite different:

ABRAMOV: You’re working on a film adaptation of the science-fiction novel ‘Solaris’, by Stanislaw Lem. Lately, the science-fiction genre has attracted the interest of many prominent filmmakers. This seems to be an indication of how the genre answers some sort of inner need for contemporary viewers and filmmakers alike. Complex, intellectual-artistic content can be combined in one film with aspects of a purely entertaining spectacle directed toward the widest possible audience. I think this is especially true for the genre of science-fiction in cinema. Viewers of different levels of sophistication would appreciate different elements of these films; in some cases the philosophical content, in other cases, the strictly superficial, dramatic, exciting aspects of the plot.

In your opinion, what needs are satisfied in our time by the genre of science-fiction in cinema? Is it a desire to see the scientific and technological progress of humanity, incarnated in the vivid imagery of a contemporary film? Is it the expression of philosophical thought within the strange and thrilling context of a flight into space; the future of our planet; or the story of some brave, new invention? Maybe it’s the striving of the writer and filmmaker to study people’s character, our contemporary character, with the dramatic events dictated by the genre?

And finally, why have you turned to science-fiction, a genre which is so new to you?

TARKOVSKY: The questions you’re asking, as far as I understand, are connected on one hand with filmmaking and on the other hand with the viewer. But first, I want to explain why I decided to adapt Lem’s novel, Solaris. Whether or not my first two films are good or bad, they are, in the final analysis, both about the same thing. They are about the extreme manifestation of loyalty to a moral debt, the struggle for it, and faith in it – even to the extent of a personality crisis. They are about an individual armed with conviction, an individual with a sense of personal destiny, for whom catastrophe is an unbroken human souI.

I’m interested in a hero that goes on to the end despite everything. Because only such a person can claim victory. The dramatic form of my films is a token of my desire to express the struggle and the greatness of the human spirit. I think you can easily connect this concept with my previous films. Both Ivan and Andrei do everything against their own safety. The first physically, the second in a spiritual sense. Both of them in a search for an ideal, moral way of living.

As for Solaris, my decision to adapt it to the screen is not at all a result of some fondness for the genre. The main thing is that in 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.

The novel is not only about the human mind encountering the unknown, but it is also about the moral leap of a human being in relation to new discoveries in scientific knowledge. And overcoming the obstacles on this path leads to the painful birth of a new morality. This is the ‘price of progress’ that Kelvin pays in Solaris. And Kelvin’s price is the face to face encounter with the materializatron of his own conscience. But Kelvin doesn’t betray his moral position. Because betrayal in this situation means to remain at the former level, not even attempting to rise to a higher moral level. And Kelvin pays a tragic price for this step forward. The science-fiction genre creates the necessary premise for this connection between moral problems and the physiology of the human mind.

ABRAMOV: And nevertheless, even though you emphasize your indifference to the genre, you are resolving this philosophical problem which concerns you within the genre of science-fiction. lt seems to me that science-fiction creates such special conditions of cinematic representation for itself that it’s impossible just to shrug them off. The filmmaker encounters different intellectual and artistic capacities in a novel and a film. He deals with the cinematic incarnation on screen of what was created by the imagination of the author of a literary work, with the need to provide the fantastic with a plastic specificity.

These questions must have presented themselves to you.


TARKOVSKY: The complexity in adapting Solaris is an issue of film adaptations in general and secondarily an issue of science-fiction adaptations. These are the two fundamental issues of my current work. The first issue relates to the principles of a work of literature in general. Prose possesses the special characteristic that its imagery depends on the sensory experience of the reader. So, no matter how detailed this or that scene is developed, the reader, to the degree of his own experience, sees that which his own experience, character, bias, and tastes have prepared him to see. Even the most detailed descriptions in prose, in a way, will elude the control of the writer and the reader will perceive them subjectively.

In the literal, superficial sense, War and Peace is read and envisioned by thousands of readers; this makes it a thousand different books as a result of the differences in experience between the writer and the reader. In this significantly important aspect is the special relevance and ubiquity of literature – its democracy, if you will. In this is the guarantee of the reader’s co-creation. A writer subconsciously depends on an imaginative reader to see more and to see more clearly than the presented, laconic description. A reader can perceive even the most ruthless, naturalistic details with omission through his subjective, aesthetic filter. I would call this peculiarity of prosaic description to influence the reader ‘aesthetic adaptation’. Principally, it governs perception and the prose author invades the soul of the reader within the belly of this Trojan horse.

This is in literature. But what about cinema? Where in cinema does a viewer have this freedom of choice? Each and every frame, every scene and episode, outwardly doesn’t even describe, but literally records actions, landscapes, character’s faces. And in this is the terrifying danger of not being accepted by the viewer. Because on film there is a very unambiguous designation of the concrete, against which the viewer’s personal, sensory experience rebels.

Some may argue that cinema is attractive because it’s really a source of what is exotic and unusual for a viewer. That isn’t quite right. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Cinema, in contrast to literature, is the filmmaker’s experience caught on film. And if this personal experience is really sincerely expressed then the viewer accepts the film.

I’ve noticed, from my own experience, if the external, emotional construction of images in a film are based on the filmmaker’s own memory, on the kinship of one’s personal experience with the fabric of the film, then the film will have the power to affect those who see it. If the director follows only the superficial, literal base of the film, for example the screenplay, even if in the most convincing, realistic, and conscientious manner, the viewer will be left unaffected.

Therefore, if you’re objectively incapable of influencing a viewer with his own experience, as in literature as I mentioned earlier, and you’re unable to achieve that in principle, then in cinema, you should sincerely tell about your own experience. That’s why even now when all half-literate people have learned to make movies, cinema remains an art form, which only a small number of directors have actually mastered, and they can be counted with the fingers of one hand. To remould a literary work into the frames of a film means to tell your version of the literary source, filtering it through yourself.

ABRAMOV: Where do you draw the line between a filmmaker’s interpretation and the original work? Isn’t there a danger of remoulding the literary work to the point of losing its original stylistics and visual structure?

TARKOVSKY: Working in science-fiction demands great subtlety and sincerity, especially if you’re talking about the issue of perspective. That’s why Lem is such a great science-fiction writer. You would understand what I mean if you read Solaris, Eden, and Return from the Stars.

In Eden, Lem tells about an expedition to a planet where the members of the expedition encounter a reality, the developmental laws of which they cannot comprehend. These laws slip away from understanding, like thoughts just forgotten. The air is filled with guesses and analogies, seen by the naked eye, but they can’t be caught. It’s a very specific, unnerving, and frustrating condition. And Lem does a brilliant job of expressing this condition. He describes in detail everything that the expedition encounters. But more than the detail, he describes what it is the people see, while not understanding what it means.

The same thing is in Return from the Stars. The protagonist returns from a flight to different galaxies. On earth, because of the differences in time (he has traveled at the speed of light), life has progressed through several generations. The returned astronaut walks through the city and doesn’t understand anything. Lem describes everything the astronaut encounters in extreme detail and despite this detailed description, we don’t understand anything either, along with the protagonist. These emotionally tense pieces express, for me, the quintessence of the author’s personal experience projected into the future.

ABRAMOV: The majority of directors of science-fiction movies think it necessary to impress the viewer’s imagination with the concrete details of everyday life on other worlds or the details of a spacecraft’s construction, which often crowd out the central idea of the film. I think Kubrick’s ‘Space Odyssey’ is guilty of that.

TARKOVSKY: For some reason, in all the science-fiction films I’ve seen, the filmmakers force the viewer to examine the details of the material structure of the future. More than that, sometimes, like Kubrick, they call their own films premonitions. It’s unbelievable! Let alone that 2001: A Space Odyssey is phoney on many points even for specialists.

For a true work of art, the fake must be eliminated. I would like to shoot Solaris in a way that the viewer would be unaware of any exoticism. Of course, I’m referring to the exoticism of technology.

For example, if one shoots a scene of passengers boarding a trolley, which, let’s say, we’d never seen before or known anything about, then we’d get something like Kubrick’s moon-landing scene. On the other hand, if one were to shoot a moon landing like a common trolley stop in a modern film, then everything would be as it should. That means to create psychologically, not an exotic but a real, everyday environment that would be conveyed to the viewer through the perception of the film’s characters. That’s why a detailed ‘examination’ of the technological processes of the future transforms the emotional foundation of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth.

Design is design. Painting is painting. And a film is a film. One should ‘separate the firmament from the waters’ and not engage in making comic books.

When cinema moves out from under the power of money, namely, the costs of production, when there will be a method for the author of a work of art to record reality as with a pen and paper, paints and canvas, chisel and marble, ‘X’ and the filmmaker, then we’ll see. Then cinema will be the foremost art and its muse the queen of all the others.

– Naum Abramov: Dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on the Screen. From Ekran, 1970-1971, 162-165. Translated from Russian by Jake Mahaffy and Yulia Mahaffy. In Tarkovsky Interviews. Edited by John Gianvito. University of Mississippi Press, 2006.

   

Andrei Tarkovsky: Into the Zone

Stalker (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Stalker (1979), Tarkovsky's fifth feature film and the final one he shot in the Soviet Union before defecting to the West. Following his voluntary exile, only two more fiction works were planned: Nostalghia, shot in Italy and released in 1983, and The Sacrifice, shot in Sweden (1986). The director died of cancer in 1986, just outside Paris, at the age of fifty-four. 

Stalker was his second attempt at science-fiction subject matter, following the space adventure Solaris (1972), though it is nearly indistinguishable from both that earlier film and The Mirror. The film is an adaptation of the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady (1925–91) and Boris (1933–2012) Strugatsky, which Tarkovsky read shortly after it was published in the literary magazine Avrora in 1972. The casual observer may wonder why he was drawn to this particular tale. Unlike high-art sources such as Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, it is firmly rooted in the hard-boiled end of the literary spectrum; it is rife with slang and violence, as well as characterization and sentiment to match. Yet beneath the surface, and more specifically in the psychology of the character who would become the film's eponymous protagonist (in relation to his wife and their mysteriously damaged daughter, Monkey), there is a difficult-to-define tenderness of outlook more in keeping with the director's usual preoccupations: a humanistic belief (if one can put it that strongly) in the sacrament of marriage. Although the book's central vision is dystopian, this may have contributed to its appeal. Certainly, there were numerous reasons to be dystopian about the Soviet Union at the time. 

Having said that, the film is a loose adaptation of the novel. The Zone's basic premise—that it was created years ago by an alien incursion and is full of mysterious dangers that have been explored illegally over the years by freelance agents known as stalkers (who occasionally offered themselves as guides to gullible tourists)—is common to both book and film. However, the book contains numerous additional incidents, characters, and digressions, and, unlike the film, it unfolds over an extended period of time. Tarkovsky's work necessitated a rigorous simplification of the story line. For example, the book's multiple incursions into the Zone are reduced to a single encounter, while the Stalker's companions, the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko), are director inventions (though they contain composite elements from the original). At the heart of the Zone, and only accessible to those who have survived the invisible terrors of the "Grinder" (a seemingly endless tunnel filled with jagged stalagmites and stalactites), is the legendary Room, entry into which is said to grant the wayfarer the fulfilment of his deepest desires. (In the novel, magic is associated with an object—a "Golden Sphere"—rather than with a destination, but the two concepts are otherwise identical.) Viewers of the film, as well as readers of the book, may have varying perspectives on how "deep" a concept we are confronted with here, when viewed through the lofty lens of philosophy or religion. Yet "innermost desire" is saved from glibness by the sheer complexity of its distribution throughout the film: what those deepest desires are (whether altruistic or cynically selfish) is never finally pin-pointed to any of the three characters in a coherent manner.

Tarkovsky creates an immersive world that is rich in material detail and has an organic feel to it. As a religious allegory, a reflection of contemporary political anxieties, and a meditation on film itself, Stalker surrounds the viewer in a series of possible interpretations.

“Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1980) came second, behind Blade Runner, in a recent BFI poll of its members’ top movies. In outline, it’s one of the simplest films ever made: a guide, or Stalker, takes two people, Writer and Professor, into a forbidden area called the Zone, at the heart of which is the Room, where your deepest wish will come true. It is this simplicity that gives the film its fathomless resonance. If Tarkovsky’s previous film, Solaris, seemed like a Soviet 2001, was Stalker Tarkovsky’s take on The Wizard of Oz?

“The starkness of its conception did not prevent the production traumas that seem integral to the creation myths of other favourites: the likes of Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo. Plans to shoot in Tajikistan had to be abandoned because of an earthquake. Having relocated to an abandoned hydroelectric power station in Estonia, Tarkovsky was dissatisfied with the cinematography and decided to shoot a pared-down version of the script all over again – in the same place. The price paid for this pursuit of an ideal is incalculable. Sound recordist Vladimir Sharun believes the deaths from cancer of Tarkovsky (in 1986), his wife Larissa and Anatoly Solonitsyn (who plays the Writer) were all due to contamination from a chemical plant upstream from the set.

“The film itself has become synonymous both with cinema’s claims to high art and a test of the viewer’s ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett’s enthusiasm for it – "every single frame of the film is burned into my retina" – attests not just to the director’s lofty purity of purpose, but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement. So a certain amount of blowback is inevitable. David Thomson included Stalker in his pantheon of 1,000 memorable movies, but was dubious about the notion of the Room. Perhaps it’s "an infinite, if dank enclosure in which an uncertain number of strangers are watching the works of Tarkovsky. Equally, it may be that as malfunction of one kind or another covers the world, we may have a hard time distinguishing the Room, the Zone, and the local multiplex.”

– Geoff Dyer.

The following interview with Andrei Tarkovsky was conducted by the renowned Italian scriptwriter Tonino Guerra in 1979.

TG: What does "Stalker" mean?

AT: It’s a made-up word that comes from the English verb "to stalk": to approach furtively. In this film this word indicates the profession of one who crosses the borders and penetrates a forbidden Zone with a specific objective , a bit like a bootlegger or a smuggler. The stalker’s craft is passed on from one generation to the next. In my film, the forbidden Zone represents the places where desires can be satisfied. The spectator may doubt its existence or see it merely as a myth or a joke . . . or even as the fantasy of our hero. For the viewer this remains a mystery. The existence in the zone of a room where dreams come true serves solely as pretext to revealing the personalities of the three protagonists.

TG: What kind of person is the Stalker?

AT: He’s a very honest man, clean, and intellectually innocent. His wife describes him as "cheerful." He leads men into the Zone to, he says, make them happy. He gives himself completely to this task, with total lack of self-interest. He believes that it’s the only way to make people happy. In the end his is the story of the last of the idealists. It’s the story of a man who believes in the possibility of happiness independent of the will and the capacity of man. His job gives meaning to his life.

As if he were a priest of the Zone, the Stalker leads men there to make them happy. In reality, no one can say for sure if anyone there is happy.

At the end of his journey in the Zone, under the influence of the people he is leading, he loses faith in the possibility of making all of mankind happy. He can no longer find anyone who believes in this Zone or in the happiness to be found in this room. In the end he finds himself alone with his idea of human happiness achieved by a pure faith.

TG: When did the idea of this film come to you?

AT: I had recommended a short novel, Picnic on the Roadside, to my friend, the filmmaker Giorgi Kalatozishvili, thinking he might adapt it to film. Afterwards, I don’t know why, Giorgi could not obtain the rights from the authors of the novel, the Strugatsky brothers, and he abandoned the idea of this film. The idea began to turn in my head, at first from time to time and then more and more often. It seemed to me that this novel could be made into a film with a unity of location, time, and action. This classic unity -Aristotelian in my view - permits us to approach truly authentic filmmaking, which for me is not action film, outwardly dynamic.

I must say, too, that the script of Stalker has nothing in common with the novel, Picnic on the Roadside, except for the two words, "Stalker" and "Zone." So you see the history of the origins of my film is deceptive.

TG: : Do the images that you’ve shot suggest specific musical accompaniment?

AT: When I saw the rushes for the first time, I thought the film wouldn’t need any music. It seemed to me that it could-that it must even - rely solely on sounds. Now I would like to try muted music, barely audible, behind the noise of trains that pass beneath the windows of the Stalker’s home. For instance, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony ("Ode to Joy"), Wagner, or even the Marseillaise’ In any case music that is more or less popular, that expresses the movement of the masses’ the theme of humanity’s social destiny. But this music must be barely heard beneath the noise, in a way that the spectator is not aware of it. Moreover, 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 of natural sounds.

TG: But will there be a central theme?

AT: I think the theme will be Far Eastern, a kind of Zen music, where the principle is concentration rather than description’ The main musical theme wiII have to be, on the one hand, purged of all emotion, and on the other, of all thought or programmatic intent. It must express its truth about the world around us in an autonomous way. It must be self-contained.

TG: Can you describe to me, image by image, the end of the film, as if I were blind?

AT: It would probably be great not to make films, but instead to simply describe them to blind people. A wonderful idea! One would only need to buy a tape recorder. "Thought expressed is a lie," said the poet.

TG: So, I can’t see. Tell.

AT: In the foreground, a sick little girl, Stalker’s daughter’ She holds a large book in front of her face. She is wearing a scarf’ She is in profile against an illuminated window. Slowly, the camera pulls back and frames a part of the table. The table in the foreground with dirty dishes on it: two glasses and a teapot. The little girl puts the book down on her knees, and we hear her voice repeating what she has just read’ She looks at one of the glasses. The glass, under the force of her look’ moves towards the camera. The child looks at the other glass and the other glass also begins to move forward. And then the child looks at the glass at the edge of the table and it falls to the floor without breaking. We then hear a train passing very close by, making a strange sound. The walls shake more and more. The camera goes back to the girl in the foreground and in the midst of this crashing noise the film ends.

TG: Are you thinking about another film right away after Stalker?

AT: I would like to make the film that we decided to make together: Italian journey. But you can talk about that better than I can. I would like to make a film that would lose some viewers and gain others, new ones. I would like our film to be seen by different people than those we call film viewers.

 TG: I was told that you would like to change your style completely. Is this true?

AT: Yes, only I don’t know how yet . . . It would be great for me to make a film with the freedom of a beginner. To turn down big financing. To have the possibility to observe nature and men at my leisure, without haste. And the subject would emerge of itself, as the result of these observations and not necessarily planned down to the smallest detail.

Such a film would have to be made in complete freedom, independent of inspiration, of actors, of camera angles and shots. And with a discreet camera . . . It seems to me that making a film in this way would push me to go much further.

TG: What images do you think you’ve "stolen" from someone else, even though you’ve obviously transformed them into your own style?

AT: I’m generally very wary of this and I try to avoid it. I don’t like the suggestion that I may not have acted in such or such a situation with complete independence. Yet, lately, these references begin to interest me. In The Mirror for instance, there are two or three shots that are very clearly inspired by Brueghel: the boy, the small silhouettes of then, the snow, the bare trees, and the river in the distance. I created these shots very consciously and deliberately, not with the idea of copying or to show culture but to bear witness to my love for Brueghel, of my dependence on him, of the deep impression that he has made on my life.

In Andrei Roublev, there was a scene that might have been from Mizoguchi, the great departedJapanese director. I wasn’t aware of it until it was projected. It’s the one where the Russian prince gallops across the countryside on a white horse, and the Tatar is on a black horse. The quality of the image in black and white, the landscape, the opacity of the overcast sky had a strange resemblance to an ink-drawn Chinese landscape.

The two riders gallop after each other. Suddenly the Tatar cries out, whistles, whips his horse, and overtakes the prince. The Russian goes after him but cannot catch up. In the next shot, they have stopped’ There is nothing else. Just the memory of the Russian prince on his white horse trying to catch the Tatar and unable to do it’

It’s a scene that has nothing to do with the plot of the story. It attempts to express the state of a soul and to throw light on the nature of the relationship between the two men. It’s like a game that two boys play. One runs ahead and says, "You can’t catch me!" The other one takes off after him running as fast he can, but he can’t catch him’ Then right afterwards, they forget their game and stop running.

– Stalker, Smuggler of Happiness. Andrei Tarkovsky interviewed by Tonino Guerra, 1979

Andrei Tarkovsky: Stalking the Stalker

Stalker (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Geoff Dyer’s book ‘Zona’ (Pantheon, 2012) is a personal meditation on the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ (1979) – a dystopian epic set in an industrial wasteland that takes in the mysterious journey of three Russians: the Writer, the Professor, and their guide, the Stalker, who wander through a blighted apocalyptic region called the Zone in search of the Room, where it is promised one’s innermost desires will be fulfilled.

Dyer outlines the film from first shot to last, while supplying his own informal annotations during which Dyer observes that, ‘The prominent place occupied in my consciousness by ‘Stalker’ is almost certainly bound up with the fact that I saw it at a particular time in my life … I suspect it is rare for anyone to see their — what they consider to be the greatest film after the age of thirty.’

In addition, Dyer recounts the film’s troubled production history – from the director’s bitter arguments with his wife, the health issues that sidelined Tarkovsky for several months during post-production, lost footage and damaged film stock, and the inauspicious earthquake during location shooting that forced the crew to relocate to a polluted industrial region in Estonia where it is suspected Tarkovsky, his wife, his leading actor and others involved in the film were exposed to toxic chemicals that induced the cancers that led to their premature deaths.

Dyer approvingly cites the critic Robert Bird who characterized the ‘Zone’ as the filmmaker’s essential space: ‘The Zone is where one goes to see one’s innermost desires. It is, in short, the cinema.’ Dyer claims that the Stalker who guides us there is ‘a persecuted martyr’ conveying the viewer to the place ‘where ultimate truths are revealed’. In other words, the Stalker is the artist himself. Although Tarkovsky vigorously resisted allegorical interpretations of his work, it's difficult not to read ‘Stalker’ as in some sense autobiographical. (Tarkovsky even wanted his wife, Larisa, to play the Stalker’s long-suffering wife).

As the Stalker’s expedition proceeds towards the Room, Dyer becomes increasingly personal in contemplating the nature of his own desires, recounting old girlfriends and acid trips, elaborating on failed sexual opportunities and his affection for dogs.

In the end, the film’s secret room is not revealed. The Writer cannot enter it for fear of facing his true desires, while the Professor has to be prevented from destroying it. ‘Stalker’, ultimately, is about a threshold that cannot be crossed, the forces that guard it, and the fears that prevent its crossing – although it remains open because the journey, like the film itself, is deemed necessary.

Andrei Tarkovsky discussed the film, its characters and their significance to him as an artist and filmmaker in the following interview from 1981:

Stalker does not enter the Room, that wouldn’t be proper, that is not his role. It would be against his principles. Also, if all this is indeed a fruit of his imagination then he does not enter because he knows no wishes are going to be granted there. For him it is important that the other two believe in the Room’s power and that they go inside. Stalker has a need to find people who believe in something in the world in which no one believes in anything. Why doesn’t Writer enter the Room? This is something we don’t know and neither does he. Nor where he is going and what he is searching for. We know Writer is without a doubt a talented man but he is already burnt out. He currently writes what is demanded of him, what critics, publishers, readers expect from him. In fact he is a popular writer. But he does not want to prolong this situation. In the first part of the film he seems to think that after entering the Room he would perhaps write better, he would again become himself and he would find relief from the burden he is carrying within himself. Later his thinking changes: if I change, if I become a genius, then why should I continue writing, as everything I’ll write is always going to be perfect? The goal of writing is to overcome oneself, direct others towards the goal and the path to its realisation. What should a man who is a genius a priori write for? What can he offer? Creation is an expression of will.

If a creator is a genius a priori, his creation loses all significance. Besides, Writer thinks about the story of Porcupine who hanged himself. He deduces from it that what is granted in the Room are not wishes but a kind of internal vision hidden within the human heart. Perhaps they are true wishes pertaining to the inner world. If, let’s say, I wish to become rich then I’ll probably obtain not the riches but something more compatible with my nature, depth, the truth of my soul – for example poverty – which is closer to what my soul needs in fact. Writer is afraid to enter the Room because his opinion about himself is rather unflattering.

And regarding the scientist, he has absolutely no intent to enter. He is after all carrying a bomb, he wants to blow everything up. For him the Room is a place that could be visited by those whose wishes might endanger entire human life on Earth. Yet Professor gives up his plan as it is silly to be afraid people would wish for unlimited power in the Room. They usually desire really primitive things: money, prestige, women... That’s why Professor does not destroy the Room. Another reason is that it’s necessary to preserve a place for people to come to preserve hope, express longing, fulfil the need for the ideal.

At the end of the film Stalker laments over the baseness of those who did not enter the Room, he considers their attitudes. They didn’t enter on account of their cowardice. Writer is more afraid than most. He has a highly developed sense of his own worthlessness but at the same time he says to himself: why enter if nothing special happens there and most likely no wishes are granted? On the one hand he understands that wishes cannot be fulfilled and that they won’t be fulfilled. And on the other, above all, he is afraid to enter. His approach is full of superstitions and contradictions. That’s why Stalker is so depressed – nobody really believes in the Room’s existence. Writer completely questions it. He says: ‘It probably doesn’t exist’ and he asks Professor: ‘Who told you this Room even existed?’ The scientist points to Stalker. So he appears to be the sole witness. He is the only person who can testify to the existence of a Room with the power to grant wishes. He is the only one who believes. All the stories about the Room come from him – one could imagine he has invented it all. For Stalker the worst thing is not that his clients were afraid but that they did not believe, that there was no room for faith anymore. Man devoid of faith has no spiritual roots, he is blind. Over the centuries different concepts were associated with faith. In these days of no faith it is important for Stalker to light up a spark within human hearts.

The Zone is in some sense a result of Stalker’s imagination. Our line of reasoning was as follows: it is he who invented that place to bring people there and convince them about the truth of his creation [...] I completely agree with the suggestion that it was Stalker who had created the Zone’s world in order to invent some sort of faith, a faith in that world’s existence. It was a working hypothesis which we tried to preserve during creation of that world. We even planned an ending variant in which the viewer would find out Stalker had invented it all and now he is heartbroken because people do not believe him.

Stalker is not a desperate film. I don’t think a work of art can be inspired by this sort of feeling. Its meaning must be spiritual, positive, it should bring hope and belief. I don’t think my film lacks hope. If this is true – it is not a work of art. Even if Stalker has moments of despair, he masters them. It is a kind of catharsis. It’s a tragedy but tragedy is not hopeless. This history of destruction still gives the viewer a glimmer of hope. It has to do with the feeling of catharsis. Tragedy cleanses man.

Every image, even the most expressive one (and this is precisely what it ought to be) possesses a very significant and very distinct intellectual content.

I like Stalker the most. He is the best part of myself and at the same time the least real one. Writer – who is very close to me – is a man who has lost his way. But I think he will be able to resolve his situation in the spiritual sense. Professor... I don’t know. This is a very limited character and I wouldn’t want to seek any similarities between him and myself. Although despite the obvious limitations he does allow a change of opinion, he has an open, comprehending mind.

– Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky (on ‘Stalker’) with Aldo Tassone in ‘Positif’, Oct. 1981.