The nostalgia of the Stalker

The nostalgia of the Stalker

by Peter Green

El autor analiza la construcción plástica de Nostalghia. El código de secuencias en blanco y negro o sepia, y las que han sido filmadas en color, proporciona una clave esencial para comprender cómo Tarkovski diferencia y articula en el filme los mundos de la realidad y del deseo o sueño de sus personajes. Este mismo código ya había sido empleado en la película anterior, Stalker, con la que Green establece en este ensayo una interesante comparación. Ambas confirmarn el desarrollo de lo que denomina aquí el “ojo pictórico” de Tarkovski; y también, desde un punto de vista de los contenidos, Green señala la continuidad esencial entre Stalker y Nostalghia, en lo que sus personajes tienen de buscadores de una fe o creencia que les salve.

For Gatsby it was the green light across the water, ‘the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us’, that eluded his grasp. Gatsby believed in the green light and the possibility of turning back time, of repeating the past, or allowing it to take another, more desirable course. For him everything seemed possible: the realisation of an unfulfilled dream of life, shaped to his own design. But Gatsby’s life ended in a deserted Swimming pool.

Domenico in Nostalghia also believes in the need to create a new world. His goal, however. is not the realisation of a personal realm, but a change in the values of the world. Stationed on the scaffolding about the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, he proclaims the need to return to that point in history where we took the wrong path, and to begin again. But Domenico preaches to a mad world, and he takes his own life with a can of petroi and a lighter to the strains of Beethoven and Schiller’s Ode to Joy (Freedom). At the same time, Andrei fulfils Domenico’s wish and bears the flame - the lighted candle for St Catherine—-- across the emptied sulphur baths. Heartsick, he collapses (and dies?) in the steaming pool of the spa.

Nostalgia as a sickness for another place, another time, so severe as to amount to a disease—a sickness unto death.

Andrei has come to Jtaly in search of information on an eighteenth century Russian composer who has been here before him. He encounters Domenico. Domenico proves in many respects to be his alter ego, the fllm providing numerous allusions te a common identity. In Domenicos dilapidated house the old man pours two drops of oil into the palm of his hand, indicating how they merge and becorne one; painted on the wall of his house is the equation 1 + 1 = 1. Similarly, the Alsatian that suddenly emerges from the bathroom of Andrei’s hotel room and settles down beside his bed as if they had been lifelong companions proves, in the realm of reality, to be Domenico’s dog. On Domenico’s first appearance at the open air sulphur baths the dog appears with him, and it is also present in his derelict house outside the town; and when Domenico goes up in flames, one sees the dog tied to a column, straining at the leash, the only creature in fact to show emotion at his master’s death. But the dog also inhabits Andrei´s waking dreams, his memories of other places, other times, and is within the ruined church at the close, after death, when they alone are left in the artificial reconstructed landscape and the failing snow of ‘home’. The black dog in Stalker plays a similar role, its first appearance being just as sudden and rnysterious.

This merging of identities is to be found in a number of situations in Tarkovsky’s films and in particular in The Mirror (1975), where the characters of wife and mother (performed by the same actress) are blurred to the point of identity. In Nostalghia, too, Tarkovsky’s old preoccupation with his own family history manifests itself anew. The son of Arseniy Alexandrovitch and Maya Jvanova, Andrei Tarkovsky grew up in a family of two children, whom the mother was left to bring up on her own after the departure of the father. These circumstances correspond to those of the family in the dream sequence of Nostalghia, where one sees a woman with two children in a distant, faded, sepia-coloured world of childhood, reminiscent of old photographs from a family album. Time or place are uncertain. The family might be Andrei’s own wife and children somewhere else in the present, or his own childhood home of the past, the boy his son or his childhood self, tbe absent father himself or his own father, Domenico as alter ego or father figure.

The evidently autobiographical elements that Tarkovsky weaves into his films are reinforced by concrete references: the dedication of Nostalghia to the mernory of his mother and the quotation from a book of poems by bis father (the book being subsequently consumed by fiames). Nor for that matter is this the only film in which the director uses his own name for that of the principal character. But Tarkovsky’s search for ‘home’ acquires a broader significance that removes it frorn the purely personal, introspective realm; and the allusions to autobiographical or national aspirations, which one frequently finds in codified, cryptic form in other films from Eastern Europe, have a universal significance as well. The search for a physical or spiritual ‘home is not restricted to those countries, and it is one of the greatnesses of Tarkovsky’s films that they contain all these layers of relevance, extending from the personal, via the national to the universal.

What for example is the yearning of the Stalker for bis ‘zone’ but a nostalgia for the only place in which he feels at home, and where he is nevertheless full of fear? In the story Roadside Picnic by Arkadi and Boris Strugatzki, on which Stalker is based, the ‘zone’ is an anonymous realm guarded by future international forces. The meeting place of the scouts and others who are concerned with the exploration of the area is, however, called ‘Borstsch’. This ambivalence is a conscious element in Tarkovsky’s films. They are Russian and yet international, physical and metaphysical, full of both personal and general allusions. Andrei expresses the sentiment that it is necessary to tear down the borders between states; but to identify the destination of his yearnings purely with Russia or any other geographical location would be to amputate the further-reaching dimensions of the film. Home is a place within the heart, a scrap of language and the impossibility of its translation, time past or time future, utopias and, ultimately, paradise.

Domenico lives alone in a dilapidated house in a deserted hill town. For seven years he had held his family prisoner there, and when the police had finally freed them, the son had asked, ‘Is this the end of the world?’ The captivity of the family is both home and hell, to which Andrei returns in his waking dreams. He sees himself wandering through the empty streets of this town. They are littered with newspapers, rubbish, old furniture. He passes a wardrobe, pauses and returns to it, opening the mirrored door; but as it swings open, it is not himself he sees there but the reflection of Domenico.

Tarkovsky divides present time, present place from other times and places by means of a sepia/Technicolor contrast. The dimension of memory or dream (or of death or the nostalgia for death) is shot in sepia, the motion of the film slowed, devoid of sound, or at least without the synchronous sounds of footsteps and voices as in reality. The sounds that penetrate the silient world are those of the continuing present, of the circular saw, running water, of the physical realm, and not those of the place where his thoughts dwell. And yet the sounds of the present are inextricably mingled with those of the memory. Nostalghia opens upon a misty landscape, a slope down to a lake, a white horse in the distance, the Alsatian, Andrei’s family descending the hill to the quiet strains of Verdi’s Requiem, with which the film also closes. This unreal, sepia world recurs throughout the film, at first strictly separated from the real, coloured world; but the distinction becoming increasingly blurred as the film progresses, the inner world overlapping with the real world of the present. This confusion of the colour/sepia separation provides access to an understanding of Andrei’s waking dreams, an insight into the nature of his sickness.

With bis young assistant Eugenia, he arrives in a place of pilgrimage where infertile women seek the intercession of the Virgin. Fertility and belief are important themes of the film. Within the church, a heavy figure of the Virgin is borne in by four wornen. They open the front of her robes and dozens of little birds fly out of her breast, their feathers falling like snow. In Andrei’s drearn, which is cut in at this point (sepia), a large white feather falls, which he picks up frorn the mud. Like the Stalker, he has an aberrant patch of white in his hair. Later other dreams of a desired place, a woman in a bedroorn, an injured bird on a windowsill, appear; and later still, in Andrei’s bedroom, one suddenly sees the bed turned through ninety degrees, the scene now colourless, and a wornan -his wife or mother- lying pregnant upon it. Or again, there is a brief trance-like sequence in which Eugenia, translated to the other, sepia world, embraces this woman. So too the dog inhabits both realms, as one has seen, linking the identities of Domenico and Andrei, and accompanying them both in death.

The smahl-scale model landscape in the mind’s eye in Domenico’s house extends out through the open window into the real landscape of the Italian hills. At the end of the film, to the sound of a Russian song, the process is reversed. Andrei and the Alsatian are lying before a pool of water in front of the timber house of his imagination, having arrived in the place of his desires. But as the camera retreats, the reality dissolves and one sees the whole scene, like a stage set, within the ruined nave of a church. Previously, within those same roofless walls, but without the stage set of borne, we have seen Andrei, again in a sepia sequence, pacing the grassy nave of the church. In a conversation between St Catherine and God, as Domenico might have heard it, one overhears the saint begging God to make His presence felt to this man, and God replying that He is always present, that the man must rnake an effort and use his awareness. The final, perhaps most rernarkable instance of this overlapping of spheres, of the blurring of the distinction between theh black and white and colour realms of experience, are the scenes in the deserted hill village. Initially, they are depicted in sepia; i.e. in that other time when Domenico had kept his family imprisoned. The colour returns to the pictures, and one sees Andrei leaving the same house in the present, in real time, and driving away in a taxi. But the camera returns to the town again in sepia. This time one sees Andrei walking down the deserted street on his own. It is the moment of his encounter with the reflection of Domenico in the wardrobe mirror. Time present and time past, both perhaps present in time future...

In Stalker Tarkovsky also divides the worlds within and without the ‘zone’ into colour and sepia images. Here, however, the pattern is reversed. The long opening section of the film in the outside, real world, the preparations for the expedition into the ‘zone’, are shot without colour. It is only after the three-man party has overcome the hazards of entry and put the long journey on the rail trolley behind them that the film suddenly changes to colour, on their arrival in the ‘zone’. Here it is the desired realm that is depicted in colour. The ‘zone’ is in a sense for the Stalker ‘home’; he declares it as such on arriving at the end of the railway line and intimates that there is no return, at least not by the same route, whereupon he sends the trolley back under its own steam in the direction they have come. One hears the sound of a dog (?) howling. The Stalker leaves his two companions, the scientist and the writer, to take possession of his realm again. He lies face down in the deep grass, his arms outstretched, and as the camera pans round, one sees the house, the destination of their pilgrimage. But the route to their goal is a circuitous one, and on the way the Stalker has two brief dreams or visions, in which the photography reverts to sepia; half immersed in water they lie, beneath the surface of which are scarcely distinguishable objects. Polluted streams flow past. A large black dog appears from nowhere and lies watching them. The dog will accompany them on their journey to their goal, to the deserted house, and the room within it where, it is said, all one’s wishes may be fulfilled.

Having reached the threshold to this room, however, they are unable or unwilling to proceed further. A discussion ensues on belief, recriminations are levelled, and there is an attempt to destroy the Stalker’s realm completely rather than confront its mystery. Finally, the camera recedes across the entire depth of the room, its tiled floor submerged by shallow water. A magical, purifying shower of rain suddenly bursts through the ceiling (as it also does in Dornenico’s house in Nostalghia) and stops again. Together with the dog the three men sit on the threshold of the room. After all their disputes and discussions, after the pleading of the Stalker to save his realm, the scientist dismantles his bomb and scatters the parts, throwing the fuse section into the room. It lies beneath the water. Two grey fish swim up to inspect it. A dark fluid clouds the water.

The scene reverts to the bar where the men had met at the beginning. The photography reverts to sepia tones. The Stalker has returned from the ‘zone’, together with the dog. The Stalker’s wife comes to take him home. He is exhausted. For a moment, as he goes down the road with her, his crippled daughter on his shoulders, the pictures are again in colour. His wife helps him to bed. In a monologue she tells of her life with him, of his periods in prison for illegally entering the ‘zone’, which had remained his realm, his home, the place of belief or the place of death.

The final colour sequences of the film provide a closing frame-like construction. As at the beginning, one hears a train approaching in the distance. The whole house begins to shake. The glasses on the table rattle and move across the surface. The daughter rests her face on the tabletop. A glass falls off, as if she had caused it to move by some unseen power. Over the roar of the passing train one can just distinguish the strains of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, which bave subsided by the time the train recedes.

If the colour/sepia code is used consistently (and in Nostalghia we have seen that it is deliberately confused), the brief colour scenes at the end of Stalker would indicate that the crippled daughter and perhaps even the wife had at last entered the ‘zone’, found a place of inner peace and contentment, in the room at the end of the journey, where one’s wishes are granted.

Andrei Roublev perhaps provides further evidence on this point. The film is in black and white throughout. Only in the final sequence, when this other Andrei, the icon painter, has finally revoked his vows of silence and begins to paint again, does the film turn to colour, in tbe glory of his frescoes and icons, where he finds his way back to the realm of creation; in these final shots of the faces of the Madonna and Christ and the angels -accompanied by the sound of running water and a roll of thunder- the water pouring down the face of the wall and horses grazing in the rain, the crowning use of colour is like an apotheosis.

It is possible to see the ‘zone’ as a place of terror or as the home of one’s dreams, the barriers about it keeping one out or in; nostalgia for another time, another place -a polluted zone, or ideal realm, dreams of childhood or death. Tarkovsky allows us all these meanings in the complexity of his vision.

The painterly eye

Visually and aurally, Nostalghia is a multi-layered film. Music is used extremely sparingly, not as an atmospheric background, but as a specific pointing of a scene. The soundtrack is a carefully considered aural composition of noises near and far, past and present -the crunching of glass underfoot, the sounds of water running, dripping, echoing, the distant cuckoo in Stalker, or the constant whine of the circular saw in Nostalghia- that overlap and link present and past, reality and vision. The aural iconography is as dense as the visual (water, fire, horses, the dog, places of ruin and dilapidation, spilt milk, etc).

The music is the music of mourning (Verdi’s Requiem), or of joy and freedom (Beethoven’s 9th Symphony), or the brief strains of a Russian folk song. Visually and aurally the films have a rigour and inner Iogic which suggest that no picture, no sound is a matter of chance. The thunderstorrn, the bursting of the sun through the mists, however much they may appear as splendidly spontaneous moments, are as deliberately staged as the white horse in the background. Tarkovsky has developed his own ‘montage of attractions’. Frame for frarne the pictures are like carefully composed paintings, with almost imperceptible movements and subtly changing light: the still ljfe scene in Domenico’s house; the objects, framed pictures and mirrors, openings in walls; the head of Eugenia like a Renaissance portrait in the dim light of the hotel room; the hill town rising up like an ideal city in an ltalian landscape; the walls themselves as backgrounds, selected for their textures, colours, light and shade.

The painterly quality of the pictures is striking in all his films, but ub Nostalghia Tarkovsky goes beyond the creation of mere fascinating visual images. He emp]oys iconographic codes and conventions from Renaissance and earlier painting, systems of attributes and symhols that were a familiar language of painting in the past, and often a chiaroscuro form of lighting. In the scenes in Domenico’s house, for example, he underlines the discussion of belief with vanitas elements in the best tradition of still life painting, carefully selecting and arranging objects in various stages of decay in a a metonymical representation of the transience of life. In Stalker one finds parallels to this in the rotting cars and the tokens of dilapidation and ruin.

ln a similar way his citation of objects or of the four elements is often directly related to the conventions of’ painting. Implicit to wine, bread and oil were obvious religious overtones. Other objects (water jugs, candles, bowls, books, dead gamne, fish, birds, etc.) were incorporated in mythological or Biblical depictions, or formed the basis of still lifes and represented certain ideal qualities. Bowls, towels, fish, for example, were symbols of water; candles or conflagrations, of fire. The four elements were in turn tokens of other qualities, water representing purification; fire, light and (divine) enlightenment.

ln all Tarkovsky’s films the four elements are quoted, but in none of thein in quite such an associative and painterly man ner as in Nostalghia. Water and fire are given particular emphasis here, therte being at least ten distinct manifestations of’ the former in this film. The manner and context in which these references are made leaves little room to doubt that they are used with a consciousness of the traditions of painting.

The Quest for Belief

Belief is a theme central to both Stalker and Nostalghia. In the former fllm, the writer arrives at the designated meeting place before setting out on the expedition into the ‘zone’. He engages in a discussion on belief and miracles with the woman who has driven him there. He argues that all phenomena are now explicable in scientific terms, that there is no room any more for exceptions to natural law. Signiflcantly enough, the third member of the party is a scientist (‘not a chemist, more a physicist’), a professor with a bomb in his rucksack, which he risks his hife to recover, having inadvertently left it behind on their way to their goal.

On their roundabout route they overcome seemingly insuperable obstacles and dangers, and yet on the threshold to the room that is the goal of their journey no one has the will to go on. They avoid confrontation with the mystery the have come so far fo experience, indulging instead in procrastinations on belief. The promise of fulfilment of one’s wishes becomes a triah of belief in itself, an neither the writer nor the scientist is prepared to put his belief or lack of belif to the test, the author taking refuge in recriminations, the Stalker heaping abuse on the intellectuals, and the scientist reaching for his bomb fo destroy all question of a metaphysical dimension. No one should see the mystery; no one behieve in it, no one should come after them. The Stalker tries to wrest th bomb from the scientist. It is the Stalkei the only one not allowed fo see the phenomenon, who is the ultimate guardian of belief, who pleads with the author fo throw away his revolver, as useless anyway, and who struggles with the professor to prevent him detonating his bomb and destroying the mystery. The inteleectuals are incapable or unwilling to venture an encounter with the mystery and subject themselves to a possible revelation (change or disillision), despite the trials they have undergone, and even though it might provide the author with an incomparable wealth of material and the scientist with an ultimate scientific insight. Without belief, the object or phenomenon does not exist.

The same idea recurs in Nostalghia The voice in the ruined nave of the church replies that only with an opennes, a willingness to see, can He become manifest. Or when Eugenia enters the church at the beginning, she encounters the verger, who tells her to open herself to God, to kneel in payer; but she is unable to kneel. Andrei’s discussion with Domenico revolve about belief; and his final act in carrying out Domenico’s wish and bearing a lighted candle across the emptied basin of the bath is an act of belief on behalf of a friend. But where does this quest lead; and in what is it an expresssion of faith; in God, in Russia, in home, a yearning for childhood? There are sufficient indications of all these things; and yet the nostalghia of the Stalker and Andrei is a search for paradise -not necessarily a paradise lost, but a utopia yet to be attained, in life, of after death.

In Roadside Picnic the scout or Stalker remarks that the further one penetrates into the Zone, the closer one comes to heaven. In the context of the book this is an ambiguous statement, with the meaning being placed on the dangers to life involved in entering the ‘zone’. The film, however, reveals a number of significant shifts of emphasis. Whereas the illegal expeditions into the ‘zone’ in the book have as their aim the salvaging of material objects left behind from a possible visit from space, Tarkovsky removes all concrete evidence of such a visit. His ‘zone’ is a guarded area, in which there are no physical artifacts from another world. There is merely an atmosphere of menace. What has happened there is uncertain, shrouded in mystery; a meteorite or flying saucer has fallen, or ‘something of the kind’; and whereas the Stalker of the book finally encounters the mystical object at the heart of the ‘zone’ that is allegedly capable of granting any wish -a golden sphere- Tarkovsky wisely avoids all physical manifestations of this phenomenon. The three men turn back on the threshold of the room without seeing it.

In his commentary to Roadside Picnic, Stanislav Lem sees the golden sphere and its property of fulfilling desires as a naive device. In the physical world of the ‘picnic’ that is true. It is a breach of natural laws in a physical world. But Tarkovsky turns his world into an inward, metaphysical one, where a metaphysical object would have its validity; and he proceeds to place it even further from our grasp, by allowing no one to see it, removing the certainty of a godlike existence from the realm of verifiable experience to that of belief. Tired of taking a circuitous but allegedly safer route to their goal, the author defies the Stalker’s warnings and approaches the house directly. A short distance from the apparently deserted building he hears a voice forbidding him to come closer, whereupon he retreats and rejoins his companions. What at first seems an exception, a concrete manifestation of a presence in the ‘zone’ is immediately undermined by the Stalker, who provides a natural explanation for the occurrence, suggesting that the author, afraid in his own heart to go on, yet ashamed to turn back, had spoken to himself in order to resolve his dilemma.

The film pursues a path that skirts hazardously close to hocus pocus or schoolboy adventure, but that finally rises aboye these dangers, transcends the world of science fiction and, given the belief of the observer, attains a metaphysical plane. In Roadside Picnic three distinct expeditions into the ‘zone’ are described, the third of which Lem compares with a ‘black fairy tale’, in which obstacles have to be overcome; and it is this realm that is closest to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The film becomes an allegory of a quest for belief, of belief itself.

What was in the central room? Nothing without belief. One recalls the dialogue in the nave of the ruined church in Nostalghia, when the voice of God remarks that one must open oneself to hear His words. Is the Stalker a Charon ferrying his tourists across the Styx, through the various circles of hell to the realm of the dead, or an Apostle, a Christ-like figure, a guide to paradise?

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