OANA URCAN

2006

Time and Tarkovsky

Cinema as time within time in Stalker

An artistic discovery occurs each time as a new and unique image of the world, a hieroglyphic of absolute truth. It appears as a revelation, as a momentary, passionate wish to grasp intuitively and at a stroke all the laws of this world. The artist expresses these things by creating the image, sui generis detector of the absolute. Through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite; the eternal within the finite, the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form. (Tarkovsky. 1986: p37)

1. Tarkovsky’s background

Tarkovsky was born in 1932 in Zavrozhne, in the Soviet Union. His parents were both intellectuals and he spent his childhood in the countryside mainly with his mother and sister, after his father had joined the war, and who, later left the family. His father’s poems would reverberate through his films, as would the early memories of his childhood especially the house where he grew up and the nature of the countryside. His mother encouraged him to take painting and music lessons, so an early sensibility for art had been established.

The Second World War broke out when he started school in Moscow and he had to return to Zavrozhne. Undoubtedly the war experience seen as a child in newsreels and other media was to resurface in his films especially in Ivan’s Childhood 1962 and Mirror 1973.

In 1959 he began to study Arabic at the School of Oriental Languages, then, joined an expedition to study geology in Siberia. Long, solitary walks in the vast expanses of Siberia may have informed an intimate understanding of the natural forces and later emerged in his films as a heightened sense of space.

In 1954 he returned to Moscow and enrolled at the Moscow State Film School and for six years he studied with Mikhail Romm, a veteran film- maker and a former pupil of Sergei Eisenstein.

We also have to understand the wider political picture, the transition from the Stalinist1 era to a more relaxed form of communism of the Khrushchev’s regime.

For the young Tarkovsky and others of his generation who would become a veritable Soviet New Wave in the early 60’s, grasping the freedom that Khruschev’s ‘thaw’ had brought, Romm was crucial precisely because he didn’t teach the tainted socialist realism of the Stalin era. Instead, rather as Renoir did in France for the Nouvelle Vague, he acted as a bridge between two widely separated generations, in this case between the early Soviet avant-garde of the 20’s and the first generation to emerge after the war and Stalin’s final paranoid years.(Turovskaya.1989: xii)

Tarkovsky’s generation who studied with Romm, include Vasily Shukshin, Larissa Shepitko, Andrey Konchalovsky(who collaborated with Tarkovsky on The Steamroller and the Violin 1960, his graduation piece, and Andrey Rublyev 1966) and Maya Turovskaya, a film critic who later wrote a book on Tarkovsky’s films Tarkovsky, Cinema as Poetry, and from Georgia, most notably, Otar Ioseliani and Sergo Paradjanov, both of whom he respected and shared cultural affinities.

It is important to note that Eisenstein’s films had become ‘academic’2 at this stage and were part of the montage tradition, the technique of visual metaphor, and for the younger generation his ideas were archaic, a view which was officially encouraged. But, as Ian Christie points out:

What Tarkovsky encountered would have been more of a parody of Eisensteinian montage theory than the real thing. Eisenstein’s reputation had been in eclipse since before his death in 1948 and the bulk of his writing began to be published only in 1961. At this period, a selective account of Eisenstein’s early teaching was routinely attacked as ‘formalist’, while he was dismissed as a mere theorist rather than an artist. (Christie. 1988: xix)

In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky would later repudiate Eisenstein as an intellectualist and would reject any symbolical interpretation of his own work. ‘Tarkovsky’s fundamental disagreement with Eisenstein takes us to the heart of his aesthetic and indeed his ontology of the cinematic image.’(Christie.1987: pp.37-8) Eisenstein’s main concern was that of overcoming’ intuitive creativity’ through ‘rational constructive composition’,( Bornstein.2004: p1) while Tarkovsky’s work relates to the viewer in an intuitive, intimate way. We must not forget though that Eisenstein was a pioneer in the newly discovered medium of cinema, that, he worked mainly with black and white silent footage, undoubtedly a genius of the movement-image era, which differs greatly from the optical-sound image (time-image). By the time Tarkovsky made Andrey Rublyev in 1966, he had seen Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible part 2, and, according to a contemporary, was clearly impressed by it, even inspired.

While at film school, he had also seen the films of Bunuel, Bergman and Bresson, with the latter sharing theoretical affinities, Fellini and Kurosawa’s works, all of which he admired. The early Soviet avant-garde naturalistic film- maker Dovzhenko would appear as an influence in his writings also.

Tarkovsky made a total of seven feature length films: Ivan’ Childhood 1962, Andrey Rublyev 1966, Solaris 1972, Mirror 1973, Stalker 1979, his last film made in the Soviet Union, after which he worked abroad, first in Italy where he made Nostalghia 1983, and Sweden where he made The Sacrifice 1986, his last film.

2. Time concepts. Bergson and Deleuze

Henri Bergson was the first philosopher to use the cinematic experience in regards to the way the intellect perceives time. Although Bergson’s particular interest was within the field of epistemology, nonetheless his ideas on Time-Memory-Duration are still relevant in today’s theory and aesthetics of cinema. The way in which the camera records single frames and then they are reproduced in sequence, after being edited, so does the mind ‘see’ reality. The intellect tends to fragment the perception of time, the past, present and future instead of allowing its continuity, its duration. According to Bergson:

We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us.

(Deleuze.1997: p2)

Therefore, the intellect is capable of understanding static objects and gives us a grasp of reality, while, what Bergson calls the intuition, gives us understanding of movement, flux, duration. In Bergson’s view, the cinema gives us an incomplete grasp of reality. Bergson sees painting as the best form of representation of reality and he does not view cinema as a high form of art.

Through intuition and a ‘disengaged’ vision, the artist can lift this veil and offer us a privileged view of reality. The intellect, because of its pragmatic nature, thickens the veil between reality and consciousness. The logical consequence of Bergson’s cinema/intellect analogy is not hopeful for anyone envisioning cinema as a high art form. Cinema cannot communicate reality. (Totaro.2001: p2)

Tarkovsky firmly believes that cinema is a higher art form. For Bergson, the intuitive element is important in achieving duration. Tarkovsky thinks that intuition can be incorporated in the cinematic process. Bergson fails to realise that there is an intense creative process involved in film making precisely because it allows the manipulation of the time dimension and the effect it has on the viewer. When Bergson wrote these thoughts cinema was still a very young art form and perhaps he disliked the mechanised medium of the camera, and because mechanical, then unable to capture the essence of duration.

Because Bergson only considered what happened in the apparatus (the homogenous abstract movement of the procession of images) he believed the cinema to be incapable of that which the apparatus is in fact most capable, eminently capable of: the movement image – that is, pure movement extracted from bodies or moving things. (Deleuze.1997 p23)

Tarkovsky recognised that ‘cinema is the one art form where the author can see himself as the creator of an unconditional reality. A film is an emotional reality, and this is how the audience receives it – as a second reality.’(Tarkovsky.1986: p176) It is precisely this understanding of time that is important. Tarkovsky understood the potential of time within time, allowing for time lived in the shot, to flow and create its own rhythm, especially in the ‘long shot’, which will characterise his cinematic signature and comes very close to Bergson’s ‘duration’.

In Creative evolution published in 1907, Bergson writes:

Continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present, real duration- the living being seems, then, to share these attributes with consciousness. Can we go further and say that life, like conscious activity, is invention, is unceasing creation? (Bergson.2005: p183)

Through his analysis of mind in Matter and Memory 1896, Bergson intuits cinematic theory, and gave Deleuze a matrix for his Movement-Image and Time-Image studies, which offer an understanding of the way in which cinema has evolved.

The movement-image is concerned directly with action; it is a rational, direct, linear, interpretation of reality, and is characteristic of pre WW2 films and most Hollywood films. Movement- image basically consists in the representation and reproduction of the real, creating what Deleuze calls ‘sensory-motor’ situations, which are given and the spectator follows. The

movement- image relies heavily on montage and the way this releases the essence of the film.

The films of Eisenstein, Lang, Renoir, Murnau, Griffith, are included here. Deleuze classifies three types of movement-image: perception-image, that of the subjective point of view, which the viewer perceives as a direct dialogue, or an indirect dialogue of the partially-subjective point of view of the camera; affection-image of the close-up of a face or object, where the sense of space is eliminated, such as in Bresson and Dreyer; and the action-image where we follow the character through a series of situations such as in Chaplin or Keaton’s films. These processes are found in most types of movement-image classic cinema.

This type of representation is too fragmented to give us a sense of duration in the Bergsonian sense because of its indirect account of time.

Towards the end of Cinema 1 Deleuze senses a crisis in cinema, in the way that film- makers started experimenting and breaking out of the clichés of the movement-image, allowing a different form of cinema to emerge.

On the one hand, the image constantly sinks to the state of cliché; because it is introduced into sensory-motor linkages, because it itself organizes and induces these linkages, because we never perceive everything that is in the image…On the other hand, at the same time, the image constantly attempts to break through the cliché, to get out of the cliché. There is no knowing how far a real image may lead: the importance of becoming visionary or seer. (Deleuze.2000: p21)

The time-image is a step away and beyond the movement-image and consists of the breakage in the sensory-motor system. It emerged in the post war years, and is the pattern of the European art film. Deleuze argues:

The image had to free itself from sensory-motor links; it had to stop being action-image in order to become a pure optical, sound (and tactile) image. But the latter was not enough: it had to enter into relations with yet other forces, so that it could itself escape from a world of clichés. It had to open up to powerful and direct revelations, those of the time-image, of the readable image and the thinking image. (Deleuze.2000: p23)

Time-image is concerned not with movement but with time, the inner time of the protagonists, their inability to deal directly with the situation they find themselves in, illogical timescapes are allowed to emerge, past merges into present and future. It deals with memory and consciousness.

Instead of producing an indirect image of time on the basis of movement, it will organise the order of non-chronological coexistences or relations in the direct time-image. Diverse sheets of past will be evoked and will embody their aspects in recollection-images. (Deleuze.2000: p111)

Time is allowed free flow, and it becomes evident in the films of Welles, late Goddard, Resnais, Tarkovsky. In Pasolini, Antonioni and Bertoluci, the ‘objective and subjective images lose their distinction…in favour of a new circuit where they are wholly replaced, or contaminate each other, or are decomposed and recomposed.’ (Deleuze.2000) More importantly, montage is no longer the most dominant technique in the unfolding of the story.

This identity of montage with the image itself can appear only in conditions of the direct time-image. In a text with important implications Tarkovsky says that what is essential is the way time flows in the shot it’s tension and rarefaction, ’the pressure of time in the shot’. (Deleuze. 2000: p42)

It is from this perspective that we are to consider Tarkovsky’s film Stalker and the implications time has on his cinematic signature. Stalker contains and deals with most of Tarkovsky’s concerns; his philosophy on art and life, rhythms of nature in the Zone, the character’s inner struggle. It is a dystopian, ‘hallucinatory anticipation of a world that “represents the reality of the artist’s inner life.” (Petric.1989: p28)

3. A day with Stalker

Tarkovsky’s films are unique, unusual visual experiences. Throughout his oeuvre, there are certain leitmotifs, elements that are employed and developed from one film to another and are obviously of central importance to his ‘language’ in film.

His uniqueness and to some, hermetic style, stems from the fact that he comes from the Far East of Europe, more precisely Russia. Russian culture is a blend of ancient Orthodox Christianity, blended with Eastern Paganism of it’s many historical tribes, some of which are rooted as far as Mongolia, and it is different from the Western Catholic Tradition. Orthodox Christianity has a mystical, hidden, magical side through its iconography and rituals. This mystical side of faith, akin to the alchemical processes, has made its way into Tarkovsky’s films. Faith, as a vehicle for the soul’s journey through life. Tarkovsky greatly admired Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy, all of whom, depicted man and the soul of man striving in life and art to find a balance through faith, or fail through lack of it. Tarkovsky saw art as a close companion to faith and intuition an important part of both.

In art, as in religion, intuition is tantamount to conviction, to faith. It is a state of mind, not a way of thinking. Science is empirical, whereas the conception of images is governed by the dynamic of revelation. It’s a question of sudden flashes of illumination- like scales falling from the eyes; not in relation to the parts, however, but to the whole, to the infinite, to what does not fit in to conscious thought. (Tarkovsky.1986: p41)

There is no evidence that Tarkovsky read Bergson, however, this is a theme that Tarkovsky was to deal with directly through his films from Andrey Rublyev, through to Sacrifice.

His protagonists are those who are on a journey of inner searching, who are not interested in the materialistic side of life, but that of the spirit, of intuition, of becoming – although these journeys are very real, thoroughly connected to life. The central character of Stalker is one of those searchers. Tarkovsky’s use of Orthodox symbolism such as icons, trinities and a concern with the inner life can be misunderstood as overtly religious – especially to a western audience, though it is not Tarkovsky’s intention to preach to anyone.

I don’t know if I’d call myself a religious man. I think that people put too much store in knowledge and understanding, when you can’t count on either. By their very nature all those great scientists – the more knowledge they gain the more ignorant they become.

The question of knowledge is tied up with the problem of faith, that is to say, mystical knowledge. It’s tied up with the problem of self-awareness, and that’s far more to me. It’s an area of human make-up, which is far more important than we think. We claim that the world in which we live shapes us. But there is also our internal world, which won’t disappear. That’s what my work is about, and I don’t suppose you could call that materialism. (Anning, Auty.1981: p10)

Stalker was the last film Tarkovsky made in Russia and due to a processing error it had to be shot twice. Its starting point is the Roadside Picnic novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It is a science fiction story, but as in Solaris1972, Tarkovsky chose not to delve on that aspect, rather he simplified it to the barest minimum and concentrated instead on the protagonist’s inner dilemmas.

In the novel, there is a place called The Zone, where, in the past, an alien race had landed, had a picnic of sorts and left behind them strange, unexplained energies, objects and most importantly the Golden Ball, which made one’s wishes come true. This area was a magnet for scientists and people from all walks of life. But the only people who understood it, knowing all it’s traps and dangers, were the stalkers, the guides to the Zone. Many of those who entered the Zone would perish.

The central character is called Red, a laboratory assistant at the International Institute for Extraterrestrial Cultures and who would go into the Zone to collect alien objects then selling them as a way of making good money. He uses nuts and bolts to throw ahead to sense dangerous gravitation anomalies called ‘mosquito mange’, there was the ‘witches jelly’, a blue, jelly like substance which would melt anything that came in contact with, and the ‘meat grinder’ all of which were fatal. The description of the Zone in the novel manages to give a real sense of alien atmosphere, of strangeness, which Tarkovsky reproduced very successfully in the film.

Red drinks heavily, his daughter Monkey, is a mutant who progressively becomes less human. The stalkers and those who paid them to go to the Zone would meet in a bar called Borscht. Towards the end, Red would make a last incursion into the Zone to find the Golden Ball in order to save Monkey. He enters the Zone with the son of another rival stalker who eventually dies in the ‘meat grinder’. We never know if Red succeeds, having sent the younger man to his death through the last trap.

Although there were numerous re-writes of the script, and many changes made, some of the original ideas remained in the film, the Golden Ball becoming The Room as the place where wishes come true. (see appendix 2 for Stalker synopsis)

With Stalker I felt I could build a kind of journey. I liked the idea because it gave me the chance to make a film where there was unity of action. The cinema is a huge accumulation of sets, it’s so varied, the times are so different. And yet it isn’t really so. True cinema begins when three people are sitting in a room and we get that on film. (Anning, Auty.1981: p10)

The film could be read as a parable of inner spiritual searching by the protagonists, of spirituality against materialism, and Stalker’s visits in to the Zone are not for selfish or materialistic purposes. His daughter Monkey is a mutant, she cannot walk, and his wife is his long- suffering companion who loves him but doesn’t understand why he has to put his life in jeopardy. They are poor in a material sense, their house is all run down, and the reality outside is drab and gloomy. Tarkovsky renders this feeling in the opaque, sepia toned shots at the beginning of the film.

Stalker leaves to meet his fellow travellers to the Zone, whom he agreed to guide, the Writer, a talkative, cynical man and Professor, a quiet, mysterious scientist. (Image i)

The crossing into the Zone is a dangerous matter, for there are armed police trying to stop anyone who trespasses. They manage to escape and set of on their journey towards the Zone in a rail cart.

The transition from reality into the Zone is subtly and hypnotically achieved. The camera follows the three protagonists in close-up, against a blurred background, studying their faces in an almost meditative manner. The sound of the rail cart mixes with electronic rendition of the sound of the tracks3, adding an eerie feeling. The shots are monochrome, as the reality they are about to leave, their expressions full of anticipation for the different world they are about to encounter.

The scene, paradoxically, is full of human interest. Tarkovsky, you could say, takes his time, almost uniquely in modern cinema to look at men’s faces inquisitively. His gaze is not of the type that we call psychological but something older, more strictly related to sculpture and painting. (Le Fanu.1987: p93)

The scene lasts a considerable amount of time, three and a half minutes long, and it feels like it is almost a continuous shot, although there are five shots. Each shot is long, extended, rhythmic, and, the editing is seamless and Tarkovsky comes ‘closest to creating the “pure cinema” working solely in terms of time, sound and images.’ (Johnson,Petrie.1994: p155)

In contrast to the previous scenes, which were more or less full of action as the protagonists were trying to escape, the scene of their journey into the Zone is one that allows the viewer to enter a different rhythm, to feel the dimension of a different time and space, in preparation for the strangeness, the otherness of the Zone.

The distinctive time running through the shots makes the rhythm of the picture; and rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited pieces, but by the pressure of time that runs through them. Editing cannot determine rhythm (in this respect it can only be a feature of style); indeed, time courses through the picture despite editing rather than because of it. (Tarkovsky.1986: p117)

As the protagonists arrive in the Zone, the film changes to colour, muted but beautiful hues of green and blue. This is Stalker’s home. This concept of the Zone gave Tarkovsky the perfect opportunity to explore nature and it’s elements, creating a magical feeling of ‘otherness’ through very simple but not simplistic means. It is a physical space, an expanse, a beautiful but eerie landscape, which is dangerous and demands respect. We know that a meteorite had fallen here, and since, it has been uninhabited. Stalker explains how things change and shift unexpectedly, as if by the figments of their imagination.

From the moment they enter the Zone time seems to shift continuously, and although we follow them in their journey, it is impossible to say how long they actually stay there. The colours of the film change, from colour to sepia, then colour again, and the way the shots are layered, the acceleration and deceleration of action allows for subtle and almost hallucinatory changes in the perception of the viewer. These are the breakages in the Deleuzian sensory-motor situations, the combination of ‘the optical-sound image with the enormous forces that are not those of a simple intellectual consciousness, nor of the social one, but of a profound, vital intuition.’ (Deleuze.2000: p22)

As the group advances through the deserted countryside, the composition of the shots depicting the landscape becomes increasingly crowded with details in the foreground, anticipating the anxiety the three men will experience in the centre of the Zone, which complies with Tarkovsky’s inference that art must transcend and not merely record the outside world. For him, the camera is an explorer rather than an observer. (Petric.1989: p32)

In the second part of the film there is the scene of Stalker’s dream. In this scene Professor, Writer and Stalker have arrived through ‘the dry tunnel’, which is in fact a waterfall seen through the ruined walls of a building, to a place of rest. As the Writer and Professor are talking of the redemptive power of art, Stalker lies on a mound of earth surrounded by water, he slips in and out of a ‘dream’. There’s a shot of dry land, the wind blowing upon it and lifting in the air fine particles, which look like snow. The scene is complex, ‘the positions and special relationship of the characters alter in a totally non-naturalistic manner, and a dog mysteriously appears’ (Johnson, Petrie.1994: p281). A long tracking shot from above leaves Stalker’s face and slowly wanders above the water surface where objects are seen drowned, like symbols from a lost civilisation. A voice, the wife, is heard whispering a passage from the Bible, the opening of the Sixth Seal from the Revelation, chapter 6:12-17. The camera then returns to Stalker, to his hand resting in the water. The dog is watching on like a guardian between two words. It is quite obvious that this is a comment on the lack of spirituality in the modern world, with Stalker, the cynical Writer and the enigmatic Professor, all in search of the other dimension of life, with Stalker being the one who in his humility, is a believer, while the other two are not.

These shots have a highly poetic and oneiric quality, and through them Tarkovsky makes possible the transcendence of image, involving the viewer on a deeper level. ‘Through poetic connections, feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active. He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life’ (Tarkovsky.1986: p20). As Vlada Petric explains in an article in Film Quarterly in 1989:

An important feature of Tarkovsky’s dream imagery is that his shots are never distorted from their representational appearance, yet at the same time the projected image looks

‘estranged’, rendered obliquely in order to suppress the ‘dramatic’ meaning of the event,

while getting the viewer involved with meanings hidden beneath the narrative level. Encouraged to search beyond the image as an analog of reality, allowed to ponder upon the presented events/objects, the viewers engage in their own reflection upon what they perceive on screen. (Petric.1989: p29)

As they continue with their journey through this alien landscape they are getting closer to the Room where the innermost wishes are being granted. They pass the ‘meat grinder’ which is meant to be the most dangerous part of the Zone, and where many people have perished in the past, is nothing more than a long pipe, water dripping from above, but the effect is achieved through colour, sound and tension of the shot. Tarkovsky does achieve stunning effects through limited means in the whole film, something which prompts Mark Le Fanu to write that ‘Tarkovsky becomes here (he is his own art director in the strange Estonian landscape) one of the great contemporary artists of poverty, understood in its true spiritual sense.’ (Le Fanu.1987: p.105)

When they arrive safely in the ‘dune room’, Writer reveals why he wanted to come to the Room, that he does not see any meaning in his profession, he is an empty man. In the ‘telephone room’, Professor reveals his reason. He has brought with him a bomb, which he plans to detonate in order to make sure that the wishes Room will not fall in the wrong hands.

Stalker pleads with him and Professor agrees to throw the bomb away, perhaps realising that it is not up to him to ‘save’ humanity from it’s destined path.

They come to rest again, at the threshold, in silence and overwhelmed by their incapacity to believe. Here Stalker thinks aloud about bringing Monkey and his wife to the Zone, where he thinks they would be happy. An unexpected golden, interior rain starts to pour as they sit together, experiencing this strange dream like occurrence, which shines softly around them,’ the viewers are already captured both visually and auditorially: unconcerned about the improbability of the occurrence, together with the protagonists, they feel paralyzed by the “mysterious energy” of the Zone.’ (Petric.1989: p 30) The camera moves slowly away from them, leaving the group isolated. (Image ii)

Creating dream imagery whose kinaesthetic energy surpasses the mere observation of reality, while providing a unique experience that is only possible in cinema, Tarkovsky proves that genuine experimentation in art does not mean merely optical devices, but achieving a complex cinematic structure. (Petric.1989: p34)

In the following shot, they are back at the bar where they started their journey. The black dog from the Zone has followed Stalker back. His wife and Monkey are there to take him home. A close shot of Monkey’s face, we notice that ‘reality’ is in colour and not bleak, black and white as at the beginning of the film. At first, it seems that she can walk, but as the camera changes perspective, we see that she is on Stalker’s shoulders, as the family are walking together, in the polluted landscape.

The last scene of the film is rather magical. (Image iii) We have a close-up of Monkey’s face wearing a golden scarf, reading a book. The colours are warm and luminous, as if the energy from the Zone has been transposed in the room, and a quiet, ‘feathery’ snow is floating all around. As the camera pulls back, we see her sitting at the table with three glasses upon it. She closes the book and starts reciting a love poem, with a graveness and precociousness quite intimidating for a child. She looks intently at one of the glasses on the table, which starts moving as pushed by the force of her will, through telekinesis. Then she moves another glass on the table. She rests her cheek on the table and looks at the middle glass on the table, which slowly moves towards us and falls. The camera, from another angle, moves towards her slowly, until close-up, as a train is heard passing by in the background, intermingling with a radio wave frequency of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy”, which reaches ‘it’s peak as an apotheosis to the dialectical absurdity of life.’ (Petric.1989: p34)

This scene is charged with a strange power because it is indeed like a miraculous occurrence, the fact that Monkey has unusual powers, and the chromatic fluctuations reminiscing of those in the Zone, are perhaps proof that Stalker’s wish has been granted.

4. Conclusion

Stalker is the most accomplished of Tarkovsky’s films, in the sense that there is a unity of the theoretical ideas expressed in Sculpting in Time and the cinematic praxis. Stalker is pervading life rather than recreating it. Time in Stalker is allowed to course freely through the shots, thus creating it’s own unique rhythm, which creates an emotional effect at a subtle level in the viewer’s perception. Tarkovsky’s images become the Deleuzian ‘ pure optical and sound situations’. They ‘reveal connections of a new type, which are no longer sensory-motor and which bring the emancipated senses into direct relation with time and thought.’ (Deleuze.2000: p17)

Another element of importance is the ‘logic of poetry’:

It possesses an inner power which is concentrated within the image and comes across to the audience in the form of feelings, inducing tension in direct response to the author’s narrative logic. It is the only one that puts the audience on a par with the artist in their perception of the film. (Tarkovsky.1986: pp 20-21)

This view of the poetic links in the image is akin to Bergson’s duration/intuition idea. It allows intuition to take over the intellect and thus, the fragmentation (spatialisation) to become duration.

The aim of every artist is to ‘minimise’ the spatialization that is an inevitable component of every external manifestation (words, images, symbols). So that, for example, the words spoken by an average person will normally spatialize, but the words used by a poet work against spatialization. Mark Antliff (in Inventing Bergson) continues how an artist must work if they wish to maximise Bergsonian duration ‘but our translation of words into images and images into an original artistic intuition, can only occur if such verbal imagery provokes an alogical and dynamic state of mind in the reader’s mind. (Totaro.2001: p16)

Tarkovsky has always maintained that the cinema is an art form and famously described the essence of a director’s work as ‘sculpting’ in time.

Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is not part of it- so the film maker, from a ‘lump of time’ made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image. (Tarkovsky.1986. p 63-4)

This idea mirrors Bergson’s intuitive creativity of life when he writes in The Creative Mind that we are ‘artists when we so desire, we work continually with material furnished us by the past and present, to mould a figure unique, new, original, as unforeseeable, as the form given by the sculptor to the clay.’(Bergson.2005: p225)

It is this dream like imagery and the movement of the camera, colour fluctuation, the inherent rhythm and tension in the shot which permits a loosening in the sensory-motor perception of film in Tarkovsky, to become a pure optical and sound image, a time-image. It involves the spectator on an intuitive and intimate level in the creation of the time lived, in its duration, in being aware of the ‘passage of time and its rhythmic pressure.’ (Petric.1989: p30) Deleuze agrees with, and quotes Tarkovsky in Cinema 2:

“The time in a shot must flow independently and, so to speak, as its own boss”: it is only on this condition that the shot goes beyond the movement-image, and montage goes beyond indirect representation of time, to both share in a direct time-image. Tarkovsky calls his text ’On the cinematographic figure’, because he calls figure that which expresses the ‘typical’, but expresses it in a pure singularity, something unique. This is the sign, it is the very function of the sign. It is only when the sign opens directly on to time, when time provides the signaletic material itself, that the type, which has become temporal, coincides with feature of singularity separated from it’s motor associations. It is here that Tarkovsky’s wish comes true: that “the cinematographer succeeds in fixing time in its indices (in its signs) perceptible by the senses”. (Deleuze.1989: pp 42-43)

I shall conclude that Tarkovsky manages to convey the Bergsonian sense of duration in his films, particularly Stalker, by creating images suffused with the past, present and future, creating works of art through cinematic means, through unity of time and space and bringing the viewer’s intuition to partake in their creation.

Appendix 1 Images

Before the journey into the Zone (Image i)

Stalker, Writer and Professor at the threshold (Image ii)

Monkey (image iii)

Appendix 2 Brief synopsis of Stalker

At the beginning, after the credits, the explanation of the fall of a meteorite, which caused the Zone, ‘a miracle of miracles’.

Opening shot in sepia/black and white.

A bed, in which a woman(wife), a child(Monkey) and a man(Stalker) are sleeping. A train goes by. Stalker awakes and leaves. His wife follows. She tries to stop him from leaving knowing the dangers of the Zone to no avail. She falls, crying to the floor cursing the day she met him.

Next shot, Stalker is crossing the railways, in a grim and grey morning. He approaches a man and a woman, deep in conversation about the Bermuda Triangle, the unexplained. They greet him. Stalker says something to her at which point she leaves. The men go to a bar, where a third man is waiting for them. We are now introduced to Writer, Professor, the scientist and Stalker. Writer is a cynic who wants to go to the Zone for some inspiration and Professor is led by a scientific curiosity. Stalker is quiet. A train is heard in the distance, Stalker signals it is time to go. They get into a jeep and escape behind the train through the policed ‘border’.

They arrive in the Zone. We know it is different by the change of sepia into colour.

Stalker tells them about his teacher, Porcupine, who had been ‘punished’ and goes to lie down in the tall grass. He is home. Professor tells Writer that Stalker’s daughter is a mutant that she has no legs. He also explains how Porcupine came back from the Zone one day, became extremely rich and then hung himself. There had been a meteorite that fell in this place and strange things started to happen. How there are rumours about a place in the Zone where one’s wishes became true. All this time they had been tying fabric to metal bolts as Stalker had told them to.

Stalker returns and they set off by means of throwing the metal bolts ahead of them. Stalker warns them that it is dangerous to not follow the path. Writer looses patience and sets off by himself after an altercation with Stalker. He is warned that if he should see or hear anything strange he should come back. Writer sets off by himself, and when he reaches a building, the wind increases and he hears a voice:’ Stop. Don’t move!’ Writer gets frightened and returns to join the other two. Stalker tells them that the Zone is a complex maze of traps and that Writer had been lucky to have just been warned. At this point Professor looses heart and says he’ll stay behind and wait for their return. He is made to change his mind and follows the others on.

Stalker part two.

They are inside a structure, and Stalker is calling them. He wishes aloud that they became as children, pliable and soft, not hard and immutable as death. Professor wants to get his rucksack back. Stalker and Writer march on through the perilous ‘dry tunnel’. They enter a sort of time warp, for when they arrive they find Professor having a sandwich and a cup of tea in the same place they left him. Stalker reckons they’re in a trap, he recognises one of Porcupine’s signs.

This is the place they set to rest and Stalker has his vision, his dream. A black dog appears and rests by Stalker as he drifts in and out of his dream.

Next shot takes us to the dreaded ’meat grinder’. Stalker is terrified. He sends Writer ahead by a draw of matches. Writer walks through, he has no choice, and the others follow. When they reach a door, Writer pulls out a gun, Stalker pleads with him to drop it. They go through a dirty pool of water where Stalker throws the gun into and reach the ‘ dune room’ where Writer has an attack of consciousness. Stalker praises him, not many people get through the ‘meat grinder’.

He tells the story of Porcupine sending his brother through it, and the brother died. Porcupine went to the Room asking for his brother’s return instead he got lots of money.

All of a sudden they find themselves in another room with a telephone, which starts ringing. Writer answers and says no, this is not so and so hospital. They all stop talking and then Professor picks it up and calls his work. Totally unexpectedly he gets to talk to his arch- enemy who slept with his wife about twenty years ago and tells him he’s got the bomb and he will blow up the place. Arch- enemy says that Professor’s career will be finished. Jail. The bulb in the room implodes.

They continue their journey, the black dog is there with them and they arrive in a space where Stalker tells them they are at a threshold, and they must believe. Professor arms the bomb and gets ready to detonate it. Stalker fights and pleads with him that this is surely not what he really wants to do. Professor finds the humility and understanding that it is not his job to blow the place up. They arrive at another place of rest, we don’t actually know whether this is the Room or not, but they have stopped fighting and a beautiful rain falls around them. Professor throws his bomb away.

The travellers are back at the bar where they’ve started the journey. The dog has followed Stalker. His wife and Monkey are there to take him home. They love him. The film is colour now.

They walk home, where the dog gets a nice bowl of milk and we get to see Stalker’s beautiful shelves full of books. He is exhausted by this journey, which may be the last. He goes to bed as it starts snowing in the room. We see Monkey, reading from a book. She makes the glasses on the table move. It’s still snowing. Are they in the Zone? We will never know.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Henri Bergson (2005) Key Writings New York – London : Continuum

Gilles Deleuze (1997) Cinema 1 The Movement- Image London: The Athlone Press

Gilles Deleuze (2000) Cinema 2 The Time-Image London: The Athlone Press

Mark LeFanu (1987) The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky London: BFIPublications

Vida T. Johnson, Graham Petrie (1994) The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky,

A Visual Fugue Indiana University Press: Bloomington & Indianapolis

Andrei Tarkovsky (1986) Sculpting in Time, Reflections on the cinema London:The Bodley Head Ltd

Maya Turovskaya (1989) Tarkovsky, Cinema as Poetry London: Faber&Faber

Nick Anning and Chris Auty (1981)The confessions of Andrei Tarkovsky Time Out 6 March 1981-12 March 1981 p.10 London: Time Out Publications

Vlada Petric (1989) Tarkovsky’s Dream Imagery Film Quarterly, Vol43, no2, 1989-1990

Donato Totaro (2001 January 11) Time, Bergson and the Cinematographical Mechanism Offscreen (internet) www.offscreen.com

Available from: http://.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/Bergson_film.html

(Accessed 1st November 2005)

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (2004 November) Realism, Dream, and’Strangeness’ in Andrei Tarkovsky Film-Philosophy (internet) International Salon-Journal (ISSN 1466-4615) Vol.8 No 38 Available from: http://www.film_philosophy.com/vol8_2004/n38botz_bornstein

(Accessed 13th November 2005)

Stalker (1979) Directed by Andrey Tarkovsky, Argos Films and The British Film Institute, 155 mins ( Video:VHS)

Images sourced at www.offscreen.com

www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/stalker.html

Stalker DVD review