Stalker

SHETLAND WAR RUINS PROJECT

‘Stalker’ (1979) is a film by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, known for his eerie, atmospheric, philosophical and immersive films, which draw on the apocalyptic. I was interested in this film as part of exploring a contemporary cinematic kind of sublime, in relation to work about Shetland’s war ruins. ’Stalker’ follows the journey of three men as they make their way around the mysterious ‘Zone’, a place of what appears to be wasteland and where it is rumoured there exists a room in which your deepest wishes are realised. The Stalker, a nervous superstitious man leads a cynical writer (supposedly in search of inspiration) and a scientist into the restricted area of The Zone. 

The viewer is instantly brought into a world of mystery from the first shot, through a crumbling shadowy doorway. This is in fact the family home of the Stalker, but is claustrophobic, damp and bare, with tensions running high between him and his wife. As we soon see, the home it is located in an industrial or war-torn wasteland. The monochrome colour of film, not in clean black and white tones but more muddy grey/brown, adds to the depressive feeling, this colour also bringing to mind the apocalyptic yet visionary effect of brown/greys in for instance Casper David Friedrich’s ‘The Abbey in the Oak Wood’.  

Before setting off on their journey to The Zone, the three men talk of knowledge, superstition and truth, the writer seeing the truth as something that changes as you come close to it, always out of reach - something almost utopian or even dystopian. They travel through small empty ruinous streets, never ending and maze-like, a dehumanising man-made prison of industrial buildings where nature is completely absent. It is clear they are trying to remain hidden, trying to avoid an unnamed faceless authority. By contrast the Stalker is very human, close up shots revealing his weathered, anguished face, a man clinging to life in this barren place of dereliction of the human soul. 

The three manage to reach The Zone breaking through the military barricades which guard the forbidden area like a secret military site. Then follows a calm section where the men travel on a found train cart further into The Zone, the pace of the film slowed right down by long shots of their faces as they contemplate the wasteland around them from the moving cart. In this section of transition both the men and the viewer undergo a transformation as time is suspended in this journey to a ‘place beyond’. 

It is only now, as the train cart slows to a stop and the men have fully entered ‘The Zone’, that the film becomes in colour. In comparison with the wasteland of the opening section, here’s a new world of open space and subdued but ethereal greens. Here nature is in abundance, taking over everything including the strange ruins and debris that can be seen. There is a sense of ‘outside of time’ which reminded me of the atmosphere at Shetland’s war ruins. In this mysterious site in Stalker, there is no sense of weather or time of day, but instead stillness and silence, time stopped. It is clear however, in this strange place of dereliction, the the Stalker feels free, saying “Here we are, home at last”. 

In the distance can be seen a mysterious building, its strange dark doorway a void in the landscape (as with the shadowy entrances to war ruins in Shetland). There’s further unease in strange noises heard from across the landscape, in the distance. It starts to become more clear that this was a place of warfare. A field is littered with decaying tanks and scattered guns as the mind is led to imagine the terrible events which once occurred here, and the fear and panic. 

It’s also clear there is something else going on in ‘The Zone’. The Stalker:

 “The Zone is a very complecated system of traps…I don’t know what’s going on here…it may even seem capricious, but it is what we've made it with our condition”. 

It seems the place itself is in constant change. For the first time we sense there are other powers at work here. At the mercy of some mysterious conscious power which can control and change the environment around them, the men can no longer completely trust their senses.

In one scene, as the camera pans across fragments and artifacts of a lost past submerged in water, the writer voice talks of man’s arrogance, his dreams of a technological and industrial utopia of “…blast furnaces and wheels…”. They are all to him however “…crutches, artificial limbs”. Instead man should exist “…in order to create works of art. Unlike all other human activities this one is unselfish”.