(no subject)

[proximoception]

Tarkovsky's attempts to anchor in real earth and real time I find entirely admirable, but not always successful - but where you're unable to immerse yourself on one viewing you might be on another. It's just quite risky. The long takes can push you right out of the viewing experience, or pull you too far in in hypnotized disregard of where the story went. For me Andrei Rublev was a fantastic experience, Solaris an interesting ordeal, but I feel like either could produce either watched some other year.

But when it works! The vertical shot of everything underwater had me in tears. Seemed just the best thing that could have happened.

His problem, one assumes, was finding subject matter where audiences would understand the value added by being brought back to the second-by-second, inch-by-inch existence we usually expect movies to free us from. (Insert dasein/design pun here.)

This project fits him perfectly. That first terrifying approach to the building was all of Lost at once, more tan that was the Last Tycoon nickel scene, more even than that was how I played for years as a child. Furtive pruposeful movements beside a field, some weeds, a stretch of fence, a decaying brick, all of this made your world precisely because it hadn't made another. You got to place it, it was open to your modifications. And you were grateful to it - not everything permits that sort of nothing to operate on. The specifics mattered even though / precisely because they weren't use- or recognition-stamped. They stood in for the continuities of the final world, were film rather than scenes.

A friend of mine had a backyard that opened somehow (Crowley's Somehow) into a secret place with a stream in between a garage's back wall and a tree-and-fence barrier. I think the "stream" may have been a flooded ditch, in adult parlance, and given the dimensions of lots in the neighborhood it all must have been a couple hards by a couple yards. But it felt cut off from everything, to the extent that I remember not understanding at the time precisely how I'd gotten there from my friend's yard. The friend had shown it to me but never much cared about it. I thought he was the luckiest human alive. There was nothing to do there but make sounds and stories, though of course make-believe of that sort has more in common with dreams than with stories: you forget or neglect the beginning, deviate further and further from any kind of end until one drops like an anvil. You're done because you're hungry, or some other rock brushed your bubble.

As a good hater of "belief in belief" - the sin of pride of those atheists who don't expect others to be capable of the sort of reasoning that led them clear of religion - I couldn't have been more ambivalent when it was suddenly clear that this rule-heavy odyssey of pretending was associated with that other kind of faith. But just as Tarkovsky's filming proclivities fit travel in the Zone, loco-imaginative child games do kind of fit religion. A time-honored avenue of skeptical invective against believers that I've always avoided, which may have been why it shocked me so - I just don't think of faith that way. For me it really did make it suddenly harder to condemn, as did the fact that, given when, where, among whom it was made, the issue here isn't ridicule but proscription.

Suppose there's a thing to it other than what it thinks is there, something sideways from it, finally natural rather than beyond nature, but with which communication (more in the sense of between wings of a house than words between heads) is enabled only by this exagerration of categorical gaps. As though we moved in a thick fog through which only a scream could come across as speech. The Zone dog that follows him home isn't what he's there for, but it's what he gets (meaningful, then, that the scientist too has a number of dogs, can't take another when it's offered?). That Marvellian dissolution into green - could he have managed it without the promise of nearby gold? One of the most beautiful things was the Writer and Professor being sucked in despite themselves, their plans and antipathies and ennui and whatever else. They want this house to be more than a house. (Disturbing realization that one of my favorite movies, eXistenZ, may owe a hell of a lot here).

As any house is more than a house. Whatever hoops you need to jump through to permit yourself to love this self, these others, this life, this room you immediately should. Better the ones you don't trip over, the ones not lined with razors, not on fire.

The matter of fact setting and nature of the miracles the girl performed were also perfect, along with being perfectly surprising. But why didn't she seem happy? I am not a Soviet Russian, and I know I sometimes mess up getting what faces mean, don't mean in (e.g.) French movies, Japanese ones. Was the point that she wasn't excited - to her it was no miracle at all, just how she and the world do things? Or were we to take this as a final ambiguity, given the earlier talk about blowing up the Zone so the wrong people don't access its power (or power to make us think there is a power, just as real and frightening)?

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

This is just super great. One of my favorite things about livejournal has always been this sort of entry where people trampoline off a work like Stalker and write something awesome like this.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad it was chosen. I can see how that guy could write a book about it - the hard thing is to shut up after seeing it. Broke off here only because I was falling asleep, and on waking I could have said a completely different set of things that would still reflect my experience watching it. A movie where to say it's one of the all time greats is to undersell it.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Yes, the underwater shot always finds me in tears too, even as a youtube video, it still gets at me, fiftieth time around.. Brllliant "review", essay, etc. As though we moved in a thick fog through which only a scream could come across as speech. especially. You ought to be quoted more, worldwider! Deeply sympathize with what grashupfer said. It´s one of my fav. films, all times.
The Q. about the girl and her expression is interesting. I hadn´t thought about the possibility of it being puzzling but this probably has to do with my personal childhood iron curtain experiences. Only time anyone ever hit exactly at how it felt was von Trier in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zentropa though it is closer to Fassbinder´s Maria Braun but owes both here and there. Still, the ever-present paranoia, the shifts in realities/perception. And the fantastic train conductor Ernst-Hugo Järegård, Sweden´s own Peter Lorre. I met him, in another incarnation, any time we went to see my uncle in the late GDR. Not surprising, to see the one´s dangling from a tree at passing by...
In "security", in Sweden, my fav. cat once showed me his secret place.
It was the neighbours´ cat whose father was wild, he only came to visit for food and time with my child me. Once, he tore at my flares to make me come with to where only cats and rats go. It was, if you wish, only the backside of an outdoor loo full of small skeletons, I think he "buried" all those he killed, there. Birds, mice.
But the magic of our communication was not in the fact that he dragged me off to see it, to try and understand. He left me standing there, wondering, forever.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Monkey's scene was full color (I think) but she seems more miserable even than the others. Throughout, really. As though she'd internalized the Zone but we weren't sure if that was a good or bad thing. I guess I hesitantly read it as fitting the total ambiguity of the three men back to back in the flooded ruin all not at all sure whether to enter the Room, destroy it or leave it. But something about her's beyond me.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

It's not clear to me which of the three [Stalker, wife or Monkey] moves the water across the nightstand in the early bedroom scene. Monkey appears to be asleep and she's facing away from the direction of the glass...

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Was there a train noise during?

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Yup.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

which is to say it was the rattling of the table from the train that moved the glass.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

When you say, she internalized the Zone you are spot on with my own impression/reading.
I see her as someone suffering innuendo from having to live with those that do not understand, in a place where the world is wrong, more than her hinted at or "real" walking impairment (is this why she is carried on the Stalker´s shoulders immediately after we´ve been made believe, she can walk? To Beethoven´s ninth, on top of it...) which if there, only emphazises her being "different". Also, the glass (at the end). It only starts moving when we hear the train. Could be, it´s moved on by train vibrations only and she is just the most bored teenager the world never saw. I love, not knowing.
Also,
accidents never happened behind the iron curtain up til Tschernobyl, everyone knew that. But there were more places than one where noone was allowed to go for reasons best known to the powers that be not anymore..
On seeing:
first time I saw this film was late at night short after the premier in Stockholm, so no film expert intellectuals around. It was me and a couple of (I like to think: three) skinheads. I believe, they came because of the poster which depicted three bald men, therefore they figured, this was a violent Lonsdale action film aimed at them. They sat in the far back in the tiny cinema cracking jokes and drinking beer for five minutes, then they slowly grew strangely silent. Occasional burps, but no more bickering. They sat through it all, none had the guts to get up and out; to admit their mistake. When they left, they said nothing but their faces...
Also,
the black bakelite phone that suddenly rings never fails to make me laugh out loud (it counterparts the vertigo shot, it´s like I imagine the effect of Grace in a Donne rather than George Herbert sense or Your Moment of Glory as seen through a Lynda Barry sketch: God is on the line & no insult to anyone present or not, intended). I guees, this is why the Wachowski brothers stole the means of communication inbetween reality realms-idea for Matrix just as they stole their whole storyboard straight from Gibson´s Neuromancer trilogy and Lem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress) with the red or bleu pill as a choice inbetween favoured realitites but now I drift as usual yet am glad, I got a chance to state the obvious.
You also made me want to review the film, one more time. It´s one of those.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Wow, didn't catch that at all about the train - we had the volume way down because of our own daughter. Didn't catch the Beethoven either.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Love this story of the cat.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Glad you said that.
I´ve started liking your voice, quite a while now. If you want, feel free to add me and I´d like to add you back, if not, no explanation is the best one. But if, be warned. I am mostly silly, so if you are on the search for Earnest only, wrong place. He is sometimes around though but you have to look hard, be beardy and patient. This is because I consider myself Mick who used to listen to Mozart outside other people´s windows but then I started smoking to be more like the other gals. I read too much Loos and West, to stop now. My stories are often repeated so you are likely to hear more about cats in case you come around. Then, when it hits at you, there is always theboringclub which provides the necessary vacuity implied. You can take off your hat, there.

[seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com]

Had this discussion pointed up by a friend and likely do not understand the dicsucssion's parameters, but will toss in two notes that interest me about this great film.
1) the parallel of the role of stalker to that of the 'starets' ('elder' such as the fictional Zosima of Brothers Karamazov).
2) the poem "summer has gone... etc' by the dirctor's father Arseny Tarkovsky whose poetry , read by himself, is also
in Nostalgia and Mirror ...
might add that the underwater dream includes the calendar leaf of the day on which Andrey was to die...

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Welcome! This wasn't in response to anyone else's take, just some stray thoughts.

I think one of the others did call him a Holy Fool in the scuffle, which fits his marginal social role.

You took it as a dream?

[seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com]

if we are speaking of the underwater sequence it is when stalker is sleeping yes... the one which ends with dog etc
holy fool perhaps but I think the parallel to the elder is more interesting... the spiritual director in western european termonology.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Were there elders/guides in the Gulag?

[seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com]

of course. the unknown , but likely it was a 'bishop tryphon, author of this cycle of poems
would be one: http://seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com/238590.html
it is a fairly amazing document. the author died in the camps...
"When the lightning flash has lit up the camp dining hall, how feeble
seems the light from the lamp. Thus do You, like the lightning,
unexpectedly light up my heart with flashes of intense joy. After Your
blinding light, how drab, how colorless, how illusory all else seems." as it says.

[seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com]

however the guide,stalker, tarkovsky provides is one himself
deeply immersed in the world of ambiguity ... not that the author of
the poem cycle I linked wasnt of course...but out stalker is not
allowed as radiant a faith.

[tdaschel.livejournal.com]

First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it ..

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Was thinking of that periodically throughout. And also Chernobyl. But assumed the one would have been outside the film's ken as the other.

They're filming The Price of Salt, btw.

[tdaschel.livejournal.com]

ah, thanks for passing this along !

"A film adaptation titled Carol, directed by Todd Haynes and starring Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska,"

*that* could actually work !

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

not sure how/if we're going to corral this discussion -- whether those who haven't spoken will come back here, whether those who've spoken here will check back but:

now that i've almost finished watching it a second time, i feel almost ready to contribute, and yet i'm still stuck. the analogies, the design of the whole, doesn't seem to me cohesive, consistent. i can't puzzle it together in a way that fits one vision. to wit:


at first blush, it seems that the sepia-colored film is used for the world outside the zone, just as kansas is in black&white for oz. but there are sepia parts within the zone -- and just when i'd developed a theory to explain that, there were colored portions in the outside world (when stalker's family leaves the bar to return home, when monkey sits at the table at the very end).

surely the sepia must signify something. it can't be completely arbitrary ("capricious")? does anyone following the discussion have an idea as to what? i haven't been able to work anything out beyond my initial assumption.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Well, there's some question about whether the Zone is special at all, and also some reason to think its influence colors the rest of the world, e.g. via the Monkey. So having even the Oz change be finally ambiguous might fit that?

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

i can't work with that kind of ambiguity. there's got to be some either/ors.
but i don't think there is any kind of ambiguity about the zone -- the room within the zone, but not the zone itself.

since (and i haven't delved into the lost parallels yet) the zone parallels the island, to me that would be akin to saying the island, as portrayed, didn't actually have the special characteristics it had. everything falls apart.

and what you offered is precisely my problem: if the color is via monkey, it should be consistent. we see monkey in sepia on the bench outside the bar, then moments later in color.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

But there is either/or ambiguity about the Zone - none of the Stalker's many desperate warnings seem to end up mattering, after all, whether because the secret rules of the place are his own imaginings or because it wants these people to approach the room. I think most of the key moments in the film are pitched to either/ors, in fact:

Either the train moves the glasses or a miracle does, either the Zone has been claiming people or it's just rumors spread by Stalkers (who mostly seem to return, no?), either it's a real source of magic in the world or just a place people expect magic from, either the Stalker's wife has briught color into her life by marrying him or she hasn't, either life is drab without extraordinary hopes or it isn't etc.

I guess you can narrow it to three possibilities, rather than two, an either/or/or that may fit the three guys: there's a secret, enlivening order to the world; there isn't and it's dangerous to think so; there isn't but life is given meaning by our thinking there is. I think the film's attempting to show how hard it is to solve this problem, given that each interpretation can account for all the facts on the ground, given that there's always some things we don't understand. As human beings we fall into these three camps, and there's at least some value in realizing this and sympathizing with the different visions on offer.

...

I maybe can't prove that the film goes past this to a reconciliation I myself believe in, but it gave me room to feel it did: certain acts of imagination (including sympathy with others' points of view) permit us to move outside of our one-sided, even when fact-based, projections of the world, enabling retrievals from a reality infinitely enlivening but too slippery to grasp entirely. Enabling human life-makings that neither violate nature nor disappear back into it with time.

All sides are partly right: there is more going in in the Zone than meets the eye because more goes on everywhere than meets the eye; nothing that goes on is beyond nature or outside of the real (as compared to perceived or stated) facts; getting things wrong is how our minds proceed, being partial, so meaning-making is active, in a very special sense even faith-based.

And all risk certain failings: the literalization of past efforts of imagining leading to adherences to false concepts, rules, fears; the overcautious confinement of understanding to the narrowly demonstrable; the cheapening of existence by glorifying our ability to willfully ignore truths.

The Monkey knows when the train comes. Maybe she's participating in a movement, not just creating one or usurping credit for one. She may represent the future - the possibility of a way past the present, tripartite bickering. A way to get a bit of Zone going out here in reality, of getting a little more plausibility into the Zone.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

i find grashupfer's use of the verb trampoline to be apt. i feel like a lot of what you say, eloquently and poetically, comes from yourself and not the work -- you use aspects of the work as a launching pad to muse on the subjects they occasion. which i think is great and a great use of this exercise, but what i was trying to nail down with my question is very much about the film itself and the director's intent. it appears to me you don't think he intended there to be a single discernable reason for the sepia (unlike in oz). i feel like there should be, that there is, and i'm hoping someone else can shed some light on it. my personal thoughts on the message of the movie aren't concrete because i don't feel i fully understand his agenda.


and even so, i don't see the ambiguities you do:

the train (real world) moves the glass at the beginning, in the sepia, with the well-known classical piece in the background; the girl moves the glasses at the end the movie just before the train (real world) rattles the glasses, now in color, with the well-known classical piece in the background. they're bookends and the action of the train is clear in both.

i don't think the movie allows for the possibility that the zone is a myth created by the stalkers. we're given plenty of evidence that it's not, and i find that it's fundamental to processing the story to accept as true that the zone has killed virtually everyone who has entered it. the stalkers return because they're the ones who have learned (teacher to student to student) how to navigate the zone -- how did the first teacher learn? trial and error, i assume.

that the zone follows different laws (call it magic, miracles, or as asimov would have it, technology) i also find fundamental. we have plenty of evidence of that. i find that the ambiguity lies in how the room operates, precisely because so little is known in fact. in that instance, yes, i think the movie shows a possibility that the stalkers either don't know or aren't willing to tell the whole truth about the room.

i'm not sure where the observation comes from that stalker has brought color to his wife -- there's only a brief moment where she appears in color at all, and her epic monologue at the end finds her in sepia, just as she was at the start.

i think there is plenty of room for ambiguity even after marking out some of the unambiguous fundamental bases, and for me, i can't even begin to analyze the ambiguous without some ground to stand on.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Seemed to me all evidence of supernaturalness was carefully ambiguous. And people not returning, if true at all, may have had something to do with the army shooting them. If there was plenty of clear evidence I'm missing can you name some? The Stalker inveighed against the others for their lack of faith at the end, after all, and his wife didn't defend his accuracy, just that he made joy possible.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

the lack of faith s. inveighed against was faith in the room, not the zone itself.

evidence with respect to the zone:

the professor quoted at the beginning

the stalker is quite sincere throughout - there's nothing to indicate he's running a scam

the soldier at the outskirts are clearly trying to keep people out, with deadly force, yet they have no presence within

there are no other people in the zone

all of the evidence of civilization is decayed and broken (utility poles, other junk)

the flowers have no scent

the rusted-out, overgrown tanks and weaponry show there had been an attempt to establish a military presence in the zone which failed, yet the tanks didn't flee, they were abandoned

when w. approaches the house alone he (alone) experiences a rush of wind on an apparently calm day; a voice tells him to stop (but not s. or p.)

p. goes backward to retrieve his knapsack at the point where part 2 starts, and is encountered by s. & w. who have been traveling forward yet inexplicably ended up where they started; the zone

wants p. to have his knapsack so it provides him a means of retrieving it yet still being guided forward

the nuts with the streamers don't appear to follow a natural trajectory

it may be just be an editing flub (though i doubt it), but when they reach the room with the mounds of powder, a bird swoops across the mounds, and disappears from plain sight; then the same bird

reenters the scene where it started in the foreground (or a very similar bird does), to the right of its initial position, flies across a slightly different path before successfully landing near a

pipe opening and looking around

w., having gone ahead alone, and apparently crossed the mounds to the reach the pipe, and has apparently traveled in the pipe and been spit up again into the mound room: he awakes from having been

knocked unconscious and lies outside the pipe with his hands stuck in his pockets (as if he has been carried and was not moving of his own free will); s. says w. has been inside the pipe (or "meat

mincer") and w. doesn't dispute this, is in fact angry for having suffered the ordeal

despite all of the telephone lines being broken, a telephone rings in the antechamber to the room, it's someone from the outside world with a wrong number -- they think they're calling a clinic

the professor is then given the inspiration to gloat about his revenge on the man who cuckolded him and the phone can dial out to the outside world

there is (to some extent) working electricity in the antechamber

the dog stays near the skeletal corpses of what might be its owners -- a woman and man apparently locked in an embrace, kissing, with no obvious cause for their death

it begins to storm and rain in the antechamber and yet there's bright light -- from where?

monkey uses telekinesis to move the glasses on the table, knocking one off the table

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

All totally ambiguous, eminently susceptible to natural explanations, even the corpses since this is a shot-on-sight protected area - and why would anyone doubt a magic room if they accepted the Zone itself was magical? It's all "I'm in a haunted house - did that sculpture turn to look at me? Did someone just whisper?" level stuff. Even the working phone and electricity could be explained - suppose the military's been performing some secret experiments there. Militaries have been known to. Everything fits the pattern of strange-but-not-quite-strange-enough-to-be-sure-it's-something-more.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

i find plusses and minuses to analyzing the extratextual in regards to the text, but:

as lapsed modernist mentioned in wolodymyr's post, and as i'd learned from the bonus features, many members of the crew including tarkovsky himself contracted cancer as a result of this film shoot. dying to create a work of art, and this particular work in which it's postulated the meaning of life is to create art, seems worthy of discussion. is a work of art truly worth dying for? i would agree with the writer -- not if it's not going to be read/seen by others one hundred years from now. but if one feels certain that it might be, perhaps.

i don't see that anyone's mentioned this yet, but tarkovsky filmed the movie twice -- the first time the film stock 'could not be developed' either due to sabotage or just unfortunate circumstances. the second movie is said by some to not resemble the first at all, by others to be quite similar. imagine how devastating it would have been (and reportedly was) to lose one's work after such a tremendous amount of time and money and effort. and the effort it would take to try and replicate one's best work from the prior attempt.

and i'm not going to like the film nearly so well as some of you have -- it's not for me (in the best sense of the classic penny arcade <a=href"http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24">strip). tarkovsky's own take on that (from the wiki): "on being told that it should be faster and more dynamic, tarkovsky replied: 'the film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.' the goskino representative then explained that he was trying to give the point of view of the audience. tarkovsky supposedly retorted: 'i am only interested in the views of two people: one is called bresson and one called bergman.'"

and that's terrific, and every artist should be free to pick his audience, but as narrow as his intended audience was, i don't fall into it.