The Deep and Subtle Disturbance of Andrei Tarkovsky.
By: Franklin Mount
Tags: Science Fiction, Film, Media Criticism, Perception, Psychology

I just mailed back my disc of Stalker (dir: Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979). It wasn’t easy to do. Something inside me told me that I needed to watch the film at least three or four more times, in spite of the subtle but profound feeling of disturbance this film evoked in me. I now await my next disc from Netflix. But I’m know I’m going back to Stalker.

Stalker is a slow film, unspectacular, but it makes your skin crawl. And you can’t look away. Halfway through, I had to eat. Later I realized that some tortillas and butter was just a false salve to my unease. How does Tarkovsky do it? I don’t know. I’ve got to see it again. Just to have my skin crawl.

I recall the same subtle but deep-seated disturbance from Solaris (1972). That viewing was in a movie theater, the venerable Anthology Film Archives (http://anthologyfilmarchives.org). It was easier to let it go in that blessed pre-pandemic time. Showings were limited, and it’s not a simple matter to find a spare three and a half hours.

Both films are science fiction of the highest order, and quite different from the sort of science fiction that relies on technological wizardry to depict people who are essentially like us, just dealing with incredible, no, unbelievable situations, on other planets just like ours except with weird creatures or hostile space aliens who are smarter than us. We always win, because our spirit beats their snarky intelligence.

In Stalker we’re treated to a walk “the Zone,” a quiet area of full of hidden traps, an industrial wasteland, but now overgrown with beautiful northern continental forests, and with their vague geography. There are no mountains on the horizon, no sense of the ocean.

With Solaris it’s a mission to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris, a planet with a thinking, breathing, telepathic, and malevolent ocean. The ocean wreaks havoc on the small crew of the space station.

Months after seeing the film, I was on a bike ride on a cold winter day when I stopped by the Hudson to view the pack ice. The river was not totally frozen over; that doesn’t happen in this time of climate change. The surface of the water was covered by chunks and sheets of ice, seemingly covering the surface of the river, with cracks to allow the ice to move with the liquid water below. On that dark evening, I looked out at the slow undulations of the ice, and felt sick to my stomach. It was disturbing, which puzzled me. I had seen similar scenes many times before.

I suddenly realized that the undulates of the ice reminded me of the ocean of the planet Solaris. The disturbance of that deceptively simply film had stayed with me.

Both films are peculiarly down to earth science fiction. Both are told with long, single camera takes, and few characters. Dialogue ranges from casual putdowns and cynicism to random philosophizing.

Stalker starts deceptively easily. A man sneaks out from what may be a marital bed. The woman wakes up and curses him. We learn he’s been in prison, sure to go back again, and that he’s got a daughter and a wife. The house radiates bleakness, and it’s bleaker outside.

The Stalker meets a man standing next to sports car with a fashionably dressed, casually elegant, tall girlfriend, with all of the glamor associated with young sexy Russian women, who is soon dismissed, to the quiet dismay, no doubt, of many a viewer. They’re joined by another man. They’re going to sneak into the Zone. Which involves evading guards with machine guns by driving a jeep on train tracks. The Zone may be a place with space aliens in hiding. Or maybe it’s a place where can realize all of one’s desires.

Solaris starts with similar simplicity. Then freaks you out.

One other fact is well worth noting. Both films were produced in the Soviet Union, and seem to be set in a Soviet reality. Little reference is made to country or politics. They depict interactions among their characters which are strongly at variance with received wisdom on the Soviet Union in the United States. It’s not that Tarkovsky didn’t experience censorship; his earlier film Andrei Rublev was not released in his native country in his lifetime. Tarkovsky left the country in 1982, and later said he wasn’t coming back, stating, “I am not a Soviet dissident, I have no conflict with the Soviet Government.” His problem was that he didn’t think he could work if he went home.

When I saw Y tu mamá también, besides my incredible delight at this wonderful piece of work, I also realized that I knew almost nothing about México. Despite extensive reading on the country in the American media.

Tarkovsky makes clear the same about the Soviet Union. If you know the conservative paradigm, you know almost nothing.

Stated simply, whatever the political situation, human beings are human beings. With everything that implies.