Tarkovsky's Stalker

[poliphilo]

Tarkovsky lacks a sense of humour. Is that a problem? Yes I think it is rather. Human beings find things funny. Even very grim things. Especially very grim things. It's who we are, it's how we cope. Tarkovsky appears to be telling us deep truths about the human condition, but can you do that without occasionally cracking a smile? I'm not sure you can.
 
In Stalker three middle-aged men travel through a zone of extreme danger towards a mysterious room that is said to be able to make one's innermost wishes come true. In real life people placed in such a situation would josh along with one another- they would make nervous little jokes- as soldiers do when they waiting to go into battle.  Not these guys. These guys bore one another with bitter monologues about art and the futility of human existence. Which makes them unreal. Or- at best- like 18 year-olds in a bedsit. Tarkovsky is a great artist- I've no doubt of that- but his view of life remains frozen in late adolescence.

Stalker is the kind of movie you want to make when you're 18 and you've read a bit of Dostoevsky and you've never had a girlfriend.  It is grindingly slow and scattered with symbols that mean a lot to the artist but not necessarily to the viewer. Very little happens and the action keeps pausing for poems and extracts from scripture to be read. We hear snatches of classical favourites- Wagner- and corniest of all- Beethoven's Hymn to Joy. I'm making it sound absurd- and it almost is- but not quite. 

And the reason it isn't is because Tarkovsky also retains into maturity the intensity and self-belief of adolescence.  The power of his vision is unwavering. I will make you look at this wodge of unremarkable green field until the green of it burns through the cornea into your brain.  Bergman put it memorably. "Film...is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams."  And this is absolutely true. Tarkovsky's movies are the most dreamlike movies ever made. Even the pomposity is dreamlike- the words, words, words that sound so impressive but actually mean very little-  Even the humourlessness. Are there jokes in dreams?  No, I don't believe there are.

There is a difference between profundity and deadly seriousness. Deadly-seriousness is when you look unwaveringly at life's horrors. Profundity is when you also laugh at them. Dreams are deadly serious but not profound. Tarkovsky is the absolute master of the deadly serious. 

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Are there jokes in dreams? No, I don't believe there are.

Anecdotal, and miles away from the point you're making, but my father once reported a dream that included a joking bear. I'm not sure it counts though, since the bear seems to have been a messenger of some birthing goddess and was quite possibly telling a joke merely to get his attention.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I guess the test is whether the jokes the bear was telling were actually funny.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Sadly, no.

To my ear, the joke in question was a mere pun and a rather lame one at that. In the dream, the bear was found prowling around a fenced lot on the farm where my father keeps some old junk automobiles and scrap metal. The bear said that she - ? - was very hungry and that she was there to "screw off a lug nut", from one of the wheels, and eat that.

My father found this so funny that he made a mental note to tell my mother what the bear said, as soon he was awake. Long story short, my father agreed to give the bear a requested bushel of corn, which I placed in the junk lot the following afternoon, over my father's objections, of course. We argued over just how much corn I was "wasting" over a "stupid dream", and one thing leading to another we ended up weighing a bushel basket full, to settle the discussion.

Turned out that, due to some sort of seasonal variation, the corn was much more dense than it should have been and we were over feeding the heifers by as much as 40%. The extra weight they were putting on would have caused major problems when they tried to give birth. The insight into the corn turned out to be an extremely valuable piece of information.

Also, less than twenty-fourt hours after my father's dream, he got his first hands-on lesson in assisting a cow when she's having difficulty in labor. Again, most everything he thought he knew was wrong.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

So the dream was one that addressed very real issues- but ones of which your father was unconscious at the time. That's interesting.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Yes or at least after the fact it certainly appeared to address real-world issues. As someone interested in such things, the incident made quite an impression on me.

[algabal.livejournal.com]

Thank you! This is exactly how I feel about him.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've been wrestling with Tarkovsky for years. I knew there was something about him that stopped me from being a whole-hearted admirer- and this morning I finally put my finger on what it was.