Giles Harvey on Geoff Dyer on Stalker

When I was young I saw the Tarkovsky film Stalker several times.  What I remember most is a scene with rippling sand, which even today is seared into my brain—one of the most astonishing images in a lifetime to film-going.  (I’ll have more to say on this image at the end.)   Geoff Dyer has an interesting new book on the experience of watching Stalker:

The prominent place occupied in my consciousness by Stalker is almost certainly bound up with the fact that I saw it at a particular time in my life.   I suspect it is rare for anyone to see their—what they consider to be the—greatest film after the age of thirty. After forty it’s extremely unlikely. After fifty, impossible. . . . To try to disentangle their objective merits or shortcomings, to see them as a disinterested adult, is like trying to come to a definitive assessment of your own childhood:  impossible because what you are contemplating and trying to gauge is a formative part of the person attempting the assessment.  Gradually, usually in your late teens and early twenties, you start to watch the major works of the medium.  At first it is difficult to make sense of these alleged masterpieces: they are too difficult, often too boring and challenging.

.  .  .

I saw Stalker slightly later but I saw it when it came out, within a month of it’s release, when Tarkovsky was at his artistic peak.  I saw it, so to speak, live. And this means that I saw it in a slightly different way from how a twenty-four-year-old might see it for the first time now, in 2012. . . . Obviously the difference is not as acute as it would be if you saw a band today who were at their peak twenty years ago.  The thing, the product, the work of art stays the same but by staying the same it ages—and changes.  It exists now in the wake of its own reputation, not quite in the way Citizen Kane does, not only as a monument to itself, but trailing clouds in its own glory.  And it exists also in the wake of everything that has come in its wake, both the films that have been influenced by it (that’s why Citizen Kane is both ageless and incredibly old-looking; practically everything seems to have come after it) and the ones that treat it with tacit disdain and contempt (Lock, Stock, and Two—tediously—Smoking Barrels).

Here’s Giles Harvey reviewing Geoff Dyer’s book:

What we gradually come to realize is that Dyer is using Tarkovsky’s film rather as John Ashbery used Parmigianino’s Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror in his famous poem of the same name””not as an object for cool critical dissection but as the occasion for thought, as a point of departure for a series of messy digressions on life, art, time, memory, and””lest we forget””cinema. That is to say, Zona is a kind of autobiography by other means.

Amazingly, the book is not only readable, it is hard to put down. A bit like “Reader’s Block” in his Otherwise collection, Zona turns out to be an elegy for a youthful intensity of responsiveness that Dyer knows has faded and cannot come again. “The time when I might have been able to read late-period Henry James has passed,” he writes in one of his glum, self-punishing sentences,

“and because I have not read late-period Henry James I am in no position to say what harm has been done to my sensibility by not having done so. But I do know that if I had not seen Stalker in my early twenties my responsiveness to the world would have been radically diminished.”

.   .   .

Although the book forgoes the conventions of plot, it still is remarkably suspenseful; for much of the time we have literally no idea what is going to happen next. One moment Dyer is describing the grand climactic scene when the three men in Tarkovsky’s film finally make it to the Room and are about to be granted their deepest wishes; the next, he’s telling us about his own deepest wish, or as he prefers to think of it, his deepest regret, “one I share with the vast majority of middle-aged, heterosexual men: that I’ve never had a three-way, never had sex with two women at once.” And we are not denied a thorough examination of the various times in Dyer’s life when he came within a hair’s breadth of realizing his wish. It is this ironic incongruity, between Tarkovsky’s grandeur and Dyer’s carnal waywardness, that finally makes Zona, for all its formal shenanigans, such an engaging, human, and oddly traditional book. We all know what it is like to feel indebted to, and inadequate before, a towering work, but few people have ever described that feeling with the ingenuity or the candor of Dyer.

Toward the end of the book, Dyer confesses that after spending so much time with Stalker, “I might never want to set eyes on it again; after this, I might have laid it to rest for good.” What comes through in both Zona and Otherwise, even more than Dyer’s intellectual promiscuity, is the degree to which he has kept faith with a single urgent theme: namely, the half-life of our passions, the way in which the thing that thrills us one day””a novel, a piece of music, a city, a love affair””may bore us to tears the next. He understands the painful asymmetry between our desires and life’s ability to satisfy them, but this understanding doesn’t dull his appetite, it quickens it. His books and articles are a sad, funny, and instructive record of this insatiable hunger for life.

Borges once remarked:

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.

To feel the imminence of that revelation, one must in some sense believe it’s there, or at least suspend one’s disbelief.  That gets harder over time.  Each new experience is like another nail in the coffin.  Fortunately I’ll probably be dead long before I’ve completely exhausted my ability to believe that paradise lies in the next room, or book, or foreign country.  Later today I’ll see Ceylan’s new film.  He’s one of the few directors that still gives me hope.  Wish me luck.

PS.  About that rippling sand.  The quotation at the beginning is just a small part of a 4 page footnote to Geoff Dyer’s discussion of the rippling sand:

In any case, this slight interlude of ennui is cut short by what comes next: a shot of the muddy expanse of the Zone, dry-looking but rippling–quicksand perhaps.  Whatever it is, this quicksandy stretch of dry muddiness or muddy dryness ripples exactly as it does in the early stages of an LSD trip, when the external world takes on some of the internal rhythms of the body, its breath and pulse.  (This, apparently, was from the rejected version of Stalker, shot by Rerberg, one of the two such sequences to have made their way into the released version.)

I almost gasped on reading this, because back a few pages (in a 5 page footnote!), I had read the following:

What happened was that approximately half of the film had been shot (and two-thirds of the money spend) in Tallinn, Estonia  . . . when it became obvious  .  .  .  that there was a fault, either with the experimental Kodak film that had been used or with the way it had been stored or processed.

.   .   .

A new director of photography, Leonid Kalashnikov, took over from Rerberg. . . . Kalashnikov was replaced, in turn, by Aleksandr Knyazhinsky, who shot the final version.  It’s impossible to know of the exact extent to which this version differed from the old and damaged one (preserved by the editor Lyudmila Feiginova, in her apartment before she and the film perished  in a fire).  Tarkovsky’s assistent, Maria Chugunova, says that they were ‘almost visually identical’.  Tsymbal thought that Rerberg’s footage was ‘extraodinary’ and ‘included astonishing effects.’

I’m not sure if Stalker is enriched or diminished by the thought that somewhere in time-space exists a sort of Platonic ideal of Stalker.  In any case, from now on every time I watch Stalker I’ll visualize the Room as containing the Rerberg version of Stalker, with all its astonishing effects.

Update: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia was outstanding, probably my favorite film by Ceylan.


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18 Responses to “Giles Harvey on Geoff Dyer on Stalker”

  1. Gravatar of Dirk Dirk
    16. May 2012 at 11:16

    I always enjoy your posts about film. Thanks.

  2. Gravatar of Saturos Saturos
    16. May 2012 at 11:48

    Wow. Now I’ve got that weird feeling I get whenever I suddenly find out something about a friend I never expected to find out, and am not sure how to handle the intimacy…

    As for Dyer’s deepest desire, well I can’t say I don’t sympathize, but that sounds pretty anticlimactic. I suspect what he did there was the Dumbledore stratagem. If I may be permitted to quote from my vast literary expertise, the great bard J.K. Rowling once had Harry Potter ask his Gandalf-figure Dumbledore what he saw in the mirror revealing his deepest wish, just after Harry had glimpsed his dead parents in it. Dumbledore replies that he sees himself holding a pair of thick, woollen socks, as “one can never have enough socks”. Harry reflects later that perhaps he wasn’t being quite truthful. But if taken literally, perhaps it represents an alternative to the mindset which regards “Each new experience as like another nail in the coffin.” Indeed Dyer might agree.

    Well you can’t expect us all to be as cultured as you.

    P.S. Borges is awesome. Labyrinths was once my favourite book. The Immortal, man, The Immortal…

  3. Gravatar of Saturos Saturos
    16. May 2012 at 11:48

    “I’m not sure if Stalker is enriched or diminished by the thought that somewhere in time-space exists a sort of Platonic ideal of Stalker. ”

    Should be enriched, given the Borges quote and what you said about yourself.

  4. Gravatar of Saturos Saturos
    16. May 2012 at 11:49

    Tyler will probably link to this post, it’s actually quite wonderful…

  5. Gravatar of Saturos Saturos
    16. May 2012 at 11:53

    Oh yeah, and good luck with that Turkish movie. It may not be paradise, but it should be something unexpected, and memorable. The pleasure of finding things out…

  6. Gravatar of Morgan Warstler Morgan Warstler
    16. May 2012 at 12:10

    “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.”

    Scott the next time you see a Redi-whip can, keep it turned upright and suck all the gas out of the dispenser.

    Then, you’ll actually have the revelation, but a second later, you won’t be able to remember it.

    So hold your breathe.

  7. Gravatar of 123 123
    16. May 2012 at 12:46

    Scott, couple of times when I was in Tallinn I have walked by the place Stalker was filmed. Once I visited a nightclub that used to be a cinema where Stalker was shown for the first time.

    I have never seen the movie though. Maybe I should see it.

  8. Gravatar of Becky Hargrove Becky Hargrove
    16. May 2012 at 13:01

    “…paradise lives in the next room, or book, or foreign country.” Dad almost never pulls the ‘guilt’ card (Mom is good for that) but last time my ‘greener pastures’ trek got cut short. (please help your Mom!) Of course, Dad forgets how his greener pastures search didn’t really let up till retirement, and neither did that of his father. So now my greener pasture resides in a big box full of never ending notes and scribbles.

  9. Gravatar of W. Peden W. Peden
    16. May 2012 at 14:51

    Whenever I read Scott talk about film or Tyler Cowen talk about food, I can’t help but recall a conversation that occured between the Oxford philosophers P. F. Strawson and Gilbert Ryle. As Strawson recalled Ryle-

    “He was extremely English for one thing… tall, very straight, rather soldierly in bearing; very straight forward, not
    highly aesthetic. I remember once he said to me when I’d been to a concert… “Oh, been hearing some tunes?”.”

  10. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    16. May 2012 at 16:38

    Thanks Dirk.

    Saturos, It’s always good to know someone out that is interested in the same stuff as I am. Money can get so boring after a while.

    Morgan, That would work.

    123, Most people who have never seen it would hate it, at least if they are over 40.

    Becky, Thanks for sharing that.

    W. Peden, Different strokes . . .

  11. Gravatar of 123 123
    16. May 2012 at 20:25

    Scott, then I have got six years left to see it…

  12. Gravatar of Saturos Saturos
    16. May 2012 at 20:47

    Scott, you’re into harry potter as well?! 😀

    Guilty pleasure, I’m one of those that doesn’t even need to take the ones with the “adult” covers when I’m on the train. Which I do every couple of years or so.

    If money gets boring, you could always also turn your interests to the more extended (creative) parts of economics and social science…

    W. Peden, are you a philosophy student/professor/academic?
    Seems you share my interest in the analytics (Scott seems more continental).

    Ryle always was taken by his students as a proof-by-example of the existence of p-zombies.

    (And yet that’s not quite the impression you get if you actually read Concept of Mind, which is still one of my absolute favorite books.)

  13. Gravatar of Frederic Mari Frederic Mari
    17. May 2012 at 01:58

    First, what Saturos said so well. Mostly “Now I’ve got that weird feeling I get whenever I suddenly find out something about a friend I never expected to find out, and am not sure how to handle the intimacy…”

    With regards to “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon”.

    Sure, like all geeks, I can relate. But, on the other hand, who said “Man is not meant to be happy. That’s why you get post-coital depression”…

    I am not sure “Stalker” would work for me but I will give it a try. Ditto Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. The premise is nothing special, it’s been done before but if, as I suspect, it’s relying heavily on imagery, direction and acting, it will be, well, all down to the imagery, the direction, the actors…

  14. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    17. May 2012 at 07:28

    Saturos, I read all the Harry Potter books out loud to my daughter. They were good, but I probably would have enjoyed them much more 40 years ago. Today I tend to focus on authors like Max Sebald, Bolano, Pamuk, Marias, etc.

    I wouldn’t be very good at any sort of blogging other than money–it’s my niche.

    Federic, Thanks, I agree that happiness is not the natural state of affairs.

    I rarely recommend movies to others (except Tyler) as I feel that anyone who would have enjoyed these movies would have seen them already. It’s like the Super Bowl. You don’t need to tell anyone to watch the Super Bowl, if they’re interested, they’d already be watching it. Either someone’s a film geek or not. The pace of these films is glacial. I would not have enjoyed either film on TV.

  15. Gravatar of Saturos Saturos
    17. May 2012 at 09:31

    Yeah, I had that experience watching Seven Samurai.
    (I like Ran and Rashomon, though.)

  16. Gravatar of Saturos Saturos
    17. May 2012 at 11:36

    Wait – you have a daughter??!! How old is she?

  17. Gravatar of Rustem Sharipov Rustem Sharipov
    17. May 2012 at 11:37

    BTW, ZONA means “jail” in Soviet slang (GULAG included).

  18. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    18. May 2012 at 18:12

    Saturos, I love Japanese film. My daughter’s 12.

    Thanks Rustem, I think that was mentioned in the book.

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