Lost Harmony: Tarkovsky's "The Mirror" and "The Stalker" Author(s): Michael Dempsey Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 12-17 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1212075 . Accessed: 27/09/2011 00:04

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http://www.jstor.org cious in the context of the contemporary com- as inferior, as helpless, as irrational, as passive; mercial cinema (it was, of course, produced the acceptance of herself as an image for the independently). The logical corollary is that gaze of the male; crucially, the idea of mar- it also cannot proceed as far in its thematic riage as norm. At the end of the film the em- development, in terms of a revolutionarybreak blems of male power are either transferred to with the past. Nonetheless, beside today's the woman or surrendered (Fran flies the heli- weary rehashes of the attitudes and narrative copter, the surviving male relinquishes the rifle procedures of the Hollywood past, it stands to the zombies). The film even offers an equiv- as a reminder of the degree to which traditional alent for the rescue of Madlyn in Fran's un- narrative can be bent and stretched into pro- born child, carried out of the clutches of the gressive forms.* past towards an uncertain and precarious The parallels between the two films are future. There is also, throughout the film, a striking. Like the occupants of the "house of strong element of play, in the stylized comic- fiction"-though in a less elaborated and com- strip violence, in the film's awareness of itself plex way-Romero's zombies, mindlessly grav- as genre movie, as fantasy: the audience is itating to the shopping mall, represent the invited to participate in a macabre and bloody habits of the past from which the living charac- game that manages to remain, by virtue of the ters must strive to extricate themselves (the stylization, at once fundamentally serious and make-up of the ghosts in the last part of Riv- good-humored. ette's film, as they lose their potency, is almost It is clear that the most audacious and radi- identical). The film never reaches anything cal films will continue to be made outside comparable to the positive image of women the commercial mainstream. Yet the co-pres- in Celine and Julie, but it follows Fran's devel- ence in seventies cinema of Celine and Julie opment as she progressively casts off the en- and Dawn of the Dead suggests the possibility trapments of patriarchy: notions of the woman of significant parallel developments in differ- ent spheres of independent film-making, at different removes from the *Further, I would not be prepared to assert that Celine mainstream. Our and Julie is the greater film, a caveat that may offset any delight in story-telling and story-hearing, while temptation to misread one as seeking to establish formal it needs to be carefully scrutinized, does not innovation as an absolute criterion of excellence. have to be abandoned.

MICHAELDEMPSEY Lost Harmony Tarkovsky's The Mirror and The Stalker

The vagaries of distribution, and probably Tarkovsky's first feature, My Name Is Ivan politics, brought Soviet director Andrei Tar- (Ivan's Childhood) played some American kovsky's two most recent films, The Mirror dates during the early sixties, when "art movies" (1974) and The Stalker (1980), to Filmex this were an exotic genre unto themselves here, but year simultaneously, despite the gap between it has seldom been revived since then. A cut their original release dates. version of Andrei Roublev (1966) has been It is hard to think of a widely admired film- appearing from time to time in occasional maker who seems more than enigmatic Tar- museum or one-night theater showings lately; kovsky. Partly, this stems from the rarity of and Solaris (1972), likewise cut, has become a Russian movies on American screens, though fixture in the cult circuit and among sci-fi the maybe recent art-house successes of Mos- lovers. Few Americans, then, can have seen his cow Does Not Believe in Tears (surprise winner films often enough to evaluate them confi- of 1981's Oscar for Best Foreign Film) and of dently; fewer still seem to have knowledge of Oblomov will loosen the up situation a bit. enough contemporary Russian movies to place 12 them in any adequate context. Added to which, sorrows of memory. His expansive crane shots we have the vague stories that float out of of the steppe where a teenage boy attempts Russia from time to time about Tarkovsky's to cast a mighty bell, in Andrei Roublev, or "difficulties" with the Soviet establishment, that film's final shift from black-and-white for which is said to object to his style of movie- the brutality and loneliness of medieval Russia making, supposedly because his style and con- to color for the vivid icons of the almost un- cerns are too rarified for the "masses" who, known title character express a heroic optim- the cliche has it, must be appealed to with the ism about the force of artistic expressionarrayed clear-cut, propagandizing "boy-meets-tractor" against all the forms of dark powers in the epics of Socialist Realism. The long years be- world. Similarly, although the memory-releas- tween Tarkovsky's productions, the rationale ing ability of the planet Solaris unbalances for letting him work at all despite all these the scientists who work there by conjuring up objections by the government, the arrange- phantasms from their tormented pasts, it also ments between him and the authorities-we enables the strongest of them to purge himself remain in the dark about all these, even after of numbing alienation from life. When the accounts by Westerners with good Russian astronaut's late wife, who had killed herself contacts, like Herbert Marshall and Ivor Mon- over intractable problems with the marriage, tagu (Sight and Sound, Spring 1976 & Spring reappears as a floating ghost, her very move- 1973). ment through the air, eerily soft and lovely, But even if all these mysteries cleared up and the delicate beauty of actress Natalie Bon- tomorrow, Tarkovsky would still have an aura darchuk are Tarkovsky's means of imbuing us of the enigmatic, the intractable, the ineffable as well as his deadened hero with revivified about him. Like his closest Western counter- pleasure in existence. At his best, Tarkovsky part, Stanley Kubrick, he tends to make what is enraptured, as much by movies as by his Gene Youngblood once called "trance" films, favorite abstractions, which is why he is able characterizedby slow, dreamlike pacing created to prevent them from drying out into mere with large, static tableaux, stately camera abstractions. He is a kind of Walt Whitman, movements, and an extensive use of classical with a sense of moonstruck awe instead of a music. Instead of the Marxist certainties prom- barbaric yawp. ulgated by the rulers of his country, Tarkovsky But something has changed in The Mirror pursues a degree of uncertainty, which can and The Stalker; the Tarkovsky spirit of strug- be called mystical or merely vague, depending gling but finally soaring hope has clouded. on your outlook. Implicitly, his style and his In these films, he works with much the same concern with large abstractions like Love and material as before. With its collage of memo- Nature deny that materialism and rationality ries from a boy's rural life with his abandoned can explain everything. His taste for cosmic mother, plus concurrent newsreels of World mystery has a religious tinge which makes him War II, the Stalin era, and more recent times, comparable to Alexandr Solshenitzyn, except The Mirror reworks and expands the earth- that he replaces the writer's overbearing nine- bound aspects of Solaris, which are marked teenth-century Russian Orthodoxy with a by marital and father-son agonies in a pristine mistier, virtually oceanic pantheism and natural setting. The Stalker, contrasting a humanism. silted-over, trashed-out urban society with the All by themselves, words like these might allure of a mysterious, cordoned-off natural seem to be describing an impossibly dewy-eyed wonderland known as The Zone, is viewable as naif. But Tarkovsky is almost always able to a contemporary companion piece to Andrei ground his preoccupations in poetic, tactile Roublev, which presents equally sharp con- images. The early shots of the anomic astro- trasts between dazzling landscapes and the naut in Solaris, staring at grasses as they ripple barbaric wounds inflicted on their inhabitants hypnotically beneath the surface of a pond, in the name of what passes for civilization. could be his signature shots; the mesmerizing, But in The Mirror, the broken home, the lost balletic sway of the grasses bears witness to a loves remain irretrievable, both in fact and powerfully infectious belief in the natural world through any form of contemplative consola- as the embodiment of a primal peace which tion, including the artistry which brings them we can regain. This vision of lost harmony is back to life for us. And in The Stalker the what haunts every aspect of Tarkovsky's work, promise of The Zone-that a Room somewhere from his choice of colors to his liking for en- in its midst can make one's profoundest wishes tranced tracking shots through forests to his come true-is not merely betrayed, it is pathe- recurring interest in the commingled joys and tically betrayed, leaving the horrors of pollut- 13 ing modernity dominant and the battered title because nobody, nothing quite manages to character clinging to the remnants of his quest take this boy's place as either an organizing for transcendence. principle or a center of consciousness. Herbert Marshall's account of how Soviet Tarkovsky tries to place another boy, Ignat, authorities and several of Tarkovsky's fellow in this role. Evidently a surrogate for himself, directors reacted when they first saw The Ignat lives with his mother during the World Mirror has them all complaining about its War II years in a small cabin-like home near a obscurity, its refusal (or its inability) to make meadow, surrounded by luxuriant trees and itself easily understood by a mass audience. other greenery which become seedbeds of his For different reasons, naturally, they all sound memories. These, in turn, reach us partially amazingly like baby moguls in Hollywood via narrated comments by a male voice which scratching their heads over this artsy whacko appears to represent the grown-up Ignat/Tar- who, if you can believe it, doesn't like money. kovsky. Breaking into them further are occa- However, wrong reasons or not, they are right sional quotations from the poems of Tarkov- in their basic observation; The Mirror is an sky's father, who (as fictionalized in the film) extremely puzzling film. The looking glass that has left Ignat's mother, disgusted with his it offers us is not merely cracked but shattered, failure at the age of forty to escape what he and we are seeing the jagged, jumbled reflec- considers his innate mediocrity as a writer. tions of its scattered shards. Tarkovsky begins In addition, shots of the Spanish Civil War, this 90-minute montage of memories, stock the sufferings of bedraggled Soviet troops footage, and fantasy with black-and-white struggling against the Nazi invaders, and hero- shots of a stuttering boy whom an offscreen worshipping Chinese crowds acclaiming Mao therapist is trying to cure with hypnosis. As the jump in and out of the film's imagistic flow. boy fights his recalcitrant tongue and finally Sometimes immediate connections between breaks through to coherent speech ("I can this archival material and the other shots are speak!"), we suppose that he will turn out to instantly obvious, as when Tarkovsky shows be the focal figure of the movie. But he never us children in Spain forcibly placed aboard reappears; his predicament and his victory trains for removal from war-torn areas or dead over it are evidently meant to be metaphorical. soldiers dangling from tree-caught parachutes. The problem is, to extend the metaphor in a And even when a specific reason for this or way that Tarkovsky probably did not intend, that piece of editing does not leap promptly that the film's eruptions of semi-disconnected, to mind, we can view the newsreel footage in a non-narrative scenes feel like the boy's stutter general way-as, for instance, History, in con- yet do not break through to his final burst of trast to the rest of the movie, which may be clarity. The Mirror finally speaks only dimly taken to represent what the capital H always

Natalie Bondarchuk in SOLARIS

14 fails to encompass of human existence. But this "generality" (this blurriness, in fact)- which extends to Tarkovsky's use of two ac- tresses, one young, the other (his actual mother) old to portray Ignat's mother-eventually overcomes the film, leaving it a tantalizing but unknit collection of "haunting" shots. But, leaving aside judgments like this one, which is based on only one look at the film, The Mirror is approachable as a thesaurus of Tarkovsky'spast interests and the darker light that he is throwing on them here and in The Stalker. Again, he focuses on the breakup of family life, expressed here as an impacted mass of reveries (a neighboring house bursting into flames repeatedly, slow-motion shots of rain pouring into Ignat's home and his mother wallowing ecstatically beneath the debris that the water brings crashing down), like mental loops. Although Tarkovsky is aware of family life's psychic strains and repressions, he con- tinually returns to it as a source of both loving intimacy and poetic imagination-which, of THE MIRROR course, may make him as suspect in certain American circles as he may be with the Russian images of natural flux and flow refracted film establishment. Ignat's mother he makes through the prism of childhood, when every as luminous an icon of mercurial beauty and detail of daily life, however, commonplace, persistent devotion as the resurrected wife of had an aura of enigma about it. Accordingly, Solaris. The first image of her, as a young the most resonant moments of this movie are woman sitting on a fence and gazing out over those that capture these jewelled fragments a glorious meadow, is characteristic, almost of Ignat's "past recaptured:" a reverie of his a John Ford shot of the Woman Who Waits. mother levitating above her sickbed, a winter Later, a co-worker at the printing plant where bird nesting momentarily in his cap, a sudden she works (ever fearful, like everyone else, of squall rising without warning to shake a field a printing mistake which might land everybody and then vanishing just as suddenly, to name in political trouble) accuses her of being too just a few. At its best, The Mirror does catch independent, and others chime in that they the sensation which Tarkovsky's father headily are surprised her husband stayed with her evokes when he writes of "Life's swift needle as long as he did. But Tarkovsky saves a big (which) draws me on like a thread." But be- close-up for her dismissal of these comments. cause neither Ignat nor his mother nor any Obviously, he is fascinated by the dignity that other consciousness generates enough force or he perceives in the figure of the abandoned clarity, this vortex of images finally registers wife. Yet he cannot (or so one viewing makes on our own memories like distant, faded recol- it seem) clarify the repeated failures of his men lections from past life (or movies) which, when to deal straightforwardlywith these examples re-examined, prove to be either distorted or of female grace. The Mirror suggest that Ignat even nonexistent. The result is a pervasive as an adult is replaying his father's infidelity, sense of chaos, breakdown, the beauties of yet it is hard to grasp why (without dragging in the past not crystallized in art but whirling one's own speculation), given the almost incan- away, unrecaptured and finally extinguished. descent idealization of the wife/mother here, The Mirror, with its pantheistic-lyrical whirl- which does not carry with it any of the ambigu- pool of regret and old desire, ends up a beau- ous charge that so often accompanies the tiful bewilderment. equivalent character in American movies and With The Stalker, Tarkovsky has returned literature. to straight-line, though not conventional, The salient emotion at the heart of The story-telling. The hero, a single-minded vision- Mirror appears to be a deep longing for a state ary, sneaks two outlanders (American, like of Eden-before-the-Fall innocence and bliss, himself, in the film's loose source, a novel which Tarkovsky typically locates in exquisite called Picnic by the Roadside, but evidently 15 Russian in the movie, though metaphorically long to speed things up, only to be held back All People) into The Zone. They are a Writer by the inexorable measured drift of the film, and a Scientist, both as anomic as the space- which will reach its goals in its own good time, man of Solaris and both, like their guide, not ours. This effect translates directly into nameless. Whatever may have created the cinematic terms the frustrations of exploring Zone and its reputed magic (hints center on a in any form (for knowledge or enlightenment meteor, like one which is said to have crashed as well as new realms)-the dogged labor, the into Siberia some years ago), the two way- blind alleys, the slowness of discovery, the farers, each a variation on your basic disillu- difficulty of making leaps to new ideas or sioned intellectual, are making their foray, approaches. This is a primary component of past barbed wire and border guards, in the the "trance" style, and Tarkovsky uses it in hope that their shaman can lead them to a The Stalker, both before and after we and his renewal of sapped faith and vigor. As they characters make it into the Zone. proceed over land which proves to have some But our arrival there is not like our arrival science-fiction traits, like odorless flowers, in Kubrick's Louis XIV room after a slit-scan for instance, the thought arises that Tarkovsky trip into intergalactic space or, to bring up is presenting us with an elongated (165 minute) another comparison that is not as far-fetched episode of "The Twilight Zone." At times, as it may seem at first, our arrival in Oz. Both when the Writer and the Scientist fall to dis- of these are enchanted realms, alive with mys- coursing about the roles and the weaknesses tery and promise, hot with blazing colors and of art and science, the parallel with the late weird sounds. But the Zone, even compared Rod Serling's show-ending aphorisms seems to the hellhole from which the Stalker and his even stronger. But the climax of their sortie companions emerge, is quite unprepossessing, silences them and these thoughts, when the neither beautiful nor especially otherworldly, Room not only proves impotent to live up to like the natural wonderlands of Solaris, Andrei its reputation but also turns out to be a near- Roublev, and The Mirror. Instead, it looks twin of the Stalker's wretched house, where initially like an ordinary, dowdy wilderness. he ekes out bare subsistence with his wife Accordingly, Tarkovsky brings up the intensity and their crippled little girl. The Stalker, of his color just slightly from the monochrome then, is a negative image of both Solaris and look of the opening scenes and never makes it Andrei Roublev. Their journeys through hell ravishing, as he has done in the past. For the end in serenity; here the result is a deepened Zone, too, proves to be a large illusion. Even disillusionment. though the Stalker, for instance, tries to lay The Stalker begins in tinted black-and-white, down the law about how his charges must almost as if there were mildew in the emulsion. proceed if they are to reach the Room, they Yet the effect is stingingly clear as the camera violate them several times without coming to slowly (slowly) moves over the hero and his any harm. Much of the land proves to be as family as they sleep in their hovel on the fringes littered with civilization's garbage as the outer of a pollution-spewing modern city (actually world does; again reversing key images of located in Estonia). Just as an aura of latent, Solaris, Tarkovsky shows us waterways in the lyrical possibility emanated from the dacha, Zone choked with junk; even with armed the woods, and the meadows in Solaris and patrols and a fence to protect it, the region from the wind-ruffled foliage and vistas of cannot remain clean. The trio's long struggle The Mirror, the opening sequences of The through some kind of subterranean culvert Stalker exude bleakness, rattiness, stagnation suggests an abandoned subway or sewer sys- like noxious fumes. It is as though the whole tem. There is no Yellow Brick Road in the world has taken on the character of a weedy, Zone. diseased railroad siding. Tarkovsky uses his What holds this threnody of gloom together slow and pacing camerawork to heighten our and makes it moving is not just Tarkovsky's desire to break out and brave the Zone with poeticizing style, though it functions with eerie his three This explorers. method links him to brilliance throughout the film. It is the image what Kubrick did with similar pacing in 2001, created by Alexander Kaidanovsky in the title which also centers on the lure of exploring the role. Looking as though he had just crawled unknown for people mired in mundane life at out of a Gulag or an inner city ghetto or some its most stultifying. All through 2001, watching post-cataclysmbomb shelter, this half-demented apes stumble toward their great discovery of seer-freak, with a bald head and a contorted the bone as tool-weapon and astronauts float face that looks torn from a boulder, is the most endlessly through their Jupiter Mission, we vivid human element in Tarkovsky's work 16 since Natalie Bondarchuk's wife. One weak- in his crazy, dogged hero, who persists in ness of Tarkovsky's allegorizing methods has believing that the Room has redeeming forces been the tendency of most of his characters, yet to reveal. We leave him a certifiable fool, both their natures and their very faces, to fade yet perhaps a genuine seer as well. in recollection, like most of The Mirror and the Stalker's two companions. But Kaidanov- This is also where Tarkovsky leaves us, sky's face is an icon of pain to place alongside poised between the edge of despair's abyss and Umberto D. When the Room proves to be the compensating incandescence of his images. sterile, we realize that he has lost absolutely Their heavy, intoxicating ether works on us the final glimmer of hope for something re- even when it is at his most obscure or senten- sembling a truly human life. His chastened tious, like some ancient mariner's spell. It is return to the outer world produces one stagger- not a brew for everyone, commissar or capi- ing shot of a monstrous factory beside a river, talist; there is no use in pretending that his along which he and his family walk in the fore- brand of work can expect any easier sledding ground, while the factory spews masses of in our commercial film world than in his own putrefaction as if to poison the very universe. totalitarian one. Until we are able to see them Yet Tarkovsky does not pitch him headlong more often, these strange pictures-exasperat- into the utter despondency which seems to ing and fascinating by turns-will remain as await him, for he implies a saving resilience enigmatic to us as their maker.

LINDAWILLIAMS ANDB. RUBYRICH The Right of Re-Vis Michelle Citron's Daughter Rite *

The vast majority of literary and visual images Turning Point. But even though they focus of motherhood comes to us filtered through a collec- on the complex of emotions contained in the tive or individual male consciousness. . . . We need mother-daughter bond, such films are charac- to know out what, of that welter of image-making terized by a hidden misogyny. Pretending to and is worth thought-spinning, salvaging, if only sanctify the institution of to understand better an idea so crucial in motherhood, they history, more often exalt its ideal while a condition which has been wrestedfrom the mothers merely punish- and the individual women who themselves to buttress the power of the fathers. ing humiliating -Adrienne Rich1 participate in it. At the heart of all these representations of Perhaps our current lies in humaniz- responsibility the bond is a psychological our own activities so that will communicate mother-daughter ing they truth that has been much discussed in recent more effectively with all women. Hopefully we will but which has aspire to more than women's art flooding the mu- writing3 perhaps been best de- seum and gallery circuit (and screens). Perhaps a scribed by Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduc- feminist art will only emerge when we become wholly tion of Mothering.4 According to Chodorow a responsible for our own work, for what becomes son must ultimately repress or deny his original of it, who sees it, and who is nourished by it. For a attachment to and identification with the feminist artist, whatever her style, the prime audi- mother's body to take on a more abstract and ence at this time is other women. less primally connected identification with the -Lucy Lippard2 father. But a daughter undergoes no such shift Within the form of the melodramatic Holly- in gender identification; her primary wood "woman's film," the mother-daughter identification with the mother remains with relationship has long been a favorite theme, her always. This "oedipal asymmetry" causes from Stella Dallas to Mildred Pierce to The the daughter to continue to experience herself as unseparated, continuous with others, mak- *Distributed by Iris Films, Box 5353, Berkeley, Califor- ing it difficult for the daughter to separate nia, 94705. off from her mother to claim her own life. It is 17