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Copyright © Geoff Dyer 2012

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in the United Kingdom by Canongate Books Ltd, 2012

First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2012.

Cover design by W. H. Chong

Page design by M. Kristen Bearse

ISBN 9781921922060

eISBN 9781921921568

Cover Page

Title Page

Praise

About the Author

Dedication

Epigraph

ONE

TWO

Epigraph

Films By Tarkovsky

Notes

Acknowledgments

Copyright

PRAISE FOR GEOFF DYER

‘Possibly the best living writer in Britain.’
Daily Telegraph

‘Dyer writes like a dream.’
Australian

‘A national treasure.’ Zadie Smith

‘Dyer is a witty and concise observer of landscapes: social, geographical and emotional…His eccentric charm and barbed perceptiveness will hook you to the end.’

The Times

‘One of my favourite of all contemporary writers.’

Alain de Botton

‘His work exudes an interpretative energy that breathes ideas like spring water on ancient stone, and goes straight to the heart.’
Canberra Times

‘Geoff Dyer is a true original—one of those rare voices in contemporary literature that never ceases to surprise, disturb and delight. Risky, breathtakingly candid, intellectual, cool, outrageous, laconic and sometimes shocking, Geoff Dyer is a must-read for our confused and perplexing times.’ William Boyd

‘Dyer’s style is studiedly conversational and discursive, frequently very funny.’
Telegraph

TO REBECCA

I watched the film until the film itself became a kind of blindness.

—G. C. Waldrep, ‘D. W. Griffith at Gettysburg’

After all, the best way of talking about what you love is to speak of it lightly.

—Albert Camus, ‘A Short Guide to
Towns Without a Past’

AN EMPTY BAR,
possibly not even open, with a single table, no bigger than a small round table, but higher, the sort you lean against—there are no stools—while you stand and drink. If floorboards could speak these look like they could tell a tale or two, though the tales would turn out to be one and the same, ending with the same old lament (after a few drinks people think they can walk all over me), not just in terms of what happens here but in bars the world over. We are, in other words, already in a realm of universal truth. The barman comes in from the back—he’s wearing a white barman’s jacket—lights a cigarette and turns on the lights, two fluorescent tubes, one of which doesn’t work properly: it flickers. He looks at the flickering light. You can see him thinking, ‘That needs fixing’, which is not the same thing at all as ‘I’ll fix that today’, but which is very nearly the same as ‘It’ll never be fixed.’ Daily life is full of these small repeated astonishments, hopes (that it might somehow have fixed itself overnight) and resignations (it hasn’t and won’t). A tall man—a customer!—enters the bar, puts his knapsack under the table, the small round table you lean against while drinking. He’s tall but not young, balding, obviously not a terrorist, and there’s no way that his knapsack could contain a bomb, but this unremarkable action—putting a knapsack under the table in a bar—is not one that can now go unremarked, especially by someone who first saw
Stalker
(on Sunday, February 8, 1981) shortly after seeing
Battle of Algiers.
He orders something from the barman. The fact that the barman’s jacket is white emphasizes how not terribly clean it is. Although it’s a jacket it also serves as a towel, possibly as a dishcloth, and maybe as a hankie too. The whole place looks like it could be dirty but it’s too dingy to tell and the credits in yellow Russian letters—sci-fi Cyrillic—do not exactly clarify the situation.

It’s the kind of bar men meet in prior to a bank job that is destined to go horribly wrong, and the barman is the type to take no notice of anything that’s not his business and the more things that are not his business the better it is for him, even if it means that business is so slow as to be almost nonexistent. Far as he’s concerned, long as he’s here, minding his own business and wearing his grubby
barman’s jacket, he’s doing his job, and if no one comes and no one wants anything and nothing needs doing (the wonky light can wait, as can most things) it’s all the same to him. Still smoking, he trudges over with a coffeepot (he’s one of those barmen who has the knack of imbuing the simplest task with grudge, making it feel like one of the labours of a minimum-wage Hercules), pours some coffee for the stranger, goes out back again and leaves him to it, to his coffee, to his sipping and waiting. Of that there can be no doubt: the stranger is definitely waiting for something or someone.

A CAPTION:
some kind of meteorite or alien visitation has led to the creation of a miracle: the Zone. Troops were sent in and never returned. It was surrounded by barbed wire and a police cordon…

This caption was added at the behest of the studio, Mosfilm, who wanted to stress the fantastical nature of the Zone (where the subsequent action will be set). They also wanted to make sure that the ‘bourgeois’ country where all this happened could not be identified with the USSR. Hence this mysterious business of the Zone all
happened—according to the caption—‘in our small country’, which put everyone off the scent because the USSR, as we all know, covered a very large area and Russia was (still is) huge too. ‘Russia…’, I can hear Laurence Olivier saying it now, in the Barbarossa episode of
The World at War.
‘The boundless motherland of Russia.’ Faced with the German invasion of 1941, Russians fell back on the traditional strategy, the strategy that had done for Napoleon and would do for Hitler too: ‘Trade space for time’, a message Tarkovsky took to heart.

THE SOUND OF WATER DRIPPING.
We peer through an interior set of doors, into a room. In film-script shorthand ‘Int’ means Interior and ‘Ext’ Exterior. This is a kind of ‘Super-Int’ or ‘Int-int’. Inside already, the camera inches deeper inside. It’s as if Tarkovsky has started where Antonioni left off in the famous inside-out shot at the end of
The Passenger
and taken it a stage further: inside-
in
. As slow as that—but without the colour. Antonioni’s earlier
Red Desert
(1964) would, as the title suggests, be unimaginable without the colour. The colour—Monica
Vitti’s green coat—is what makes it wonderful but for the thirty-four-year-old Tarkovsky, interviewed in 1966, the year he completed his second feature,
Andrei Rublev,
it was ‘the worst of his films after
The Cry.’ Because
of the colour, because Antonioni got so seduced by ‘Monica Vitti’s red hair against the mists’, because ‘the colour has killed the feeling of truth.’ Well. This takes a bit of chewing and digesting. Take away the colour and what are you left with? You’re left with
L’Avventura,
I suppose (also with Monica Vitti), and you’re so bored you long for colour, for something to make time pass or to stop you minding that it’s not passing. Since we’re speaking about truth and how it feels, I feel honour bound to admit that
L’Avventura
is the nearest I have ever come to pure cinematic agony. I saw it one summer, in a tiny cinema in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris where the screen was no bigger than a big telly. (A black-and-white film, in Italian, with French subtitles, in Paris, in August, in my late twenties: a case study in loneliness.) The only way I was able to get through it was by saying to myself
I can’t bear this for another second,
even though there was not actually such a thing as a second in
L’Avventura.
A minute was the minimum increment of temporal measurement. Every
second lasted a minute, every minute lasted an hour, and an hour a year, and so on. Trade time for a bigger unit of time. When I finally emerged into the Parisian twilight I was in my early thirties.
¹

Even to describe the black-and-white of
Stalker
as black-and-white is to tint what we’re seeing with an inappropriate suggestion of the rainbow. Technically this concentrated sepia was achieved by filming in colour and printing in black-and-white. The result is a kind of submonochrome in which the spectrum has been so compressed that it might turn out to be a source of energy, like oil and almost as dark, but with a gold sheen too. As well as the dripping there is a certain amount of creaking
and other spooky noises that are not easy to explain. We are in the room now, looking at a bed.

A TABLE, A BEDSIDE TABLE,
by definition far lower than the table in the bar. The rumble of some kind of transport causes the contents of the table to rattle. The vibrations are enough to make a glass of water shudder halfway across the table. Remember this. Nothing that happens in
Stalker
is an accident and yet, at the same time, it is full of accidents. Next to the table, in the bed, a woman is sleeping. Next to her is a little girl with a head scarf, and next to her, the man who is presumably her father. The rumble of the train grows louder. The whole place is shaking. It’s amazing anyone can sleep through a racket like that, especially as the train is also blaring out a recording of the ‘Marseillaise’. The camera tracks across the people in bed and then tracks back, moves one way very slowly and then moves back just as slowly. Antonioni liked long takes but Tarkovsky took this a stage further. ‘If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges,
a special intensity of attention.’ This is Tarkovsky’s aesthetic in a nutshell. At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last—and no one can concentrate on anything—for longer than about two seconds. Soon people will not be able to watch films like Theo Angelopoulos’s
Ulysses’ Gaze
or to read Henry James because they will not have the concentration to get from one interminable scene or sentence to the next. The time when I might have been able to read late-period Henry James has passed and because I have not read lateperiod 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. As for
Ulysses’ Gaze,
in spite of the fact that it starred an implausible Harvey Keitel, it was another nail in the coffin of European art cinema (a coffin, cynics would say, made up almost entirely of nails), opening the floodgates to everything that was not art because anything seemed preferable to having
to sit through a film like that, especially since the whole thing could be boiled down, anyway, to a single still photograph—a statue of Lenin gliding along the Danube on a barge, a petrified Pharaoh floating down the Nile of history—by Josef Koudelka.

THE RATTLE OF THE TRAIN
subsides and there is just the sound of dripping again and we’re back where we were a few moments ago, looking at the bed. The man wakes up and gets out of bed. Unusually, he sleeps without his trousers but with his sweater on. For a long time I thought that American men always slept in their underwear. It didn’t occur to me that this was a cinematic convention, something that men did in films so that when they got up in the morning, on-screen, they would not be naked. To sleep without trousers but
with
a sweater does not make sense with regard to any system of conventions. It just seems weird and not terribly hygienic. Another weird thing is that although he is keen not to wake up his wife, he puts on his trousers
and
his heavy boots before clomping quietly into the kitchen, but I suppose his thinking is that if she can sleep through the train going by and the
blare of the ‘Marseillaise’—to say nothing of the ambient creaking, groaning and squeaking—then a bit of foot traffic is not going to make any difference. It’s also possible that she is only pretending to sleep. We see the back of his head. The man—and although we don’t know who he is yet, for the sake of simplicity, I am going to introduce a slight spoiler at this point and disclose that he is none other than the eponymous Stalker—emerges from the bedroom and looks in through the doors, as the camera looked in a few minutes earlier, when he was in the bed, the difference being that he is no longer in the bed. By any standards it’s a slow start to a movie. Officials from Goskino, the central government agency for film production in the USSR, complained about this, hoping the film could be ‘a little more dynamic, especially at the start.’ Tarkovsky erupted: it actually needed to be slower and duller at the start so that anyone who had walked into the wrong theatre would have time to leave before the action got under way. Taken aback by the ferocity of this response, one of the officials explained that he was just trying to see things from the audience’s point of view… He was not able to finish. Tarkovsky couldn’t give a toss about the audience. He only cared about the point of view
of two people, Bresson and Bergman. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!
²

THE MAN WALKS OFF
to the right but the camera stays where he was, seeing what he was seeing, what he no longer sees—which is his wife, getting blurrily out of bed. He goes into the kitchen. Turns on the tap, ignites the boiler, cleans his teeth. A bulb comes on. Nice: you know, brighten the place up a bit and god knows it could do with a bit of brightening up. Tarkovsky has always been opposed to symbolic readings of the images in his film but one wonders about the significance of this bulb: has the
man just had a
bright idea
? If so, it turns out to be not such a good idea: the bulb flares extra-bright and then goes off completely, as if it’s blown itself out. It may not be clear which country we’re in but wherever we are it seems that getting reliable lighting might be a problem.

IN THIS INSTANCE,
there’s a more specific problem, and it’s called the wife. Either she was awake all the time, or was woken up by the train, the ‘Marseillaise’, and her husband’s creaking around. She’s turned the dimmer into the opposite of a dimmer, into a brightener, has lit the place up so brightly that a second later it’s plunged into near-darkness again. Their home could do with rewiring, evidently.

You know that expression ‘famous last words’? We are naturally curious about people’s last words but it would be interesting to compile an exhaustive list of the first words—not just sounds, actual words—spoken in films, run them through a computer and subject the results to some kind of processing and analysis. In this film the first words are spoken by the wife and they are: ‘Why did you take my watch?’ Yes, the film’s hardly started, she’s only just woken up and, from a husbandly point of view, she’s
already
nagging.
Nagging him and calling him a thief. No wonder he wants out. But of course we’re also getting the
big
theme introduced: time. Tarkovsky is saying to the audience: Forget about previous ideas of time. Stop looking at your watches, this is not going to proceed at the speed of
Speed
but if you give yourself over to Tarkovskytime then the helter-skelter mayhem of
The Bourne Ultimatum
will seem more tedious than
L’Avventura.
‘I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is
time,’
Tarkovsky has said, ‘whether for time wasted, time lost, or time that is yet to be gained.’ This sentiment is only a couple of words away from being in perfect accord with something even the most moronic cinemagoer would agree with. Those words are ‘a good’, as in ‘What people go to the cinema for is
a good
time, not to sit there waiting for something to happen.’ (Some people lie outside any consensus of why we go to the cinema. They don’t go to the cinema at all. For Strike, a character in Richard Price’s novel
Clockers,
a movie,
any
movie, is just ‘ninety minutes of sitting there’—a remark that could be taken as a negative endorsement of Tarkovsky’s claim.)