James Norton

Stalking the Stalker

The following article was sent to us by James Norton from ITV in London. It nicely complements the photographs of some of the Stalker locations we mentioned in the news item on September 16, 2006. The images on the left were taken by James Norton and are linked to larger format photographs.

Stalker had a repeatedly traumatic production history which began with the search for locations. Evgeny Tsymbal, assistant director on the film, remembers: "Tarkovsky filmed Stalker in Estonia because the original locations, near Isfara and Kanibadam in Tajikistan, became impossible as the result of a powerful earthquake with many victims. People lost their homes and were quartered in hotels, schools and sports-halls. We searched for new locations for almost three months in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, the Crimea and around Moscow. But the location was found when Tarkovsky flew to Tallinn, where he had connections with Estonian students from the Advanced Scriptwriting and Directing courses which he had taught there, and because of his script Hoffmanniana, which had written been for the Tallinnfilm studio. The main location was found unexpectedly near the Jägala river, 25km from Tallinn. They went to see the Jägala waterfall, which they didn't like, but nearby they found an abandoned electrical generating station which had been blown up in 1941 by the Red Army retreating through Estonia. The building belonged to no-one and was the ideal place for the shoot. We later found a second electrical station downstream, an overflow weir. These two ruined constructions became the main locations, providing the style and texture of the whole film, and helped to create the atmosphere of the strange and mystical events of the film. We also shot near the railway bridge over the Pirita river near the road to Leningrad, at a ship repair yard, an abandoned oil processing plant, at an empty mill, and also near an electrical station in the centre of Tallinn. The closing episodes of the film were shot in Moscow."

The shoot began in spring 1977 and was completed by midsummer. However, during processing the film was ruined due to a technical error or, it has been suggested, sabotage. Resisting calls to shelve the film, Tarkovsky rewrote the script, making the Stalker less of a petty criminal and more of a holy fool, and extending its length. He had to replace his cameraman after a falling-out, nearly ran out of funds and suffered a heart attack. Finally, the film was entirely reshot from June to November 1978.

At the beginning of the film, in black and white, the Stalker and his passengers convene in a dingy bar beside a shipyard. They drive to an area of dilapidated warehouses and workshops, a disorienting warren of filthy brickwork. These are now abandoned, fenced off and marked for demolition and redevelopment in an area bounded by the walls of old Tallinn and the mirrored high-rises of its new business centre. The location, poignantly, is now hidden behind the Coca-Cola Plaza, an eleven-screen multiplex in whose stairwell, in ghostly reflection, Tarkovsky's ruined city is mapped onto the Twin Towers in a monolithic poster for Oliver Stone's World Trade Center.

The film continues with the passengers scrambling through a labyrinth of overgrown passages, murky sheds and railway sidings, fired on by police, swept by searchlights, escaping from a monochrome prison. Jumping onto a handcar, they head out along the rails to the Zone. The railway tracks, now disused, run through a transitional, boundary area of empty shacks and car parks in the shadow of a hulking and empty power station and its towering chimney between the old town, the docks and the vast, bunker-like City Hall which commands a view of the Baltic. The sheds that line the tracks are now galleries of vivid graffiti, a metal door sprayed with the image of a cartoon doll, pockmarked by airgun pellets, syringes lying in the grass.

Tarkovsky's initial idea was to give at least the impression that the entire film was one continuous take, something like an almighty tracking shot into the Zone. Such a shot accompanies the characters along the rails, and when the camera angle finally widens it reveals the landscape of the Zone, now in colour.

The Jägala waterfall is celebrated locally and sincerely as the 'The Niagara of Estonia'. It is little wonder that Tarkovsky was so underwhelmed by this merely seven metre drop in the river, but much of the rest of the film was shot very close by. The Zone location is an area of gently rolling pastures and woodland, and that it looks much as it does in the film, military props having been removed just as the Soviets have subsequently withdrawn from the country, is a sign of the invisible threat with which Tarkovsky was able to imbue it. The river itself transports the visitor back to the idylls of the films, its lazy tributaries moving at the same pace as a gliding film dolly, photogenic aquatic plants drifting in the limpid current.

Beyond the vestiges of one of the hydroelectric stations lies a basin where the river widens out and which in the film is covered in a thick layer of scum, whipped up into toxic flakes by the wind. This pool acts as a memorial to the catastrophic legacy of industrial pollution left by the Soviet Union. The film was thought to have prefigured the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred a few months before Tarkovsky's death, the contaminated area known ever since as the Zone, which was also the term by which the Gulag was known, as the Russian audience would have recognised.

The choice of location and this deadly foam tuned out to be fatal, if sound recordist Vladimir Sharun's explanation is correct: "Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured poisonous liquids downstream." To this he attributes not only allergic reactions from the crew, but the eventual deaths from bronchial cancer of Tarkovsky himself, his wife Larissa and the director's favourite actor Anatoly Solonitsyn. Although Estonia, now a member of the EU, has counteracted much of this environmental damage, there are pockets of enduring contamination, such as the town of Sillamäe near the Russian border, which in Soviet times was a secret uranium extraction centre.

The wishing room is not shown in the film. The writer dares not enter for fear of confronting his true desires, the scientist has to be restrained from blowing it up. Stalker, ultimately, is about a threshold, the forces that guard the threshold, the irreconcilable spaces it separates, the fears and desires that inhibit its crossing. The threshold cannot be crossed, although it is open, because the expedition, the film itself, like Borges' story The Circular Ruins, whose title could describe the setting, is a dream within a dream. The space and narrative of Stalker is a circle that deceptively appears to be a straight line, curvature of space-time.

Stalker and Tarkovsky's last two films, Nostalgia, filmed in Italy, and The Sacrifice, in Sweden, are sometimes seen as a hermetic trilogy on the themes of faith and cataclysm. As Estonia sheds its association with Russia and definitively consolidates its independent identity, perhaps film historians of the future will consider this to be a trilogy of films made outside Tarkovsky's native Russia, and that its most poignant legacy could be the realisation that he had already left home and begun his exile without knowing it. Film locations vanish as the imaginary is overgrown by the real, they do not sustain the marks of history. It is to the films themselves that we must look to reveal what only film can capture: spectral voices, the passage of time, traces of psychic wounds, relics of a lost future.

The sequence of the dream in the film is accompanied by the voice of the Stalker's wife reciting part of the Book of Revelation. But in Tarkovsky's original script, the Stalker utters a prayer, itself then effaced, for the preservation of place: "Grant that it may be thus forever: that walls remain walls, dead-ends remain dead-ends, roads remain roads, and nobody remains cheated..."

Thanks to Evgeny Tsymbal, Pille Rünk and Tom Lasica.