Zona

I seem to have written rather often about Andrei Tarkovsky on this blog, but perhaps it's not so surprising - how many other directors made two major films about possibly-sentient landscapes?  Last week I went to watch one of them, Stalker, at the BFI Southbank, where there is currently a 'Mirroring Tarkovsky' season.  It is some years since I last saw the film - this was the first time since having read Geoff Dyer's book about Stalker, Zona (2013), which was fun to turn to again after seeing the film.  One scene I had forgotten about is where the three men have come to a temporary halt on their journey and the earth seems to undulate like waves.  In my memory of Stalker the landscape of the Zone was mysterious but entirely free of any special effects.  This strangely rippling ground prompts from Dyer a couple of the many humorous digressions that make up much of his book and which some readers will find self-indulgent (on quicksand and LSD trips).  But he also provides the interesting background information that this footage came from an earlier stage of filming, when there were more science fiction elements than appeared in the final cut.  However, he doesn't fully explain what is going on here...

'The little islands of grass do not ripple.  The trees in the background do not ripple: it's just the boggy-looking dried earth that ripples and then, gradually, stops rippling.  How does Tarkovsky do this, how does he achieve these effects?  Or are they not effects?  Was it simply luck that he came across a patch of ripply quicksand and then it started snowing where, a few seconds earlier, it had been dusting and blossoming?  Is this part of the random magic of cinema that Herzog discovered in a sequence of footage shot by Timothy (Grizzly Man) Treadwell?  Treadwell plunges into and then out of shot, leaving the camera to record only the wind-whipped bushes and foliage. 'In his action-movie mode Treadwell probably did not realise that seemingly empty moments have a strange beauty,' Herzog explains as the bushes and trees bend and sway in the wind as if in unconscious homage to Tarkovsky*.

'* Or, of course, to Herzog himself, specifically the famous epigraph - 'Don't you hear the terrible screaming all around you?  The screaming that men call silence' - and shot of wheat swaying in the wind at the opening of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.'

The Zone

Rembrandt, The Three Trees etching, 1643

I was at Tate Modern today for an all day symposium on The Art of Andrei Tarkovsky. It began with a talk by Evgeny Tsymbal who worked on Stalker (1979) and who was partly responsible for the famous dream sequence which you can see in this Youtube clip. After about 45 seconds in this clip some trees appear. I thought these were reflections but they are actually an upside-down image of Rembrandt’s engraving The Three Trees. Tsymbal said he had recalled Tarkovsky’s use of Renaissance art in earlier films and gone to look for some art reproductions in a Tallinn bookshop. All he found that was suitable was this Rembrandt and an image of John the Baptist from Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece.

Three years ago artist Jeremy Millar was also in Estonia to see and film the locations for Stalker. He too found inspiration in a bookshop – a copy of Ajapeegel by Tatjana Elmanovitsh (1980), one of the first books about Tarkovsky. ‘Ajapeegel’ means ‘Time Mirror’ in Estonian and it is the title of a film Millar is making using footage he shot of what must be one of the most memorable landscapes in modern cinema, ‘The Zone’ through which the Stalker leads his two companions. To be honest I was a bit disappointed with the film in its current state – a series of panning shots and a voice over with echoes of Patrick Keiller and W.G. Sebald. Millar and his excellent interlocutor Brian Dillon had both been at the Sebald symposium I reported on last year.

The rest of the day was quite a mixed bag. I was expecting more artists who were explicitly working with Tarkovskian material – it would have been interesting to hear from the University of Westminster’s David Bate, for example, who has also made the pilgrimage to Tallinn to photograph The Zone. The other artists who did attend (in addition to Jeremy Millar) were Hannah Collins, who has recently done some slow tracking shots and long takes in the style of Tarkovsky, and Hannah Starkey, whose interesting photographs didn’t really appear to have been directly influenced by Tarkovsky. Of the other speakers, Toby Litt was entertaining and film critic James Quandt was the most interesting, pointing out Tarkovsky elements, for example, in Bela Tarr’s Damnation (rain, ruin, entropy), in Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (windblown grass, a muddy path, church bells) and in Carlos Reygadas (a tree and a road straight out of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia).

One final reflection on landscape and Tarkovsky: in talking to Jeremy Millar, Brian Dillon used an interesting verb to describe the way the Stalker approaches The Zone and contemporary artists deal with place: they try to ‘incite something from the landscape’.

The Olympic Park

A few weeks ago, at The Printed Path event, I heard Iain Sinclair describing his walk to the 2012 Olympics site in the company of writer Robert Macfarlane. Sinclair spoke amusingly of Macfarlane's youthful enthusiasm and described his attempt to climb the sculpture of Alfred Hitchcock at Gainsborough Studios, thwarted by security, noting that climbing seems to be the way Macfarlane 'gets to grips' with a landscape. I have thought of going up with my camera to take a look at the Olympic site myself - I once did a Sinclair-influenced walk up the Lea Valley, before the Olympics came to town - but my opportunities for psychogeographical wandering are limited these days. I imagine it's quite a popular destination at the moment... Sinclair said that he and Macfarlane had encountered at least one photographer with 'art pretensions'...

In his talk, Iain Sinclair praised Stephen Gill's photographs of the Olympic Park site, and in today's Guardian, Robert Macfarlane discusses these, as well as giving his own account of the walk with Sinclair. When they reach the construction site Sinclair says "Are you ready for the zone? From here on in it's pure Tarkovsky." But beyond the 'light-industrial spaces, car-wrecker's yards, square-windowed studios, haulage depots' there is the perimeter fence 'designed to exclude not only access, but also vision. There are no viewing windows built into it, no portholes for the curious stakeholder. To see inside the zone, you must ascend a Stratford towerblock, hire a helicopter, or - the desideratum - visit the ODA's website, which provides stills of the construction process and mocked-up futuramas of the park.' Images of the future like this one really do have an eerie quality...

Robert Macfarlane refers to the The Manor Gardens Allotments, a green oasis and vital part of the area's history, which has now been demolished despite the efforts of a strong campaign. A lot of people will be reading about the allotments in Moro East, the latest cookbook from Moro restaurant (you can see a clip here). But sadly they will never now be able to see the allotments that have inspired the cooks at Moro and so many other local people over the years.

Light floating like fog

The English version of Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids is now available in paperback (Thames & Hudson). Andrei Tarkovsky took to using a Polaroid camera in the late seventies and these images of Vermeer-like interiors and landscapes of memory are a distillation of the particular atmosphere that some of us find compelling in his films. The Guardian site has some of these photographs alongside some brief commentary by Andrei Tarkovsky’s son (this commentary would have been welcome in the book – instead there are quotations from the director’s writings).

Instant Light includes an essay by photographer Giovanni Chiaramonte which is available at the excellent Tarkovsky site Nostalghia.com. Chiaramonte draws attention to the way these photographs capture different aspects of the light of Italy and Russia. There is ‘a soft, suffused light floating like the fog over the fields of the immense plain around Myasnoye’, Tarkovsky’s house in the country, ‘low, raking light given off by the grass in the woods’, and ‘evening light reflected, lighter than the sky, in the water along the bank of the Parà River’. For me, the small Polaroid photographs of the Bagno Vignoni, with steam rising from the water in a golden haze, are almost as affecting as the slowly moving images in the film Tarkovsky’s made there, Nostalghia.

A lake and a tree

In his enjoyable survey of one hundred years of cinema, Flickers, Gilbert Adair discusses a still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1985 film The Sacrifice, an image which Tarkovsky himself captioned (in his book Sculpting in Time) ‘Little Man waters the tree his father planted, patiently waiting for the Miracle which is no more than the truth’. Adair suggests that this caption, “flatulently theoretical”, is the opposite of the image, “limpid and serene”. What makes the image so effective is the absence of spectacle. We see a “shimmering (but not dazzlingly shimmering) lake and a skyscape of placid (un-baroque, resolutely unapocalyptic) clouds.” In the unlikely event that Hollywood were to make such a film, the lake, Adair thinks, would inevitably have been “straight out of National Geographic.”

I think this insight is equally true of other Tarkovsky films, e.g. the scenes around the dacha in Solaris. For Mirror Tarkovsky altered the landscape before filming it, growing buckwheat round the old house to accord with his memories, even though the current owners assured him the soil would not support it (when the buckwheat flowered, Tarkovsky recognised a good omen). For all its beauty, the landscape he shot in Mirror is very real, like the lake in The Sacrifice, and gives the scene an opportunity to work naturally on the viewer’s emotions.

[Postscript: since writing this it has become possible to embed YouTube clips in blog posts.  I have therefore added above the 'wind scene' from Mirror.]