Had Tarkovsky wanted us to take Monkey’s psychic powers completely at face value then I suspect he would not have included the passage of the train. The fact that he did include it does suggest, as Adam puts it, that Tarkovsky wanted at least to problematise the straight-forward assertion that in the world of the film, the supernatural exists.

I don’t think it’s completely ambiguous but there’s a degree of ambiguity there and it would be silly to just ignore it.

I’m wary of laying this at the feet of Tarkovsky’s cinematic technique simply because his techniques are used elsewhere without the same side-effects. For example, the shots of empty space and incredibly long takes pop up all the time in Terrence Mallick’s films (another great visual poet, I rewatched The New World recently and was just blown away by the skill and beauty of it all) but Mallick’s films are much easier to summarize.

I think instead that it might be down to the way that we remember films. Games like Chinese Whispers show that we don’t remember information straight, instead we construct narratives around it and store it that way. Stalker’s issue is that despite having a plot, a lot of the plot is only tangentially related to the central narrative and almost completely unrelated to the elusive themes of the film. So when we watch it, I suspect that our brain folds the film up into a convenient shape by cutting out the bits that seem less important. However, because the real themes and subject matter are so elusive, you can sit down and rewatch the film time and again and still be no clearer as to what it’s about and so you reform new schemas and uncover whole new sections of the plot that your brain snipped out for the purposes of storage.

However, what’s disconcerting about the film is the impression that Tarkovsky knows precisely what he is doing with every shot and it wouldn’t surprise me if he knew about the mnemonic fog too.

It’s like one of those images of a behaviourist future in which a screen flashes the colour green and all the conditioned humans gurgle with bliss. It’s a film that by-passes the higher brain functions and operates directly on the point of interaction between neurological quirks and cinematic technique.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? The seems exactly the way Stalker works, at least in my experience. I watched it again recently and there was a whole bunch of stuff I simply didn’t remember from when I last saw it. This, I think, isn’t because the film is unmemorable (of all the films I’ve seen, this is the single most memorable, I think, in lots of ways) but because it seems to play peculiar tricks with memory, as the Zone does with the protagonists. So for instance: I’d forgotten that the Professor goes back for his rucksack, despite being specifically told not to go back by the Stalker … and then somehow ends up ahead of the other two. It doesn’t seem to me coincidental that my memory took some kind of perverse short-cut past that part of the narrative. And now, as I write, I can’t remember if it’s the Writer or the Professor who brings the pistol into the Zone … presumably the latter, I suppose. But the movie lives in a much more fluid, sinuous way in my mind than most films I’ve seen.

I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon, and I wonder if part of the thing here is the way Tarkovsky’s cinematic technique, his scrupulous way with lighting and cinematography, his famous slow pans and long-held takes, encourages us to pay much closer attention to the quiddity (if you’ll pardon the pretentious language) of the world of his films. He is the great visual poet of attentiveness to the world. What this means, I think, is that when he puts a gun on screen we’re much less likely to respond to it on the level of crude symbolism (as it might be: that representes ‘violence’ or ‘power’ or ‘intimidation’ or whatever) and much more likely to respond to its materiality as a thing; its colour and shape; the texture of its metal and the way its material responds, especially under water, to light. In a way this sort of response is the point of Tarkovsky.

As for the final shot of Monkey at the table, I agree that it generates enormous power by bringing in the vibration of the passing train in order to problematise whether she actually has telekinetic powers or not. But I think the reason this is so clever is that it crystallises a moment of desire in the viewer. It makes you think: am I disappointed or relieved that she has, or that she hasn’t, these powers of telekinesis. Which explanation for the moving glass do I prefer? What does that say about me? The room in the zone is about making manifest your deepest desires after all, and one of the threads of the movie is that these desires are hidden even to yourself.

Thanks for the praise. Coming from you, it’s ego-boosting stuff :-)

I’d actually forgotten about the bit with the hand-gun but I think that we’re both correct. I think that the film is lacking in what might be called ‘external symbols’, namely signs that link the film with some wider narrative outsider of it. In fact, as I say, I think the film is explicitly about the process of attaching meaning to symbols.

However, this does not mean that the film is lacking in ‘internal symbols’ that serve to link up certain ideas within the film. The gun is one such internal symbol, Monkey is another. She exists in order to muddy the waters by underlining the fact that everything we see in the film can be interpreted in different ways. However, if you try to enlist her as an ‘external symbol’ as part of a wider narrative about the supernatural, then she is arguably too slight to say anything of any substance.

So YES I think I might have over-stated my case by suggesting (if not really thinking) that Stalker is a huge array of random meaningless images but also YES that I don’t think that any of the symbols in the film are strictly metaphorical, allegorical or synechochical.

But you are quite correct to point out that the gun is more functional a symbol than I suggested.

The fact that there is a gun in that stream rather than any other type of object bears no relation to the meaning of the film or the scene, but a gun is so richly symbolic that we cannot help but look at that scene and try to work out what it is that Tarkovsky is trying to tell us.

Absolute semiotic specificy is, I agree, not the film’s currency; and it would be fatuous to ‘decode’ the images, as if it were all some rigid allegory. But guns figure in particular ways in this text that give the appearance of the gun here greater than just random-noise symbolic heft … the Stalker’s horror that his charges have brought a handgun into the zone, the shot where the abandoned weapon is in the water and the Stalker nudges it to push it deeper in. This gorgeous pan along the water connects with this (as, I suppose, with the gunfire the three brave to get into the Zone in the first place; and with the Professor’s bomb).