Catastrophe / катастрофа

I've just finished reading Serhii Plokhy's excellent 2018 book Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe, and watching some remarkable footage this morning of the liquidators - the brave civil and military personnel tasked with cleaning up the radioactive debris ejected from the stricken reactor 4. Looking at pictures of taken from within Chernobyl’s Zone of Exclusion, the discarded, disintegrating military vehicles; abandoned residential blocks being slowly reclaimed by the wilderness, my thoughts are inevitably drawn to Tarkovsky’s film Stalker and the eerie way the film anticipates life after the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. As per the film, the photographers who took these pictures may well have sneaked into the Zone (strict permission is required to pass thru the military checkpoints), and perhaps a guide or a stalker was required to lead them around pockets of radiation - apparently the poisonous radioactive dust that coats the Zone is more prevalent on foliage than asphalt roads. Something else to reflect on was the high number of crew members, including Tarkovsky, who developed cancer in the ensuing years – most probably from working in the poisonous ruins of the Estonian power station where Stalker was filmed. Seeing the film nowadays I can’t help but wince when I see the actors wading thru pools of dirty water (think of the famous shot of Alexander Kaidanovsky dozing in the stream), or negotiating their way thru spaces filthy with toxic dust. Perhaps one can draw a parallel between the Chernobyl liquidators and the Stalker crew - both groups heroically struggling in the face of adversity to complete their missions; the liquidators working to limit the environmental damage, and the Stalker crew battling to get Tarkovsky's film made after the catastrophic loss of the first draft of the film...

Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of Stalker

With the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster inching closer, I plan to revisit Tarkovsky's Stalker, a film that seems indelibly twinned with the catastrophe, and to preface this screening, I watched the 2009 documentary Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of Stalker, at the w/end, a long and engrossing film about the troubled production of Tarkovsky's great work. Georgi Rerberg who photographed Mirror and was originally assigned to shoot Stalker was sacked from the production when the footage he shot was deemed unsatisfactory. Worse still, Rerberg was blamed for not adequately testing the film stock when it was discovered to be unusable, resulting in the scrapping of Stalker draft 1. Tarkovsky burned thru a second cameraman and a second abandoned version of Stalker before completing the version released in 1979, but Rerberg’s reputation was destroyed by the experience, compounded by Tarkovsky’s snide and harmful comments made about Rerberg in the French edition of his diaries.

Georgi Rerberg on the camera platform with Tarkovsky and actor Alexander Kaidanovsky to the left

Igor Mayboroda’s documentary is a harsh rebuttal of those diary entries and unsurprisingly Tarkovsky doesn’t come out of it particularly well, the director placing the blame for the disaster of Stalker on his cameraman, after Tarkovsky himself pushed Rerberg beyond the limits of what the film stock could handle. Tarkovsky’s wife Larissa actually emerges worst from the film, the consensus was that she was an arch manipulator, bitter about not landing the role of the Stalker’s wife. Having watched the documentary, I feel like Margarita Terekhova from Mirror, sitting on the fence. Rerberg was treated terribly by Tarkovsky but I can’t take the leap of faith that Rerberg was a genius, a reputation which rests by and large on his extraordinary work in Mirror. Ironically though it’s the finished version of Stalker that earns the shoddiest treatment, the film is all but dismissed along with Alexander Knyazhinsky’s stunning camerawork, apart from one singled-out shot of Rerberg’s that survived the reportedly 19 final cuts - the memorable pan across the scummy toxic lake. Still, for Stalker and Tarkovsky fans, the film is required viewing and can be seen here  (with excellent English subs).

Zona

Finished reading Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, Geoff Dyer’s 2013 book about Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. Dyer’s book is not a scholarly study of the film but a scene-by-scene commentary on a film that has fascinated and obsessed the author for the past 30 years. It’s a short, breezy read (the book can easily be digested in one sitting), and while Tarkovsky students might feel frustrated that the book reveals little new about the film, Dyer has left me with at least one notion that I will take to my next screening of the film. With tongue firmly in his cheek Dyer imagines the mysterious black dog, possibly abandoned or separated from its owner in the Zone, has in fact ventured into the Room and has had its heart’s desire – of being adopted by a loving family – granted. Hence his reappearance in the final act of the film, back in the industrial wasteland of the Stalker’s home, happily lapping milk and finding a gentle companion in the Stalker’s daughter. It’s a lovely idea and it’s a measure of the brilliance of Dyer’s short book that it has increased my love of the film even more. Highly recommended reading.

Music inspired by the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker

I've been revisiting Lustmord's discography recently and several late nights have been spent in the company of the 1995 album Stalker. Composed by Brian Williams in collaboration with ambient musician Robert Rich, Stalker is a 68-min album inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film of the same name. In the film, a nameless Writer and Professor are led by a tracker, or a stalker through the Zone, a dangerous shape shifting landscape, to the Room which contains a power that makes wishes come true...

Almost immediately after its release, Stalker was hailed as a landmark album of the Dark Ambient / Isolationist genre. The music is heavy, gloomy and brooding. Like the Zone itself, the album's 7 tracks run continuously to form a single mutating soundscape, with ghostly foghorns, whispered voices, deep subterranean rumbles, and ominous dark drones that bellow up and dissipate like plumes of black smoke. Robert Rich provides the album's more ethereal moments with his ethnic musical sounds (which is the closest the album comes to the film's soundtrack and composer Edward Artemiev's electronically treated flutes). If Tarkovsky's film provided the inspiration for the album, one could readily imagine the album serving as a very good companion for a trip into Chernobyl's desolate Exclusion Zone, with track titles such as Hidden Refuge, Delusion Fields, Omnipresent Boundary, Undulating Terrain and A Point Of No Return suggestive of the kind of illicit trips explorers frequently make into the Zone, negotiating radioactive hot spots and avoiding attention from police and armed forces.

The CD from Fathom Records perfectly compliments the music with its sleeve of images by landscape photographer Brad Cole whose haunting work is well worth checking out.