The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Andrei Tarkovsky · a film in two parts · 1979 · about two hours and forty minutes · written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, loosely from their novel Roadside Picnic · in Russian
Mode
Science fiction stripped of its genre to a pilgrimage; parable of faith, argument between two modern vocations and journey film in one
Mythos
The pilgrimage to a sacred place, led by a guide who may not enter, with two companions; the holy ground approached only indirectly; the holy fool; the wish-granting place as a test of the self that no one dares
Phase
About a day: from the guide’s room before dawn, through the bar and the cordon, into the Zone by trolley and on by indirection to the threshold of the Room, then back to the bar and home
Presentation
Feature film in two parts, about two hours and forty minutes, in Russian; sepia monochrome outside the Zone and colour within it; Alexander Knyazhinsky’s camera, Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score; the Zone made of real ruin without a built effect
Register
Still and grave, broken by the Writer’s sarcasm; long takes in which nothing moves; dripping water, trains and the trolley’s wheels as half the film
Scale
Three men in about a day; a wife and a child at either end; the sacred, art and science before one door
Governing Proposition
A guide who has served time in prison leads a Writer and a Professor past a guarded cordon into the Zone, where a Room is said to grant the wish of whoever enters, and at its threshold neither will go in. The wager of the film is that a place that grants not what one asks but what one most deeply wants is the most frightening place there is, that science fiction can be made of nothing but a landscape, three men and time, and that the miracle the travellers fail to reach lives in the weakest people in the film: the guide who believes for others, and the crippled child at home.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in a brown room before dawn. A man lies in bed beside his wife and their daughter, and a glass of water trembles as a train passes. He rises and goes out. The colour of this world is a sepia monochrome, close to brown, and the film keeps it for every place outside the Zone. The man is the Stalker, played by Alexander Kaidanovsky, shaved and trembling. He guides people into the Zone, and he has served time in prison. His wife is played by Alisa Freindlich, and their daughter, called Monkey, by Natasha Abramova.
At a bar he meets his two clients. Neither has a name, only a calling: the Writer, played by Anatoly Solonitsyn, and the Professor, played by Nikolai Grinko. The film was made at Mosfilm, directed and designed by Andrei Tarkovsky from a screenplay by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, taken loosely from their novel Roadside Picnic (1972), photographed by Alexander Knyazhinsky, with music by Eduard Artemyev. It was released in 1979, in two parts, about two hours and forty minutes in all. It is one journey and its return: a room, a bar, a cordon, the Zone, a threshold, the bar again, the room.
The three drive through the cordon, past its guards, and onto a railway trolley. The film holds their three heads in profile while the wheels run on the rails, and the sound of the wheels grows into music. Then the screen turns to colour, and the grass of the Zone is silent. Whatever the Zone is, it is not shown as strange: it is grass, water and ruined buildings, moss, tile and wire, an industrial waste that nature has taken back.
Movement II
In the Zone no one walks straight. The Stalker throws nuts tied with strips of cloth and goes where they fall, and the three approach the Room by indirection, never by the shortest way. The Writer sets off straight toward the Room, and a voice stops him. The Professor goes back for his knapsack. Each stage is a test of one of the three, and what it tests is not the body but the visitor: whatever danger the Zone holds, it answers to what its visitors bring into it.
The form does the same. There is no effect anywhere in the Zone, no alien, no artefact, no light from nowhere. For minutes at a time nothing happens; the camera moves slowly, or not at all, and the viewer begins to search the frame as the Stalker searches the ground. The danger cannot be shown, because it is in the visitor, and the film makes its viewer wait and go round, as the Writer will not. Tarkovsky built the Zone from real ruin, and its sound is half of it: dripping water, distant calls, trains.
Between the stages the three argue. The Writer is a cynic, sarcastic about his own art and about everything else; the Professor is quiet and speaks as a scientist explains. The Stalker, mocked by both, has nothing and believes. The talk restates itself, and the rest stop in the first part runs long; the film lets the bickering hold it level. A dog appears among the ruins.
Movement III
Halfway, the film dreams. The camera passes slowly over shallow water, and in it lie a syringe, coins, a painted icon, a gun and a leaf from a calendar, while a woman’s voice reads from the Revelation. The things are the leavings of a civilisation, its medicine, its money, its faith, its violence and its time, under water, and the words are of the end of the world. It is the still centre of the film, and it rises by moving least.
The Stalker tells the story of Porcupine, another stalker. Porcupine’s brother was lost in the dry tunnel the stalkers call the meat grinder. Porcupine went to the Room to wish his brother back, and was given money. Then he hanged himself. The Room had granted him not what he asked but what he most deeply wanted, and he could not bear to know it.
The story is the key to everything that follows. A place that grants what one asks would be a fable; a place that grants what one most deeply wants is a test of the self, the oldest test in the tales of wish-granting places, and few can bear to take it. The Stalker believes in the Room, and he leads others to it. He is the guide who may not enter.
Movement IV
The way runs through the meat grinder, where Porcupine’s brother was lost, and through a room of sand dunes, where a telephone rings. Dread here is a sound and a narrow space. Then the three come to the threshold of the Room and sit down at its edge, and the film holds them there.
The Professor brings out a bomb. The three argue over it, and in the end he dismantles it and throws its parts into the water. Art and science have come as far as the door: the one from cynicism, the other from fear, and neither will cross.
No one goes in. Rain begins to fall into the Room, and then it stops. The film never enters the Room and never shows its inside; the form refuses to cross what its characters refuse to cross. Whatever the Room would have given them, the three have learned only that they do not dare to know what they want, which is what Porcupine learned, and what the Stalker, who believes, has always known.
Movement V
They come back to the bar, and the brown world closes round them again. At home the Stalker is in despair. His wife turns to the camera and speaks to it, in one long take: she knew what life with him would be, and she chose it. She chose to share his misery rather than a safer life. Freindlich holds the speech without a cut, and it answers the despair the film has just shown.
The last scene is the daughter’s. Monkey, crippled, sits at the table reading, and the colour comes back, on her. Under her gaze the glasses on the table move. A train passes, and through its noise the Ode to Joy is heard. She has never been in the Zone, and she carries it out. The miracle the three could not reach at the threshold is at home, in the weakest person in the film.
In forty-seven years the film has been read as a parable of faith, as Tarkovsky spoke of it; as a political film of the intelligentsia and the forbidden place, or of the gulag; as a film about cinema, a darkened room where wishes are granted; and, after Chernobyl in 1986, as prophecy. The words “stalker” and “the Zone” were taken up for the exclusion zone and for those who enter it, the film’s name has passed into video games, and Geoff Dyer wrote a book on it alone, Zona (2012). The world has since produced the places it imagined. What has lasted is a journey and a refusal: three men brought to a door that would show each of them himself, and a child at a table, moving glasses with her eyes.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and duration. The film is one journey, and the subtractive test finds little to take out of its line. The domestic opening sets the wife and child the close returns to; the bar names the two clients; the cordon and the trolley make the crossing; each stage in the Zone tests one of the three; Porcupine’s story is the key to the Room and to the ending; the wife’s speech and the glasses answer the Stalker’s despair. The long takes are the waiting the Zone demands, and their length is compelled. What gives: the Writer’s tirades restate his position, the Professor’s arguments are partly exposition, and the rest stop in the first part is longer than its work.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Disclosure through image is credited in full, and this one can be stated. A place that grants not what one asks but what one most deeply wants is the most frightening place there is: few can bear to know what they want, as Porcupine learned. Art and science arrive at the threshold of meaning and cannot cross it, the one from cynicism and the other from fear. Faith survives where it is weakest, in a man who is mocked and has nothing, and in the wife who chose to share his misery. Held below the top because much of what it gives is atmosphere, a sodden ruin as a state of soul, and its statements come in speeches.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Height is reached often for so slow a film. The crossing: three heads in profile on the trolley, the wheels growing into music, until the screen turns to colour and the grass is silent. The dream: the camera over shallow water in which lie a syringe, coins, a painted icon, a gun and a calendar leaf, while a woman’s voice reads from the Revelation. The threshold, rain falling into the Room and stopping. The ending: the glasses moving under Monkey’s gaze, a train passing and the Ode to Joy heard through its noise. Held below the top because the elevation is mostly of one temperature, still and grave, and the bickering of the first part keeps it level.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The myth is built, and it is the film’s structure. A pilgrimage to a sacred place, led by a guide who may not enter, with two companions who stand for two kinds of modern man: the shape is Dante’s, and the guide is Virgil and Charon. The Stalker is the holy fool, mocked, poor and faithful. The threshold not crossed is the centre: the wish-granting place of the oldest tales is a test of the self, and no one here dares it. The crippled, gifted child carries the myth into the next generation. Held a step down because the companions are types by design, and the myth carries types more than persons.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance was science fiction, in the cinema and in the Strugatskys’ novel: alien visitation, salvaged artefacts and the men who smuggle them out. The film turns from all of it: no alien, no effects, no artefact on screen, a Zone of overgrown industrial waste, and faith in place of discovery. It turns from narrative toward duration as well. The stake was real: the first footage was lost and the film was made again. Held below the top because Tarkovsky had prepared the turn himself. Solaris (1972) had already turned science fiction inward, and Mirror (1975) had broken his narrative grammar; this is the furthest point of a road he had opened.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. No effect can show the Zone’s danger, because the film’s knowledge is that the danger is in the visitor; so the form shows nothing happening for minutes at a time, and the viewer learns, as the Writer does not, to wait and go round. The long take is the Zone’s law made into the viewer’s experience. The colour is knowledge: the world outside is the brown of a life without belief, and the colour that touches the daughter at the end says where the Zone’s grace has gone. Held a step below the top because the argument is at times placed in the dialogue, where the form becomes its container.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: forty-seven years of return, and readings numerous and at odds. A parable of faith, as Tarkovsky spoke of it. A political film about the Soviet intelligentsia and the forbidden place, or about the gulag, read into a guarded cordon and the men who cross it. An ecological film, read after Chernobyl in 1986 as prophecy. A film about cinema, a darkened room where wishes are granted. Geoff Dyer gave it a book of its own, Zona (2012). It yields formally on return: the dog, the water, the trains, the movements between colour and monochrome. Held below the top by a span under fifty years, and by a yield that gathers around one central question.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force: the film made duration and stillness the substance of a genre film, science fiction made of a landscape, three men and time, and set the model of the long contemplative take Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the slow cinema of Béla Tarr, Aleksandr Sokurov and Apichatpong Weerasethakul; the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games; and the words “stalker” and “the Zone” as they were taken up for the Chernobyl exclusion zone and those who enter it. The games and the words count as presence more than as a moved field, and a share of the reach belongs to Tarkovsky’s work as a whole.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole; the footage lost in 1977 was never part of it. Presence: forty-seven years of continuous exhibition, restoration and issue, and an unusually wide life outside cinema, in games, in common speech and in the vocabulary of the Chernobyl zone. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a moment only in a way that has become meaning; Soviet industrial ruin was its setting, the world has since produced the places it imagined, and it ages as prophecy rather than as fashion. That presence earns the most forty-seven years can show, level with Apocalypse Now of the same year (8.7). Decades do not outscore centuries: far below the Parthenon (9.2).
Score: 8.7 / 10
The making carries the film at every point. Alexander Knyazhinsky’s camera: slow movements that reframe without cutting, the dolly over the water, static frames in which nothing moves for long seconds and the viewer begins to search them. Tarkovsky’s Zone of real ruin, water, moss, tile and wire, without one built effect. The sound, half the film: dripping, trains, distant calls, the trolley’s wheels turning into Eduard Artemyev’s score, electronic, eastern in colour and never sentimental. Kaidanovsky’s shaved, trembling believer, and Freindlich’s speech to the camera held in one take. The costs: post-synchronised dialogue, speeches delivered as argument, a first part less finely made. Andrei Rublev (8.9) stands three tenths below, its lapses falling on more of the film.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bar at the start, with its grime and a barman’s indifference, and the glasses moving under the daughter’s gaze at the end. One law governs both: the miraculous is real only to those who wait for it, and it lives in the weak. The bar is the brown world without faith; the Zone is the world where inner states have consequences; the daughter, who has never been in the Zone, carries it out. The indirection, the colour and the refusal at the threshold all obey the law, and nothing breaks it. Held below the top because the range is narrower than it looks, three men, one journey, one grave temperature, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, in three men’s desires and fears; the sacred, in the Zone, the pilgrimage and the Stalker’s faith; art and science, the two vocations of the modern mind, each brought to the threshold; the family, in the wife and the crippled child at both ends; the state, in the cordon, the guards and the prisons the Stalker has known; nature, taking back the works of industry; history, as an unexplained catastrophe whose ruins are the setting. They are joined through the journey, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: labour is nearly absent, history is a ground and not an agent, society is a bar and a cordon, and the field is three men over about a day.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Made at 9.2, then The Sublime at 9.0. A form in which the long take is the Zone’s law and the colour says where its grace has gone, a making of camera, real ruin and sound that carries every minute without a built effect, and heights that return from the trolley’s crossing to the glasses on the table.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3: the sacred, art, science, the family, the state and nature are joined by one journey, but labour is nearly absent, history is a ground and not an agent, and the field is three men over about a day. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.6, where the Writer’s tirades, the Professor’s exposition and the long rest stop restate more than they advance.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment, The Swerve and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear it by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it covers falls below 8.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.8 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Stalker as released by Mosfilm in 1979, its one released version, in two parts and about two hours and forty minutes long, from the glass trembling in the brown room to the glasses moving under the daughter’s gaze: directed and designed by Andrei Tarkovsky from a screenplay by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, loosely after their novel Roadside Picnic (1972), photographed by Alexander Knyazhinsky, with music by Eduard Artemyev; sepia monochrome outside the Zone and colour within it. The footage first shot in 1977 and ruined in processing was never a version of the film and is not the object. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Russian film; the English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, and nothing here is charged to a subtitle. No line of the dialogue is held to the word with certainty, so the dialogue is described and not quoted. The novel is the source, not the work, and is named only where the film departs from it. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact running time, the number of shots, the circumstances of the lost footage and any change of crew it brought, the prizes at Cannes, the illnesses later attributed to the location and the film’s places in polls, are not given.