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Tarkovsky
about Stalker
from "Sculpting in Time"
This too, is what Stalker is about: the hero goes through moments of despair
when his faith is shaken; but every time he comes to a renewed sense of
his vocation to serve people who have lost theis hopes and illusions.
I felt it was very important that the film observe the three unities of
time, space and action. If in Mirror I was interested in having shots
of newsreel, dream, reality, hope, hypthesis and reminiscence all succeeding
one another in that welther of situations which confronts the hero with
the ineluctable problems of existence, in Stalker I wanted there to be
no time lapse between the shots. I wanted time and its passing to be revealed,
to have their existence, within each time frame; for the articalations
between the shots to be continuation of the action and nothing more, to
involve no dislocation of time, not to function as a mechanism for selecting
and dramaticaly orginising the material - I wanted it to be as if the
whole film had been made in a single shot.
Such a simple and ascetic approach seems to me to be rich in possibilities. I eliminated all I could from the script in order to have a minimum of external effects. As a matter of principle I wanted to avoid distracting or surprising the audience with unexpected changes of scene, with the geography of the action, with elaborate plot - I wanted the whole composition to be simple and muted. More consistently than ever I was trying to make people beleive that cinema as an instrument of art has its own possibilities which are equal to those of prose. I wanted to demonstate how cinema is able to observe life, without interfeing, crudely or obviosly, with its continuity. For that is where I see the true poetic essence of cinema.
It occured
to me that excessive formal simplification could run the risk of appearing
precios or mannered. In order to avoid that I tried to eliminate all touches
of vagueness or innuendo in the shots - those elements that are regarded
as the marks of 'poetic atmosphere'. That sort of atmosphere is always
painstakingly built up; I was convinced of the validaty of the opposite
approach - I must not concern myself with atmosphere at all, for it is
something that emerges from central idea, from the autor's realisation
of his conception. And the more precisely the central idea is formulated,
the more clerly the meaning of the action is defined for me, the more
significant will be the atmosphere that is generated around it.Everything
will begin to reverberate in response to the dominante note: things, landscape,
actors' intonation. It will become interconnected and necessary. One thing
will be echoed by another in a kind of general interchange: and an atmosphere
will come into being as a result of this conceptation on what is most
important. (The idea of creating atmosphere for its own sake seems to
me strange. That, incidentally, is why I have never felt at home with
the paintings of the Impressionists, who set out to imprint the moment
for its own sake, to convey the instantaneous; that may be a means in
art, but not an end.)
It seems to me that in Stalker, where I tried to concentrate on what was
important, the atmosphere that came to excist as a result was more active
and emotionally compelling than that of any of the films I had made previosly.