Perfect in Weakness

Faith in Tarkovsky’s Stalker

Colin Heber-Percy

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532663246
  9781532663253
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532663260
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Three men go on a risky journey through a forbidden Zone in search of fulfillment. They fail. They come home. The end. The plot of Tarkovsky's Stalker is a joke. Taking its title from 2 Corinthians, Perfect in Weakness explores Stalker as a ludic parable. And the subject of this parable is faith. Faith as folly, faith as a dangerous, last-ditch attempt to attain the unattainable. To fail, to fail again, and to carry on regardless. Stalker is about crossing borders, boundaries, conventions. To transgress, to disrupt, to deconstruct is the dark impulse behind Tarkovsky's personal vision. It is also the illicit, revolutionary message at the heart of the gospel: tear down this temple, and have faith. Like one of Deleuze's rhizomes, or David Tracy's fragments, Perfect in Weakness aims to throw out thoughts, ideas, and connections in unexpected (even unintended) directions, drawing new and unlikely texts into the field of film theology--Patristic thought, Christian Neoplatonism, and Renaissance literature. Perfect in Weakness suggests we see cinema itself as the ultimate apocalyptic art form--letting light into the darkness, and then throwing it on a screen.

1

Cracked Cisterns

Christ leads me through no darker room than he went through before; he that into God’s Kingdom comes must enter by this door.

—Richard Baxter, Poetical Fragments

Dogged by problems from the start, Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece was almost never made. Shooting was scheduled to begin at Isfara, Tajikistan in April of 1977, but these plans had to be abandoned when the area was hit by a violent earthquake. Having relocated to Tallinn in Estonia, filming could commence. But after three months’ work, Tarkovsky (1932–86) found that the rushes were poor and the condition of the film stock degraded; furious, he blamed the suppliers of the film stock, he blamed his cameraman for failing to check the quality of the film, and he blamed the technicians at his production company, Mosfilm, for using the wrong development procedures. Tarkovsky describes the situation in his diary as a “total disaster.”29 But in disaster, Tarkovsky found the motivation to carry on; in disaster he found redemption:

[the disaster is] so conclusive that one actually has the sense of a fresh stage, a new step to be taken—and that gives one hope.30

This hopeful stepping, as he calls it—out of disaster, out of chaos, out of despair—gives us a hint as to the character, determination, and vision of Tarkovsky the artist. But it also finds full and moving expression in Stalker, the film he goes on to make. Stalker is shaped and characterized by this movement, a hopeful sense of being impelled toward something better, something elusive yet tangible, something that draws us toward the margins but which is also at the heart of ourselves.

Tarkovsky’s fifth film, Stalker has the timeless, unsettling atmosphere of a dream, the disjointed and compressed tumbling out of a Dostoevsky novel, the crystalline quality of a fairy story or a Russian folk tale. And like all fairy tales, Stalker is ultimately about transformation, or the possibility of transformation. The theme of transformation—or conversion—runs throughout the film in quasi-sacramental modalities—as baptism, as lament, as creation, as redemption. And its element is water.

Water features in almost every scene of Stalker—standing in puddles, fast-flowing, falling as rain, dripping, drifting, rippling in a glass, disrupted at the bottom of a well; in one image (the only shot making the final edit from the Tajikistan shoot), the landscape, the ground itself seems to undulate as though everything were water. And water pours through the vast concrete spaces, tunnels, and corroding tanks. It saturates and sacralizes, reclaims an environment that was once human, but is no more:

For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.31

We are led through these cracked cisterns and the waters they cannot contain by the Stalker himself, a John the Baptist figure propelled across borders and boundaries into a wilderness, preaching repentance: a new way of being: “Let everything that’s been planned come true. Let them believe!”32

So the water in Stalker is the water of baptism, and the film is ultimately sacramental. In common with sacramental liturgy, the film is thematically structured around transformation, metanoia, and conversion. Unlike Close Encounters, Stalker implicates us, calls for us—as subjects—to risk believing, to risk being changed.

Overlaying these deep sacramental themes are experiences familiar to everyone: love and divided loyalty, hope and despair, running risks and facing failure. The movie’s themes of transformation and faith play out both sacramentally and psychologically within an overall metaphysical and cultural context which we could call the “perhaps predicament.” Stalker is a vivid, relentless, “harrowing” depiction of this predicament.

The “perhaps predicament” is where we live, the air we breathe; it could be characterized as a post-Enlightenment or postmodern condition, but arguably it is more pervasive and more fundamental than either of these labels suggest. It is the recognition that, epistemologically and existentially, we are all in something of a tight spot; the world presents itself to us in a way that appears irresolvably ambiguous. Cinema itself becomes a paradigm of the predicament: a presentation of the world to us without at the same time requiring us to be present to the world. Cinema teases us with a taste of transcendence; it is, in essence, an exquisite uncoupling of ourselves from the world. Or that, at least, is its aim. Perhaps it is an unrealizable aim. The fourth century church father Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335–ca. 395), who will prove a crucial conversation partner throughout our exploration of Stalker, would deny the possibility of our ever being able to achieve a genuine uncoupling, true transcendence. We might say that theater allows us to imitate the theoi, but never to join them: we are watching with the groundlings, not from the gods. In his seventh homily on Ecclesiastes, Gregory says,

The whole of creation is unable to stand outside of itself by means of an intuitive knowing grasp, but always remains within itself; and whatever it sees, it sees only itself, and if it believes it sees something beyond itself—well, it is not of its nature to see beyond itself.33

With this in mind, the cliché about science fiction always being about ourselves can be elevated to a statement concerning the limits of our epistemological capacity:

O human beings gazing on the all, recognize . . . your own nature!34

Cinema, like any art form, can never justify its claim to a privileged transcendent viewpoint. To pretend to hold this viewpoint (as cinema does) can be titillating, but it is actually tragic. Denied access to a super-lunary or divine realm of certainties and principles, we are thrown inevitably back on our devices and desires.

I am precisely who I am because I exist at this particular point in time, because I am a recipient of a particular national and cultural heritage, because I have a particular set of parents and have received a particular amount and quality of education.35

The impossibility of the camera’s transcendence, the inescapable specificity of our subjective experience, the prison of the particular returns us to “perhaps.”

Where science once guaranteed progress, we now encounter only perhaps; where the church offered truth and the surety of salvation, we now find only perhaps; where political and social ideologies offered answers to deep-rooted social injustices, we now remain incredulous, succumbing to the perhaps. The old verities became versions of a truth that, far from being simple and unchanging, turns out to be culturally determined rather than universally determinative. Perhaps, we now recognize, lies at the root of physics in the form of the Uncertainty Principle; perhaps governs policy-making by eradicating hegemonic claims to cultural, racial, or religious correctitude; perhaps has undermined authority in all walks of life, not least the church: perhaps emptied the pulpit and the pews.

This is the volatile and insecure late-twentieth-century context into which Stalker spoke. And nearly fifty years later, the “perhaps predicament” remains just as pervasive (arguably more so), and Stalker still has a great deal to say. No film, in my view, has plumbed the “perhaps predicament,” given it shape and depth, as successfully as Stalker. For Tarkovsky, I suggest in passing, “perhaps” is a radical, and potentially risky response to the Soviet authority under which he was working. But Stalker is much more deeply radical and risky than any perceived political payload. In fact, I will argue, risk is the film’s response to the “perhaps predicament.” Risk, it suggests, is the g...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Cracked Cisterns
• Chapter 2: Journey
• Chapter 3: The Kingdom of God
• Chapter 4: Faith
• Chapter 5: Miracle
• Coda
• Bibliography