Zona by Geoff Dyer (2012)
Recommended by Andrew
‘I’m off to see Tarkovsky’s
Stalker tonight’, Andrew texted me
last summer. He was in Edinburgh, spending some time at the festival.
‘Oh, Stalker!’ I replied. ‘I have opinions about Stalker. “Enjoy”.’
I shared those opinions when
I next saw him. I considered Stalker overlong
and indulgent: a great concept frittered away by a director too in love with
his own visuals and not with his audience. I related an anecdote that, to me,
summed it up: I’d been watching the film, got bored, gone off to make a cup of
tea, came back, and exactly the same shot was still on the screen.
Fast forward a few months,
and Andrew recommends me Zona, Geoff
Dyer’s recent book about his love affair with Stalker. I’m going to have to watch the bleeder again come May, I
thought.
However, through
Artificial Eye being useless and happily letting important films go out of
print (don’t get me started on their treatment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Stalker is unavailable on DVD in the UK at
the moment. So I did the next best thing; I rewatched another Tarkovsky movie, Mirror.
I first saw Mirror not long after Stalker and vastly preferred it (I’ve
also seen Solaris, which I consider
the worst of the three). Mirror probably
has even less of a plot than Stalker,
but there was a warmth to its images: without wishing to sound too pretentious
(very difficult to avoid when talking of Tarkovsky), Mirror evoked the curious space of childhood memory and its impact
on the present with great sophistication and candour. I liked it even better on
a second viewing.
Immediately, in Zona, Geoff Dyer addresses my moans
about Stalker.
By any standards it’s a slow start to a movie. Officials
from Gosinko, the central government agency for film production in the USSR,
complained about this, hoping the film could be ‘a little more dynamic,
especially at the start.’ Tarkovsky erupted: it actually needed to be slower
and duller at the start so that anyone who had walked into the wrong theatre
would have time to leave before the action got under way. Taken aback by the
ferocity of this response, one of the officials explained that he was just
trying to see things from the audience’s point of view… He was not able to finish.
Tarkovsky couldn’t give a toss about the audience.
So I was right about the Tarkovskian
arrogance towards the paying public! But how about that static shot when I went
off to get a cup of tea?
Often, in Tarkovsky, when we think something is still
it’s not; at the very least, the frame is contracting or expanding slightly,
almost as if the film were breathing.
Pah. One-all.
Dyer broadly sees the
total lack of interest in a cinema audience as a plus point for ol’ Tarkers: it’s
exactly because of that attitude Stalker is the achievement it is.
Although mostly Dyer was persuasive as to his argument, he annoyed me at one
stage:
At first there can be a friction between our
expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the
twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time
towards moron-time in which nothing can last – and no-one can concentrate on
anything – for longer than about two seconds.
This may very well have a
kernel of truth in it, yet Dyer’s tone and use of ‘moron-time’ smacks of
unpleasant superiority. This was its most obvious example, yet there were other
hints that Dyer occasionally didn’t care about his audience, either.
Zona – and I suspect this was the reason
Andrew recommended the book to me, rather than simply to argue by proxy about Stalker – is part-autobiography. Dyer
not only considers his relationship with the film, but how its various ideas
and imagery offer insight into his own history.
The football pools: that, for many British people, was
their equivalent of the Room, the thing that would make all their wishes come
true. ‘All I’d like to do,’ my mum said with a mixture of pride and humbleness,
‘is go down to the supermarket and buy the nicest piece of steak there. That’s
all I want.’
Reading these bits, which
increase in frequency as the book goes on, was great, and really helped me understand why Dyer loved the film, and
perhaps, also, why I did not. It seems to me that if we only admire a movie for
its innovation or beauty, cinema wouldn’t work the way it does, and none of us
would have a favourite movie at all, even. But those treasured films, those that
do touch us deeply, they set in motion a special chemical reaction. Their
content pings off our own yearnings or regrets, loves or hatreds. It’s easy
when writing – or speaking – of a film to neglect this, perhaps because we
don’t think others will be interested, perhaps because we don’t want to unpick
our own muddled feelings, perhaps because its simply easier to praise (or criticise)
an audaciously lengthy still shot than to analyse why it affects us so. And
this is where I come back to Andrew: in the relatively short time I’ve known
him, it’s been his unapologetic and intelligent capacity for introspection,
along with an unusual and eloquent means of expressing it, that has had a
striking effect on me.
So I can see why Zona has resonated with him. Dyer explicitly
applies his own narrative to Stalker,
and sometimes this means the structure of the book is messy – many will be
frustrated with the digressions via footnotes, everything from a bitch about Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels to
missed opportunities for ménage a trois
– but I found it a price worth paying. Zona
has much more in common with House Of Leaves than, say, with a coolheaded Cahiers
Du Cinéma anthology.
Another text from Andrew
(yesterday):
If
we ever find a copy of Stalker I
demand a gala viewing.
And what did I reply? Has Zona convinced me to sit through it
again?
You’re
so ON.
