The Soviet Nomad

Introduction: The Wreck of the Andrei Rublev

In 1966, when the Soviet film censors at Goskino rejected Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, the success promised by the director’s astonishing debut on the international scene with Ivan’s Childhood (1962) began to slip away. ¹ Tarkovsky had begun work as a filmmaker in the so-called “Thaw” under Khrushchev, but found the neo-Stalinist policies of Brezhnev’s new government far more restrictive. In fact, a recently auctioned letter from Tarkovsky to Brezhnev from 1969 contains an appeal to the Chairman to okay the release of Andrei Rublev, as it is “not anti-Soviet propaganda,” even going so far as to mention personal and family hardship on Tarkovsky’s part as a result of the movie having been shelved (Brown, 2012). ²

As Vida Johnson (2004) argues,

A new generation of talented young film-makers got into trouble trying to do what only a few years earlier had been possible: to experiment with style and offer a personal, at times critical, view of the Soviet present or past. (p. 202)

Despite Tarkovsky’s heartfelt plea to Brezhnev, it was not until 1971 that an edited 186-minute version of Rublev would hit the screens of Russian cinemas (down from its original 205 minutes). ³ Of course, it is not difficult on viewing Andrei Rublev to see why the state censors did not want to see it released. While it might have seen the light of day more quickly in Khrushchev’s time, it hardly fit with the return to a more harshly defined version of Soviet Realism under Brezhnev, and it was this harsher social control that characterized the remainder of Tarkovsky’s Soviet career, until his defection to Italy in 1982.

The religious and metaphysical themes in his work make Tarkovsky’s continual run-ins with Soviet authorities unsurprising, but it is particularly his use of science fiction in two of his films from the 1970s, Solaris (1973) and Stalker (1979), that I want to examine in this article, from the perspective of the discourse of science and the State. In short, I argue that Tarkovsky’s turn to science fiction is a part of his purposeful construction of a “war machine” along Deleuzio-Guattarian lines, to provide lines of flight from the striated space of the State in the Soviet context. ⁴

Deleuze and Guattari are not the easiest of theorists to jump into, so let me take a moment briefly to outline how I am deploying three related concepts developed primarily in their book, A Thousand Plateaus (1987): the war machine, smooth/striated space (nomads and the State), and lines of flight.

Deleuze and Guattari lay out a conceptual framework in A Thousand Plateaus derived initially from their work together in Anti-Oedipus (1983) that posits (pace Marx) a primary relation among humans based on lateral connectivity (in A Thousand Plateaus, the opening chapter famously discusses this with the visual metaphor of the “rhizome”), as opposed to hierarchical connectivity. In short, we are social beings before our relation to society constructs us as individuals. It is our emergence as beings on “the full body of the earth” that becomes a model for the subsequent emergence of the State, as a new body onto which we now attach, mediating our possible connections to the earth. Moving through human history as a progression from universal nomadism to hierarchical kingdoms (the “body of the tyrant”) to the emergence of capital as the new body to which we now attach, we are, in each phase, organized in society’s striated spaces according to the organizational principle of what they call the “despotic signifier”—the thing to which all else is connected (in a monarchy, this is the king; in capitalism, it is capital, etc.; cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1983, pp. 10-11). But, human affect remains one that emerged as a species in nomadism, with the ability to make sense of the world around us, and it is this set of abilities that is utilized by each successive form of the State body, convincing us in each epoch of the necessity of the striations that it uses to organize us. This is the basic sense of smooth versus striated space—in the smooth space of the earth, any movement is possible for the nomad. It is not the lines on the network of singularities that matter in nomadism, but rather the movement itself. For the State, however, it is very much the demarcations of our existence (and not limited to physical space) that allow its control to be on-going.

It is in this context that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduce the notion of a “war machine”—the ability of nomads (both the visual metaphor of geographical nomads and the nomadic capability/identity of human being) to oppose the State’s organization of them:

The war machine answers to other rules. We are not saying that they are better, of course, only that they animate a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again, impedes the formation of the State. (p. 358)

Deleuze and Guattari are not advocating a particular political position or stance—“We are not saying that they are better”—but are rather describing a tendency, a set of options that can be exercised against State control. The politics of Deleuze and Guattari do not map onto a “good” or a “bad,” but rather onto possibilities and relations between different movements of power. The war machine is not a strategy, but rather a series of strategies that Deleuze and Guattari are describing.

The most obvious live metaphor ⁵ example for the war machine is guerrilla warfare—a form of war that uses the organization of the State against itself, like a judo wrestler who lets her opponent’s movements translate into his own defeat. But, the war machine can be used by the State, too—though, as they put it, “The war machine is always exterior to the State, even when the State uses it, appropriates it” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 242-243). Alexander the Great brought the war machine of mobile warfare, using every technical, strategic, and tactical tool that he could to bear on a problem that was well beyond the capability of current State war to overcome, symbolized by his cutting of the Gordian knot. Yet, in his wake, he sowed the striations of a new State, leaving behind Alexandria after Alexandria, specifically to lock down the potential of his opponents using the war machine that he had appropriated against him. The warrior in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a war machine is simply the operator of a strategy, neither good nor bad, but merely an actor.

We can also look at Marx’s theory as a war machine deployed against Capital—and in this context, the role of religion as a control structure is a part of the striations of State against which he—following the example of the French—must orient his war machine. Marx’s concept of socialism, an inversion of the hierarchical striations of capitalism, is indeed a “spectre haunting Europe”—it aims to use the weaknesses of the system against itself, eventually to bring the entire system down. But then Marxism is appropriated by the State, and this war machine becomes an imperial machine, used to dominate a people and limit their ability to move freely, both literally and metaphorically.

The nomad, though, has the ongoing possibility of finding “lines of flight,” by which to oppose and escape State control. For Deleuze and Guattari—as articulated specifically in their last book together, What is Philosophy? (1990), art, science, and philosophy are all sites of the production of war machines. As they put it in Anti-Oedipus, “The artist stores up his treasures so as to create an immediate explosion, and that is why, to his way of thinking, destructions can never take place as rapidly as they ought to” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 32). This destruction, the result of the creative act, is inherently a hopeful one, aimed at “a people yet to come”:

The artist or the philosopher is quite incapable of creating a people, each can only summon it with all his strength. A people can only be created in abominable sufferings, and it cannot be concerned any more with art or philosophy. But books of philosophy and works of art also contain their sum of unimaginable sufferings that forewarn of the advent of a people. They have resistance in common—their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, and to the present. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1990, p. 110)

No matter how many groups of stone carvers are caught in the woods and blinded (as takes place in Andrei Rublev), the artists and philosophers will continue to summon the people of the future with all their strength.

Spittle Mud for the Stone Carvers’ Eyes: Marx in Solaris

In Tarkovsky’s Russia, official Marxist-Leninist doctrine dictated an atheistic worldview, where, among many other elements, departments of atheistic science were required in every university, and instruction in these matters was a requirement for children throughout their education. ⁶ In the Soviet interpretation of the Marxist doctrine, the suppression of religious freedom was fundamental, so as not to inculcate the ongoing anaesthetization of the proletariat. Marx’s war machine was appropriated by the State, and deployed against the possibility of resistance by the Church against the Revolution.

Marx’s conception of religion as an anaesthetic—“religion is the opiate of the people”—derives from a longer treatment in the introduction to his unfinished critique of Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right. Considering this axiom in context of the longer section of which it is a part produces a more robust and nuanced sense of the conceptual framework surrounding it. Beginning by telling us that “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism,” Marx (1844a) continues:

Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man, where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Dealing with religion is fundamental to the production of the class consciousness necessary to bringing about revolution—Marx’s “opiate” comparison is no throwaway. The mention of “aroma” in the above quotation is followed up with the following statement:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The suffering against which religion can anaesthetize the people is exactly the suffering of which the people need to become fundamentally aware. It cannot be dulled, or it will be tolerable.

Marx carries on his argument, stating that

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

The top-down suppression of religion in the Soviet experience derived apparently from a staunch belief in the illusory identity of religion, and in its complicity in keeping the proletariat from being able to engage in the construction of their own happiness. However, once Revolution had been effected, it played an ongoing role in suppressing any potential opposition to the new State from that quarter. From the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique, this suppression can be seen as a part of Marx’s anticapitalist war machine being appropriated by the State, and used in a fashion that went well beyond the original target of the war machine as developed by Marx.

In stark contrast to the official Soviet line on religion, Tarkovsky’s concern for spirituality is patent throughout his oeuvre, and in his conception of what art is and does—“Art does not think logically, or formulate a logic of behaviour; it expresses its own postulate of faith” (Tarkovsky, 1986, p. 41).

Devoid of spirituality, art carries its own tragedy within it. For even to recognize the spiritual vacuum of the times in which he lives, the artist must have specific qualities of wisdom and understanding. . . . An artist who doesn’t try to seek out absolute truth, who ignores universal goals for the sake of accidentals, can only be a time-server. (Tarkovsky, 1986, p. 168)

Tarkovsky sees art as the way to “triumph . . . over grim, ‘base’ truth” (Tarkovsky, 1986, p. 168), making the relation between Tarkovsky’s self-conception and the way that Andrei Rublev is presented in Tarkovsky’s film patently obvious. ⁷ Tarkovsky shifts the locus of spirituality from the control of the Church to the activity of the artist.

Tarkovsky’s decision to adapt Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Solaris, as his next project after the long delay of Andrei Rublev was initially presented to Goskino as financially motivated:

Audiences are eager for a good science-fiction film, and it is common knowledge that there is great interest in the idea of one being produced here in the domestic market. The plot of Solaris is taut and sharp, full of unexpected twists and turns and exciting confrontations. . . . We can be sure from the start that the film will be a financial success. (Turovskaya, 1989, p. 52)

High-concept science fiction films like Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) had opened up the territory for financially successful (at least in the case of 2001) yet philosophically intensive explorations, but it is also well known that Tarkovsky found Kubrick’s 2001 to be cold and soulless (Johnson & Petrie, 1994), and his design for Solaris actively problematizes the aesthetics of Kubrick’s masterpiece. In fact, Tarkovsky made it very clear that he felt an aversion for science fiction as a genre: “I don’t like science fiction, or rather the genre science fiction is based on. All those games with technology, various futurological tricks and inventions which are always somehow artificial” (Czapinska, 1980, pp. 18-19).

If Tarkovsky’s public antipathy for science fiction is not enough to raise questions about his decision to make a science fiction film, the acrimony that emerged between Tarkovsky and Lem over the differences between the book and the film script certainly should. Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Lem’s book diverges in many key ways—if nothing else, the book takes place entirely in space, while Tarkovsky’s film places a significant prologue on Earth, and the tone in the film changes quite dramatically from the “hard sci-fi” approach taken in the book. ⁸ It is no surprise that Lem’s frustration with Tarkovsky’s script was no secret:

I have fundamental reservations to this adaptation. First of all I would have liked to see the planet Solaris which the director unfortunately denied me as the film was to be a cinematically subdued work. And secondly—as I told Tarkovsky during one of our quarrels—he didn’t make Solaris at all, he made Crime and Punishment. (Bereś, 1987)

Taken on its own, this project looks like many other film stories—an auteur whose ego and vision outstrip the desires of the author of the book he is adapting, and a strong desire to resist censorship (Tarkovsky, 1991). The resulting film retains its allusions to religion, but is, without argument, a science fiction film.

Yet this story is not so simple. Tarkovsky found a clever way to circumvent the censorship of the Goskino censors by following the time-honoured approach of satirists working under repressive conditions: He made a film that looked like one thing, but did another. Lem was absolutely right in comparing this adaptation to Dostoevsky, but not for the reasons that Lem thought. Lem’s complaints revolve particularly around the slow pacing of Tarkovsky’s film, and its inclusion of moral musings that were absent in the novel. More significant in this regard, however, is the affinity between Dostoevsky’s and Tarkovsky’s similar appeal to the necessity of a spiritual, or at least nonmaterial dimension of human existence.

For Tarkovsky, though, there is a new dimension to consider that was not present for Dostoevsky—the redeployment of the war machine of Marxist philosophy of religion to bolster a new regime of power. This deployment by the State of Marx’s design had transformed the religious life of Russia in the decades following the revolution, and Solaris was Tarkovsky’s direct response to the Soviet experience of Marx’s theory.

This becomes more obvious once one realizes that the remaining part of the passage from Marx’s (1844a) “Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” gives us the structure for Tarkovsky’s version of Lem’s script:

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

Solaris is an illusory sun—or even a sun that produces illusions—but it is not the artificial sun of religion. On the station orbiting Solaris, the human inhabitants are faced with neutrino “guests,” specific to each of them, generated by the planet itself. We are unclear exactly how each of the several visitors is related to those who they visit, except in the case of Hari, Kelvin’s deceased wife. It is tempting to extend the characteristics of Kelvin’s relation to guest-Hari to all of the guest relationships, but we have no evidence that this is the case. Snaut seems to indicate that he is only too aware of the progression that Kelvin and guest-Hari’s relationship will take, but both he and Sartorius are silent about the specifics of their guests. ⁹

The illusory sun creates guests that, at least in Kelvin’s case (and perhaps in Ghilbarian and Snaut’s as well), represents a relationship lost in a miasma of guilt and regret. It is eventually revealed that the original Hari had committed suicide in a depression that was related, in part, to Kelvin’s abandonment of her after the breakdown of their relationship, and that she had used poisonous “laboratory specimens” that Kelvin had left in the refrigerator, thus revealing the deeper tragedy attending the dissolution of their relationship.

The arc of guest-Hari as a character in the film, an avatar of the planet itself, is deeply connected to the bombardment of the planet surface with a copy of Kelvin’s electroencephalogram. Where the earthly Hari and Kelvin had a breakdown in their relationship—a loss of effective communication—the neutrino-Hari becomes aware of Kelvin’s inner life in a deep way, and then leaves him permanently.

Where Marx’s illusory sun of religion must be seen to be illusory, so that man “will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun,” because “Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself,” Kelvin is in no way freed of his illusions. At the end of the film, Kelvin descends to the surface of Solaris, apparently to live out the remainder of his life in an illusory copy of his parents’ dacha. The illusion comes complete with a neutrino copy of Kelvin’s father, and a house that rains on the inside. Illusions are all that Kelvin has left, and the new Sun of the Soviet experience has given the people simply new illusions, too. Yet Tarkovsky’s response to the Soviet appropriation of Marx’s war machine goes deeper than this. It is not simply a matter of appealing to the regime to allow a greater range of human feeling and expression.

The censorship that Tarkovsky had himself experienced was, in part, the result of a systematic application, by fiat, of a way of imagining reality. The Soviet regime, believing that the revolution had demonstrated that “the other-world of truth [had] vanished,” actively sought “to establish the truth of this world.” The Soviet regime took Marx (1844a) very seriously when he tells us that “It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked,” and sought to ensure this unmasking.

However, a serious problem with Marx’s logic emerges as one attempts to discover the point from which the replacement “truth of this world” would be accessed. This is a problem that Marx inherits from Plato (and a few points in between), wherein one mode of understanding reality is challenged by belief in the ability to access real reality. For Plato, we climb up out of a cave of ignorance by way of concentration on the divine which is True, Good, Beautiful, and so on. Eventually staring at the Sun/God, we can only mourn those who are not able to join us. Marx’s attempt to flip Plato’s dualism via its Hegelian form suffers from the same problem of absolutes—for Plato and other idealists, the nonvisible world is where all value—all reality—lies. This physical stuff is merely a series of shadows and images—echoes. For Marx, the invisible world—the belief in that world as the locus of value and meaning—is the illusion, that which is worthless. But the problem that we run up against in trying to determine how exactly one accesses this new truth, is that there is no mechanism by which one can ensure the reality of this new notional reality. Nevertheless, such an idea has remarkable power in the hands of a regime eager to maintain political control—the Romans similarly did this with Stoicism, and then with (deeply-affected-by-Stoicism) Christianity.

The ideational conquest of a people—or a revolution, or a conversion—is not accomplished so easily. The imposition of a new ideational map is not as simple as burning all the old ones, and then changing the signs on the roads to fit the new ones. Tarkovsky’s Solaris asks this question of the imposed worldview of the Soviet regime, and demonstrates that, opposed to Marx’s notion that we can reject one (false) reality in place of another, we can only oppose one version of reality with another version. “Reality” is a convention, and the imposed Soviet reality left out too many things that the humans who existed under its sway could not simply ignore. Kelvin’s “reality” is not ignorant of his pain and his loss. He carries it with him to Solaris, where his interaction with an alien intelligence wraps him in a new series of illusions. Finding a(n) (illusory) sun/Sun is a mysterious process, and we cannot predetermine how that process will work. The panel on earth at the beginning of the film (in the section added by Tarkovsky), that interrogates Berton and dismisses his experiences flying over the surface of Solaris can only understand things through a single lens, that of a particular understanding of “science.” Even with phenomena that are nothing but “scientific,” their minds are unwilling or unable to see in “solaristics” anything more than what must confirm their already-held beliefs.

Tarkovsky, despite his appeal to Brezhnev that Andrei Reublev was not anti-Soviet propaganda (mentioned above), produced in Solaris a deep rumination on precisely that aspect of the regime that Andrei Rublev had problematized. But, where Andrei Rublev was set in a well-researched medieval Russia, examining the life of a real Russian, whose works—famously studied in the only colour sequence at the end of the film—still existed, the science fiction identity of Solaris allowed Tarkovsky to dehistoricize his follow-up. It was an adaptation, so Tarkovsky, like the Encyclopedists in Paris in the 18th century, or Sartre producing The Flies (an adaptation of the Orestes story from Aeschylus and Euripides) in occupied Paris, could hide behind the already-existing structure of the story. Yes, he shifts much of the story to Earth, and yes, he adds and subtracts elsewhere, but the essence of the narrative remains the same. Lem’s lament that Tarkovsky “completely amputated the scientific landscape” of his novel in this, what is considered one of the best science fiction films ever made, is deeply ironic, given that it is the scientific landscape of the film that allowed Tarkovsky successfully to resist even the attempts of Goskino to remove what references to Christianity and religion that exist within the film as it stands (Bereś, 1987).

Andrei Rublev’s metaphoric sequence at the beginning of a hot air balloonist launching from a ruined church, nearly stopped by angry peasants (presumably upset by the violation of man’s earth-bound identity), and flying for a while before crashing to the earth, is Solaris in reverse. The evocation of this scene in the prints of hot-air balloons on the walls of Kelvin’s parents’ dacha prepares the viewer to start from the point where Andrei Rublev ends—the implications for a people of the repression of expression, and the way in which that expression generally finds a way through. The repression of Andrei Rublev by Brezhnev’s censors was life imitating the art, and Solaris was Tarkovsky’s satirical response to that repression.

Revenge of the Balloonist: Stalker and the Wizard of the People to Come

Tarkovsky’s last film in the Soviet Union before his defection to Italy was Stalker (1979), also his second and final science fiction film. On the surface, as Solaris was with Lem’s novel, Stalker is an adaptation of a novel called Piknik na obochine (Roadside Picnic) by the Strugatsky brothers. The production woes on this film are well documented—from spoiled film and fired crew to fighting for funds, Tarkovsky eventually got permission and funds not only to finish the film (a close-run thing) but also to make it in two parts.

Arkady Sargosky was on location with Tarkovsky for the shooting all the way through, and wrote a first-hand account of how this experience looked through his eyes (Strugatsky, 1990). Once Tarkovsky had obtained permission to make this longer film, Arkady returned to Leningrad to work on the new, longer script with his brother and collaborator Boris. Before leaving, Arkady asked

What should Stalker be like in the new screenplay?

I don’t know, you’re the author, not I.

I see. Actually, I could see nothing, but that was the usual thing now. But even before the work started it became clear to my brother and me: if Tarkovsky makes mistakes, they are brilliant mistakes and worth a dozen correct decision by ordinary directors.

On a sudden urge I asked: “Listen, Andrei, what do you need the science fiction in the film for? Let’s throw it out.”

He smirked: just like a cat that has eaten its owner’s parrot.

There! You suggested it, not I! I’ve wanted it for a long time, only was afraid of suggesting it, so you wouldn’t take offence.

To make a long story short, next morning I was flying to Leningrad. I won’t tell you how it was with Boris, because I’m writing not about us but about Andrei Tarkovsky. We wrote not a science fiction screenplay but a parable (if we understand a parable as a certain anecdote whose personae are typical of the age and carriers of typical ideas and behaviour). A fashionable Writer and a prominent Scientist go into the Zone where their most cherished dreams might come true, and they are led by the Apostle of the new faith, a kind of ideologist.

I returned to Tallinn ten days later. Andrei met me at the airport. We embraced. He asked: ‘Have you brought it?’ I nodded, trying not to shake. At home he took the manuscript, retreated into the next room in silence and shut the door firmly behind him . . .

Some time passed, perhaps an hour.

The door opened and Andrei came in. . . . He looked at us absent-mindedly. . . . Then he said . . .

The first time in my life I have my own screenplay.

The resulting film, on the surface, is a work of science fiction, but it owes as much to The Wizard of Oz as it does to The Roadside Picnic. In fact, it could be argued that the opening text of the film, coupled with the strange identity of the conditions within the Zone that is central to the film’s plot, construct the entirety of Stalker’s science fiction air:

What was it? Did a meteor fall down? Was it a visit by citizens of the vast space? So or otherwise in our little country appeared the greatest miracle of miracles—the ZONE. We sent there the troops immediately. They did not come back. Then we surrounded the ZONE with police cordons. . . . And, I suppose, that was the right thing to do. . . . Actually, I don’t know, I don’t know . . . (Interview with Professor Wallace, the receiver of Nobel’s prize, by a journalist of RAI)

Compared with Solaris, the science fiction aspects of Stalker are even further muted and distinctly secondary to the philosophical and moral questions addressed by the characters in the film.

The Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion of the film—Stalker, Professor, and Writer—are joined by their Dorothy—“Monkey,” the Stalker’s daughter—only at the end of the film, when we are tricked into thinking that she has psychokinetic powers as a glass moves across a table in the Stalker’s apartment. It is only the science fiction trappings of the film that steer us narratively toward such a conclusion, when, as it is quickly revealed, it is actually the rumblings of an approaching train that are vibrating the glass across the smooth surface (in fact, in the first seconds of the film, we watch another glass do the same thing on the bedside table, while Monkey sleeps). The switch from sepia to colour that, as in The Wizard of Oz, accompanies the entry into the Zone (obviously phonetically related to “Oz”) also accompanies the daughter’s scenes at the end of the film. The harsh reality of the world outside the Zone, and the search to find meaning and worth within this reality—communicated in part by the contrast between colour and sepia in the film—is the constant topic of the dialogue between the characters while in the Zone. But for Monkey, this breaks down, as she apparently experiences the Zone outside of its physical space.

The closing monologue of the Stalker’s wife, breaking the fourth wall and delivered conversationally directly to the camera, has obvious christological parallels:

You know my mom was very much against it. You must have, I suppose, understood, he is blessed. ¹⁰ The entire district laughed at him. And he was a blunderer, such a miserable one. . . . And my mom said: isn’t he a Stalker, isn’t he a condemned man, isn’t he a perpetual jail bird?! And children. Remember what children Stalkers get. . . . And I . . . I even . . . I didn’t even argue . . . I knew myself all this: both that he is a condemned man, and that he is a perpetual jail bird, and about the children. . . . And what could I have done? I was sure that I would have it fine with him. I knew also that there would be a lot of grief, but sorrowful happiness is better than . . . grey and sad life. And perhaps I invented that afterwards. And then he simply came up to me and said: “Come with me,” and I went. And I never ever regretted after that. Never. And there was a lot of grief, and it was frightening, and it was shameful. But I have never regretted and I have never envied anybody. It’s just such a fate, such a life, such an us. And if there was no grief in our life, it would not be better, it would be worse. Because then there would be . . . neither happiness, nor hope. That’s it.

Stalker is Jesus calling a disciple, even though Stalker believes that he brings no one any hope at all. Even in the Zone, Stalker dreams in sepia, and it is while he dreams that we get the long tracking shot of many objects shallowly submerged in the flooded, ruined building where the party is resting. Among these objects are three syringes, coins, a rusted gun, a broken clock, an icon of John the Baptist from the Ghent altarpiece, ¹¹ a picture of three trees on a hillside, a paten, a cochlear, and fish trapped in a glass bowl inside the water. Toward the end of the sequence, there are a number of pieces of barbed wire, and a page torn from a calendar. Reminiscent of the many objects found in Kelvin’s parents’ dacha or the library on the Solaris station, this sequence in Stalker teases the viewer with a sequentiality that begins with the intermixture of religious items and drug paraphernalia.

It is abundantly clear that the juxtaposition of the syringes with the religious items (the paten and the apparent cochlear, the picture of the three trees [obviously symbolic of the crucifixion—another homage to Andrei Rublev with its crucifixion scene], the icon) refers to Marx’s attitude toward religion as an opiate. Except, where in Marx religion is an opiate that has the possibility only to dull the proletariat to its real suffering, the people in Stalker are still living in continual suffering. Here, in the ruins of the Zone, the sedative characteristics of religion that did indeed keep the people from being able to control their own fate before the Revolution has been replaced by the yearning suffering of the Writer, the Professor, and the Stalker. There is no relief to the suffering, and, while it may be a good thing that the people are without religion’s sedative characteristics, it has not issued in the “living flower” that Marx suggested was on the other side of the illusion.

The tiled floor in the dream is the same tiled floor as in the building that houses the never-entered Room. In Stalker’s dream, the recent history of the Church in Russia is broken and littered behind the revolution that brought its sedative identity to an end (Revolution symbolized here by the machine gun and barbed wire that follow the religious elements), but it has not eradicated the affective aspects of religion, nor has human life in the Soviet experience done away with the need for it.

Outside the Zone—the Zone that the State tries to control, and into which the three enter with trepidation, seeking different paths to happiness—little Monkey already has the answer. What children the Stalkers have, indeed. The answer is not a return to the past—this is the only sepia-toned sequence in the Zone, a broken nostalgia. ¹² The answer is in that to which those who have not lost hope and an understanding that there is more to existence than that allowed by the State’s ideology have given birth. It is in the future:

The artist or the philosopher is quite incapable of creating a people, each can only summon it with all his strength. A people can only be created in abominable sufferings, and it cannot be concerned any more with art or philosophy. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1990, p. 110)

Conclusion: A Peace More Terrifying Than Fascist Death (or, “What Is Russia. What Is Russia?” ¹³ )

Stalker, Solaris, Andrei Rublev—these are all fabulations that together allow Tarkovsky to construct a war machine out of the logical problems of Marx’s original. The challenge that Tarkovsky experienced after the suppression of Andrei Rublev was overcome in the context of the dominant atheistic environment of the Soviet Union because of Tarkovsky’s use of a genre that superficially looked like the State-science. ¹⁴ He demonstrated with these latter two films that the apparent control of ways of imagining the world was an impossibility. He made a mutant machine. This mutant machine acted like a virus in the system whose installation Stalin himself had overseen: the cinema network of the Soviet Union. ¹⁵

The use of film as propaganda in the early years of the Soviet Union, leading up to the Second World War and following it, paralleled the growing use of media technologies across the globe for similar purposes. The career arc of a luminary like Sergei Eisenstein during these decades was interwoven with the rise and fall of prominent figures in the Party, as well as with changing expectations of the relation between different film aesthetics and the Party’s wishes. Being forced to renounce his earlier montage style in 1938 was an ignominious end to an artistic career that closely mirrored the identity of Soviet Russia herself. ¹⁶

Tarkovsky’s early-career experience of censorship produced conditions that encouraged him to slice through expectations like Alexander with the knot. His mutant machine is ours now, to turn over and inspect, and possibly to redeploy to develop our own resistance to the dominant State structure, to describe and walk our own lines of flight. The question for us, then, is how can Tarkovsky’s example in a repressive regime help us see our own repression? Today, for the most part, we live in conditions of remarkable freedom of expression. We know that we are surveilled, we know that we can be neutered by the State in any number of ways, but very few regimes will make the mistakes of the Soviet Union again. Repression like that was, in time, wildly ineffective, and encouraged the production of visible mutant machines. Today, with our eternal quest for (and frequent successes in finding), as Marx would put it, “political emancipation” (Marx, 1844b), we lose sight of the potential for something like a “human emancipation.” Who needs more freedom than the freedom to worship, protest, eat, watch, have sex with, dress whatever/whoever/however/whenever we want? Freedom not only is not free, it is also not really free.

The irony in this story of a filmmaker and his country is that it was not the abolition of religion that led to Tarkovsky’s cinematic lines of flight (as Marx and possibly the Soviet regime expected that it would), but rather his yearning for a people to come, a people unconstrained by a forced delusion. Perhaps this is integral to the division between the Marxism that depends on a kind of positivism, and one that recognizes the inherent difficulties of such a position, that the identity of all imaginings of what it would be to be reality are relative one to another.

Although Deleuze only refers to Tarkovsky on four occasions in the second volume of his solo work Cinema, ¹⁷ he considers Tarkovsky’s films to be primary examples of what he calls “crystals of time” (along with the works of Werner Herzog): Tarkovsky’s “crystal turns on itself, like a homing device that searches an opaque environment: What is Russia, what is Russia . . . ?”:

Are we to believe that the soft planet Solaris gives a reply, and that it will reconcile the ocean and thought, the environment and the seed, at once designating the transparent face of the crystal . . . and the crystallizable form of the universe . . . ? Solaris does not open up this optimism, and Stalker returns the environment to the opacity of an indeterminate zone, and the seed to the morbidity of something aborted, a closed door. . . . In the crystal-image there is this mutual search—blind and halting—of matter and spirit: beyond the movement image, ‘in which we are still pious. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 75, cf. 129)

Tarkovsky’s pious people are a people to come, not because they are enrobing themselves in the hierarchical Church of the past, but rather because they are exchanging one fantasy devoid of lines of flight for another more rich with possibility.