Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema

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Where flowers bloom but have no scent: the

cinematic space of the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky's
Stalker

David Foster

To cite this article: David Foster (2010) Where flowers bloom but have no scent: the cinematic
space of the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 4:3,
307-320

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1386/srsc.4.3.307_1

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 SRSC 4 (3) pp. 307–320 Intellect Limited 2010

Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema

Volume 4 Number 3
© 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/srsc.4.3.307_1

DAVID FOSTER
University of Manitoba

Where flowers bloom but

have no scent: the cinematic
space of the Zone in Andrei
Tarkovsky’s Stalker

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
While the mysterious Zone has frequently been the focus of narrative interpretations Andrei Tarkovsky
of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, this article offers a metaphorical reading of the Zone Stalker
as cinematic space. Following Chris Marker’s adoption of the term ‘the Zone’ in his cinematic space
film Sunless, this reading considers the Zone poetically. By focusing on the reflexiv- poetic film
ity of the Zone’s presentation of space through elements of framing, camera move- reflexivity
ment, colour and editing, this article considers the way it depends on a specifically Chris Marker
cinematic construction of space and subjectivity. This approach to the Zone and its
cinematic specificity aims to provide a better understanding of what is poetic in
Stalker and how it works towards the poetic cinema to which Tarkovsky aspired.

In his film Sunless/Sans Soleil (Marker, 1982), Chris Marker, by way of his
surrogate Sandor Krasna, shows how his friend Hayao Yamaneko (another
surrogate) manipulates images with an image synthesizer. This process
transforms images into near abstractions: high-contrast, multicoloured and
pixelated shadows of the images they alter. Krasna says that Hayao ‘claims

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 David Foster

1. Maya Turovskaya that electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory,
even titles her
book-length study
imagination’. In remaking images, Yamaneko’s machine strips them of their
of Tarkovsky’s films referential qualities, turning them into ‘non-images’ that, as Krasna notes,
Tarkovsky: Cinema as ‘proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and
Poetry. For Turovskaya
(1989: 97), the ‘poetic’ compact form of an already inaccessible reality’. It is by no means a coinci-
is appreciable in dence that Marker calls this process ‘the Zone’ in homage to the mysteri-
Tarkovsky’s films ous place in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979). The Zone, as Vida
because of the
tendency to move Johnson and Graham Petrie (1994: 142) note, has been the focus of much of
‘away from the the critical discussion and interpretations of Stalker. But attempts to explain
narrative to the
associative’. Echoing
the Zone have largely attended to its narrative function. The reflexivity of
Turovskaya, Vlada ‘the Zone’ in Sunless – its foregrounding of images as images and its connec-
Petric´ (1989–90: 34) tion to subjective experience – suggests another approach to understanding
sees the poetic in
Tarkovsky’s films Tarkovsky’s Zone, one that emphasizes the ‘poetic’ over narrative. It is of
as a product of his course common for critics to refer to Tarkovsky’s films as poetic.1 Such refer-
defiance of ‘the ences to Tarkovsky’s films as poetic are certainly encouraged by the direc-
orthodox concept of
narrative cinema as tor’s own comments on cinema’s connection to poetry in Sculpting in Time.
a linear progression Speaking of the relationship between poetry and film, Tarkovsky (1986: 18)
of representational
events’.
says: ‘I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing.
They seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most
2. Of course one might
read any of Tarkovsky’s
truthful and poetic of art forms.’ In Stalker, an understanding of what these
film as poetic, ‘poetic links’ and this ‘logic of poetry’ might entail can be found in the Zone
especially Mirror itself. As Robert Bird (2008: 69) suggests, beyond its narrative interpretations,
(1974) which makes
extensive use of Arseny the Zone also functions metaphorically: ‘In many respects the Zone is simply
Tarkovsky’s poetry and the demarcated area within which an event can occur, akin to the screen in
documentary found cinema […] The Zone is where one goes to see one’s innermost desires. It is,
footage and follows
similar counter- in short, the cinema.’ In this article I will explore this metaphor further and
narrative and reflexive consider the Zone not just as a space in which a cinematic narrative takes
formal patterns. But
Mirror, as Jerry White
place, but also as a specifically and poetically cinematic space. As cinematic
(2005: 80) describes it, space, the Zone is both shaped and revealed by the techniques, procedures
is driven by a ‘complex and conditions – film stock, the shot, editing, sound, spectatorship – that
personal-historical
dialectic’ that I would make up the very experience of cinema. It is through this reflexive, metaphori-
argue makes its cal and ultimately counter-narrative and even lyrical space that one can see
lyricism significantly Stalker as an instance of poetic film.2
different from the
cinematically poetic
Stalker.
FROM NARRATIVE TO POETIC: APPROACHES TO INTERPRETING
3. These explanations are
largely in keeping with THE ZONE
the extraterrestrial
origins of the Zone
There is no shortage of narrative explanations for and interpretations of the
described in Stalker’s Zone. Contemplations of the Zone’s origin run throughout Stalker. Following
literary source, the film’s credit sequence, a title card posits two cosmic sources for Zone,
Boris and Arkadii
Strugatskii’s story a meteorite and extraterrestrial visitation. As the three main characters, the
‘Roadside Picnic’. In Stalker, the Professor and the Writer, enter the Zone, the Professor echoes
‘Roadside Picnic’, these theories, dismissing the former for the latter, though with a degree
however, the belief that
the Zones are a product of scepticism or uncertainty.3 Beyond its origins, the film presents the Zone
of alien visitation is as a mysterious and dangerous place, both unknown and unknowable. The
much more explicitly
and definitively
Stalker’s description of the Zone emphasizes this inscrutability:
acknowledged.
The Zone is a highly complex system […] of traps, as it were, and all of
them are deadly. I don’t know what happens here when we’ve gone […]
But people only have to appear for the whole thing to be triggered into
motion. Our moods, our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings can bring
about change here. And we are in no condition to comprehend them.

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 Where flowers bloom but have no scent

Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become 4. I draw this quotation
from the English
impassable, and the route can be either plain and easy, or impossibly translation of
confusing. That’s how the Zone is. It may seem capricious. But in fact at Tarkovsky’s shooting
any moment it is exactly as we devise it, in our consciousness. script published in
Andrei Tarkovsky:
(Strugatsky, Strugatsky and Tarkovsky 1999: 395)4 Collected Screenplays.
While the film departs
Traversing this labyrinth would be an otherwise perilous endeavour, but at from the shooting
script in many
the centre of the Zone is the Room, which purportedly fulfils one’s innermost significant ways, this
desires. The Room motivates the men’s journey, and as they wait outside the speech appears in
the film exactly as in
Room, the Stalker, the Professor and the Writer variously describe the Zone the shooting script. I
and the Room as a gift, a threat and a hoax respectively. For the Stalker, choose the shooting
the Zone is a gift because its wish-fulfilling Room offers the possibility of script in this instance
over the subtitles of
happiness to those who enter it. For the Professor, this very possibility is the Kino International
a threat, because individuals with malicious desires could abuse it, and he DVD edition, which
plans to destroy the Zone with a nuclear device. Finally, the Writer proclaims are imprecise. Thus,
the DVD translates
the Zone, with its invisible traps and the Room, to be a hoax concocted by the final line of the
the Stalker, or others like him, to profit from the pain of others. Yet while speech as ‘But it is
what we’ve made it
the characters present their views of the Zone, they cannot act decisively on with our condition,’
their opinions. The Stalker refuses to enter the Room himself; the Professor which makes little
dismantles and abandons his bomb; and the Writer is terrified when he sense in comparison
to the shooting
almost trips into the Room. With their indecision, the characters leave the script translation
‘truth’ of the Room and the Zone undecidable and ambiguous. ‘consciousness’. In
It is because of this ambiguity with which the film presents the Zone other instances,
however, unless
that it has lent itself to much critical interpretation. Johnson and Petrie otherwise noted, I
(1994: 142–43), in a brief survey of critical work on Stalker, note that the Zone quote from the DVD
version.
features prominently in readings of the film as a political allegory, particu-
larly in association with Stalin-era gulags. Slavoj Žižek’s reading (1999) of the 5. For Ricoeur (1977: 6),
metaphor is not simply
Zone addresses this political allegory, as well as other political interpretations a matter of substitution
(such as a site of technological disaster like Chernobyl, as a forbidden terri- or resemblance, but
tory like West Berlin), but ties these together by interpreting the Zone as a rather the ability
to ‘“redescribe”
Lacanian indeterminate limit space of ‘fantasmatic Otherness’. Similarly, Vlada reality’ through
Petrić (1989–90: 30–31) considers the Zone predominantly as a dream space, the hermeneutical
but also proposes the possibility of seeing it as a site of ecological disaster: transformation and
tension that comes
‘perhaps Tarkovsky had in mind the real devastated region near Cheliabinsk with seeing one thing
where in 1957, a chemical explosion of nuclear material occurred, and was as another.
never officially reported.’ These various interpretations all provide compelling
readings of the Zone’s narrative significance, and indeed their variety further
emphasizes the ambiguity of the Zone; it is at once a prison camp, an ecologi-
cal disaster site and a dream space. While it may not reconcile this ambiguity,
to read the Zone against its narrative grain, to read it ‘poetically’, as I intend,
offers an alternative perspective that allows for this range of interpretations
without falling into contradictions. This is not to say that narrative is insig-
nificant to understanding the Zone, or to relegate narrative to a secondary
concern. Rather, following Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor (1977),5
to read the Zone metaphorically, to ‘see’ it as a cinematic space, opens this
space for narrative explanations and critical interpretations. Like the cinema
itself, the Zone can be a space of science-fiction narrative, political allegory
and dream.
To read the Zone as a cinematic space, following Bird’s suggestion, is to
emphasize its ‘poeticalness’ – the reflexive, metaphoric and lyric qualities of the
film that run alongside but also counter to its narrative. Two critical concepts
inform this reading. First, Gilles Deleuze’s time-image which refers to the shift

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 David Foster

6. Bordwell theorizes this from an ‘action/reaction’-based cinema of the movement-image (in which time
mode of parametric
narration in opposition
is subordinate to movement) to a cinema that emphasizes time over movement,
to three other modes following World War II. The time-image is characterized by the break down of
of cinematic narration: the ‘sensory-motor schema’ that defines the perception–affection–action link
the mode of classical
cinema typical of of the movement image (Deleuze 1989: 272). In place of this sensory-motor
Hollywood films of link, Deleuze (1989: 272) proposes that the time-image tends towards the
the 1930s and 1940s; presentation of ‘pure optical and sound situations’, divorced from action and
the mode of historical
materialist cinema focused on direct perception, contemplation and experience. These pure optical
characteristic for and sound situations of the time-image takes various forms, from hyalosigns
Soviet cinema of the
1920s; and the mode of
or crystal-images that blur the actual and the virtual to noosigns or images that
art cinema typical of link to or project thought. Deleuze’s theories offer a catalogue of ideas and
European modernist approaches to problems of perception, subjectivity and knowledge in cinema
film-making of the
1950s and 1960s. that can be useful to discussions of lyricism in poetic film. Moreover, though
his discussions of Tarkovsky’s films in relation to the time-image (particularly
the hyalosign in Mirror) are brief, Deleuze (1989: 42–43, 75) acknowledges a
clear connection between his theory of the time-image and Tarkovsky’s discus-
sion of time in film. And while he does not discuss Stalker in great detail, the
Zone recalls Deleuze’s description of space (1989: 5) in his cinema of the time-
image as ‘any-space-whatever’. The ‘any-space-whatever’ is a space of pure
optical and sound situations, unmotivated by action or reaction, which is dehu-
manized and empty, or disconnected from other spaces (Deleuze 1989: 5). The
Zone’s ambiguity, its disconnection and strangeness, make it an ‘any-space-
whatever’ par excellence, and invite one to approach a reading of the Zone as
cinematic space through Deleuze’s cinema of the time-image.
The second concept is what David Bordwell has called the parametric
mode of ‘cinematic narration’. Bordwell (1985: 275) characterizes paramet-
ric narration as ‘style-centered’.6 Parametric cinema undermines narrativ-
ity in favour of an emphasis on stylistic patterning independent of narrative
concerns (Bordwell 1985: 286). While parametric films do not eliminate narra-
tive, their foregrounding of style produces a tendency towards ellipses, repeti-
tiveness, disjoined cause and effect relationships and conspicuous narrative
gaps (Bordwell 1985: 288). Bordwell’s description of this parametric approach
presents what one might call a poeticization of narrative. As style becomes
removed from narrative discourse and disconnected from story, this other
textual level, a poetic level, displaces narrative. Indeed, Bordwell (1985: 274)
notes that parametric narration might just as well be called poetic narration.
Bordwell’s theorization of this parametric mode highlights the reflexivity of
this ‘poeticization’. Bordwell focuses on the foregrounding of style and formal
techniques in parametric cinema, but reflexivity also concerns an acknowl-
edgement of a film’s materiality, its conditions of production and reception,
and its status as a work of art. In Stalker, Tarkovsky defines the Zone as a
cinematic space by drawing on each of these reflexive qualities, particularly
through the presentation of colour, the shot and editing.

DREAMING IN COLOUR: FILM STOCK AND THE INDISCERNIBILITY

OF TIME AND SPACE
The most obvious of these parametric and reflexive strategies involves
Tarkovsky’s use of colour throughout the film. There is a distinct pattern
in the way Tarkovsky alternates between rich, high-contrast sepia; black-
and-white; and vivid colour in Stalker’s cinematography. While this pattern
initially appears to have a narrative function, with the sepia and black-and-

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 Where flowers bloom but have no scent

white images belonging to the narrative sections that take place in the ‘real’ 7. There may be a degree
of self-reflexive irony
world, and the colour appearing as the three men enter the fantastical Zone in this reflexive
(as in The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939) where the switch to colour indicates emphasis on the
the transition from ‘home’ to Oz), Tarkovsky breaks this narrative-based filmic materiality
since the shooting of
explanation (Vielma 2007). Johnson and Petrie (1994: 190) see Tarkovsky’s Stalker was plagued
use of transitions between sepia, black-and-white and colour in Stalker as by problems with film
breaking with his usual deployment of this difference, such as in Nostalghia stock. As Bird details,
much of the film had
(Tarkovsky, 1983), where black-and-white sequences indicate an alternative to be re-shot, either
reality – whether of dreams or memory. The shifts in colour in Stalker seem because the film stock
was of poor quality
almost random, as they lack narrative or character-based justification (Johnson or because it was
and Petrie 1994: 190). In breaking away from narrative motivation, these shifts improperly developed
become part of the process of defining the Zone as a cinematic space. at Mosfilm (Bird 2008:
149). Tarkovsky notes,
Transitions from black-and-white to sepia to full colour in Stalker are not however, that the
simply involved in establishing and distinguishing narrative space (setting the problems with film
difference between scenes in the Zone and scenes in the ‘real’ world), but rather stock did not influence
the decision to use
help to establish the Zone’s reflexive significance separate from narrative. The colour and black-and-
non-narrative function of colour and black-and-white cinematography in Stalker white footage (quoted
in Strick 2006: 71).
emphasizes the viewing experience of the spectator. The alternations from black-
and-white to colour and to sepia are a reminder of the very materiality of film
stock.7 The shifts in film stock signal to the viewer not only that he or she is
watching a film, but that the ‘filmic-ness’ of this film exists outside the narrative.
An example of the poeticizing effect of the alternations of image colour
in Stalker occurs after the rediscovery of the Professor by the Stalker and the
Writer (see Figure 1). As all three men rest, there is a series of transitions
between sepia and colour. The first four transitions from colour to sepia, back
to colour, and then the same again, seem to present a flashback of the Stalker
from a previous journey into the Zone and his encounter with a black dog.
But a subsequent transition from colour to sepia undermines this narrative
explanation. After a shot of wind stirring up dust on the marsh, in voice-over
the Stalker’s wife begins to recite a passage from the Book of Revelations over
a shot in colour showing the Stalker lying on the ground. As the recitation
continues, there is a cut to a vertical tracking shot in sepia, starting on the
Stalker’s face and then moving over various objects submerged underwater
before stopping over a hand that appears to belong to the Stalker. The image
then cuts to a colour shot of the dog and then again to a colour shot of the
Stalker lying on the ground. Throughout the sequence it is unclear whether
the transitions from colour to black-and-white are meant to show transi-
tions of consciousness through mental states such as dreams or memory.
As in Deleuze’s description (1989: 7) of the time-image, these colour transi-
tions emphasize an indiscernibility between subjective and objective: ‘We no
longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not
because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is
no longer even a place from which to ask.’ Like the pure optical situations of
the time-image, these images push away from narrative-based questions of
‘Where and when does this event occur?’ and towards other questions, such as
that which Deleuze (1989: 272) suggest the time-images poses, ‘What is there
to see in the image?’ In Stalker, Deleuze’s question leads to other thoughts
concerning ‘how’ and ‘why’ these images appear in the Zone.
As the distinction between those images belonging to the narrative present
and those belonging to other narrative moments or spaces is blurred beyond
narrative coherence, these alternations defamiliarize the narrative structure
for the spectator. The changes in film stock heighten the spectator’s aesthetic

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 David Foster

Figure 1: The Dry Tunnel.

experience of the Zone as an unpredictable and inscrutable place, but also

reinforce a level of stylistic meaning independent from the narrative. Even
instances where these transitions seem to have narrative motivation, attempts
at explanation are undercut. Thus, when the three men return to the black-
and-white of the world outside the Zone, the narrative logic of the colour
transitions seems to be restored until the Stalker leaves the bar with his wife
and child. The family’s walk home appears in colour, as does the film’s final
shot of the child’s telekinetic acts. Johnson and Petrie (1994: 190) propose that
this ‘suggests some seepage of the powers of the Zone into the real world’,
perhaps connected to the child’s powers. But this narrative justification fails
to explain why early shots of the child in the first part of the film and others
after the excursion into the Zone are in black-and-white. One might instead
see this ‘seepage’ as the intrusion of the Zone’s reflexivity into the narrative
space of the ‘real’ world. Or perhaps, following Deleuze, one might see this
‘seepage’ as a breakdown of the distinction between the Zone and outside
the Zone.

TRACKING THROUGH THE ZONE: CAMERA MOVEMENT AND

CREATING CINEMATIC SPACE
A second parametric pattern found in Stalker involves tracking shots that
disrupt the narrative through their extended duration. Petrić (1989–90: 29)
notes that in Stalker lateral tracking shots and vertical tracking shots both
generate a ‘level of audiovisual abstraction’. In scenes such as the one of the
Stalker and the Writer’s passage through the ironically named ‘Dry Tunnel’,
and their rediscovery of the Professor, the tracking shots function as pauses
that again supplant narrative motivation with aesthetic flourish. Following
the Stalker and the Writer’s entrance into the Dry Tunnel’s waterfall, a
lateral tracking shot over various objects stands in place of their journey (see
Figure 2). Although the Stalker’s voice is audible, telling the Writer about the
Zone, there is no relation between the objects over which the tracking shot
moves and the narrative event of the passage. Instead, the camera moves
slowly right to left over each object, first the embers of a fire, then, immersed
in water, a hypodermic needle on a tiled floor, a machine gun and pages
from a book as well as other unidentifiable detritus floating in the water. The
meaning and significance of these items and their distribution initially seems
to demand explanation. In fact, the subsequent shot offers a ‘red herring’ to
provide the opportunity to form a narrative reason for the lateral tracking shot:

Figure 2: The ‘felt’ presence/absence of the Zone.

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 Where flowers bloom but have no scent

the Professor sits beside a burning fire. But the high flames of the Professor’s
fire are unlike the dying embers in the tracking shot, defeating any narrative
connection between the two shots.
Similarly, the collection of objects in the vertical tracking shot accompa-
nied by the Revelations recitation lacks connection to the narrative: the camera
passes over objects submerged underwater – a needle (again), a framed paint-
ing of a tree, a bowl of goldfish, a religious icon with coins on top of it, a
gun, a broken clock, a spring, a page from a day calendar and other unrec-
ognizable objects. Some items could be linked to the narrative; the guns, for
instance, might be related to the broken-down tanks the men encounter. And
one might be tempted to read certain objects as possessing specific symbolic
significance, such as linking the clock and calendar page as symbolic of the
breakdown of measurable time within the Zone. But such speculation does
little to determine the function of these tracking shots in the film. Rather,
it is the formal qualities of these shots that determine their significance as
parametric intrusions into the narrative. Importantly, these parametric track-
ing shots are exclusive to the Zone, since the other lateral tracking shot at the
beginning of the film only serves to introduce the Stalker and his family as it
passes over them lying in bed.
The tracking shots in the Zone have similar parametric effects on narra-
tive flow: emphasizing duration, interrupting narrative information and
introducing pseudo-iterative frequency. These tracking shots pull away
from narrative duration and assert a style-based duration. This duration
recalls Tarkovsky’s description (1986: 117–18) of the time-pressure of the
film shot:

[Time] becomes tangible when you sense something significant, truth-

ful going on beyond the events on the screen; when you realize, quite
consciously, that what you see in the frame is not limited to its visual
depiction, but is a pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame
and to infinity; a pointer to life.

The shots last as long as it takes to pass over, to visually ‘describe’ the vari-
ous objects, but they are not tied to the time of narrative events, such as the
passage through the waterfall. By their independence from narrative events,
these shots also interrupt the narrative, coming between or even replac-
ing narrative moments. During the tracking shot that replaces the Stalker
and Writer’s journey through the waterfall, their brief off-screen conversa-
tion hints at a narrative event that is missing, some incident produced by
the Zone. But the tracking shot obscures what this moment might entail. In
their duration, these tracking shots ‘point’ outside the narrative in an associa-
tive and ultimately poetic manner, encouraging the viewer to consider non-
narrative explanations and interpretations for the collections of objects these
shots reveal.
Finally, the similarities shared by the tracking shots – their linear trajecto-
ries, the common items and the water – make them pseudo-iterative, draw-
ing attention to their repetition as an aesthetic choice rather than a narrative
necessity. The time-pressure of these tracking shots, making time tangible,
forces the viewers to be aware of their own spectatorship. The spectator
can consider the narrative significance of the shot only briefly before being
immersed in contemplation of the experience of the tracking process. Thus
Tarkovsky’s time-pressure closely resembles Deleuze’s time-image (1989: 17)

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 David Foster

and its pure optical situations that ‘bring the emancipated senses into direct
relation with time and thought’. In making duration conspicuous and obscur-
ing narrative, these shots encourage viewers to consider the cinematic appa-
ratus and their role within it.
These tracking shots also mark the Zone as a cinematic space because
they render space in a specifically filmic manner. In their strict linearity and
their hovering movement over objects, the tracking shots appear expressly
mechanical, a reminder that they are produced by the camera – a mechani-
cal rather than a human eye. The space that this camera records is also a
cinematic one because it is an impossible space. In the vertical tracking
shot discussed above, the camera first tracks overtop the Stalker’s face in
a close-up, then tracks over the submerged objects, and finally focuses on,
tracks back from, and tilts up towards an arm that seems impossibly but
convincingly (based on the shirt sleeve and leather jacket) to be that of the
Stalker as well. This folding of space, made possible in part by the delimiting
of the frame, in which the Stalker is in two places at once, further marks the
Zone as a fantastical space, where the impossible is made possible through
cinematic means.

POETIC LINKS: EDITING IMPOSSIBLE SPACES AND

DISCONTINUOUS TIMES
The editing in Stalker also contributes to this mapping of the Zone as a logi-
cally impossible but cinematically possible space. The specifically cinematic
ability to link spaces through editing is here deployed not only to present
a narrative space in which a story takes place, but more so to demonstrate
cinema’s ability to create and move through otherwise impossible spaces.
For example, the editing in the Dry Tunnel sequence returns the characters
three times to the same passageway over which hangs a metal nut attached
to a piece of cloth (the Stalker’s means of testing the Zone for traps). In
each instance, the passageway appears the same but its spatial relation to
other shots varies. The Stalker and the Writer pass before the hanging nut,
with the sound of torrents of water from the waterfall, before they enter
the Dry Tunnel, yet after the long horizontal tracking shot, they emerge
from the passageway beneath the nut to the near silence of the Professor
sitting by a fire. Here the Zone seems to loop the characters back to a space
that is at once the same but different. The Stalker calls this loop one of the
Zone’s traps, but this labyrinthine space is made possible through editing
that reflexively flaunts the notion of the continuity of space. Similarly, the
trap of the Dune Room is also a product of editing (see Figure 3). This trap
appears as an editing ‘trick’, in which a bird flies across the Room only to
disappear and then reappear on the opposite side of the frame, flying and
landing on one of the dunes. The editing here does not link discontinu-
ous spaces, but allows for impossible movement within a single space. The
disappearance and reappearance of the bird is another loop, this time a
temporal one that disrupts and repairs the flow of time. The temporal qual-
ity of this movement through space is further underscored by the slow-mo-
tion shot of the Stalker’s nut-marker striking a dune. These shots not only
edit together different time-pressures, creating the ‘rhythmical expression’
that are a process of ‘Sculpting in Time’ (Tarkovsky 1986: 121), but also
make clear the manipulations of time that define the specificity of cine-
matic space.

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 Where flowers bloom but have no scent

Figure 3: The editing trap of the Dune Room.

OTHER SPACES, OTHER DISCOURSES: DOCUMENTARY AND POETRY 8. While Tarkovsky

rejected the notion
What distinguishes the cinematic space of the Zone and Stalker from the space of experimental and
of other films? Do not all films present a cinematic space by the very fact of avant-garde cinema, he
did so largely in terms
being films? One answer to these questions is that Stalker’s foregrounding of of these concepts being
reflexivity, at the expense of maintaining a coherent narrative and narrative critical categories
(Tarkovsky 1986: 97).
space, distinguishes it from the majority of films, which are predominantly
and insistently narrative. But this reflexivity also brings Stalker closer to other 9. Here I use Kitty Hunter-
Blair’s translation of
non-narrative cinema, particularly experimental and avant-garde films. As Arsenii Tarkovskii’s
Petrić (1989–90: 31) points out, in its formal reflexivity and counter-narrativ- untitled poem included
ity, Stalker is ‘reminiscent of US “underground” or experimental films of the in Sculpting in Time.
sixties’. In its tendency towards subjectivity and lyricism, Stalker shares much
with the work of another film-maker concerned with film as poetry, Stan
Brakhage, as Jerry White (2005) demonstrates.8 This affinity with other non-
narrative modes of cinema is also apparent in Stalker in intertextual gestures
towards other kinds of cinema. The Stalker’s wife’s monologue delivered
directly to the camera is one example of this alternative to narrative cinema.
While the wife’s address has obvious connections to the story (explaining her
marriage), its delivery resembles a documentary interview. Furthermore, the
wife speaks to the camera as ‘you’, collapsing the narrative distance between
spectator and screen, reworking space in yet another cinematic manner. The
scene is striking not only because it breaks narrative convention, but also
because it seems to belong to an entirely different film or kind of film. This
documentary-like moment is perhaps another ‘seepage’ of the Zone, another
kind of cinematic discourse entering into the story. But it is also a direct
address – from one subject to another – a direct discourse that looks towards
another direct discourse that plays a role in Stalker: lyric poetry.
Throughout the film, characters, on- and off-screen, recite or read lyric
poetry in a manner that, while it may have some narrative motivation, also
disrupts the narrative by introducing alternative forms of discourse. The reci-
tation of verses from the Book of Revelations alongside the vertical tracking
shot adds to the scene’s interruption of narrative flow, as it brings with it
other information foreign to the story of Stalker. Besides interrupting narra-
tive, other inclusions of poetry in the film work to introduce lyricism into the
Zone’s cinematic space. In the Zone the Stalker recites from a poem written by
Porcupine’s brother, a fellow stalker, (in fact, in an instance of self-reflexivity,
the poem was written by Tarkovsky’s father, Arseni Tarkovsky), and although
its refrain ‘but there has to be more’9 relates to the sense of loss and failure in
the film; as Johnson and Petrie (1994: 260) say, ‘its thematic or narrative role
[…] is insignificant’. Likewise, in the film’s final scene where the Stalker’s
daughter’s telekinetic powers are revealed, the child reads a poem by Fedor
Tiuchev in a voice-over before she moves the glasses on the table with her
mind. The poem she recites acts as a prelude to her magic powers. The poem
sets a tone different from the rest of the narrative, just as the child’s ‘miracle’
sets her apart from the rest of the ‘real’ world. And in this way, the tonal shift

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 David Foster

that these poems signal is not unlike the shifts in colour between the Zone
and the world outside.

SPEAKING AND SEEING BETWEEN SUBJECTS: LYRICISM AND

CINEMATIC TRANSSUBJECTIVITY
The introduction of poetry into the film in both these instances is an indication
that lyricism is germane to the Zone, which seems to inspire poetic contem-
plation. But it is also a reflexive reminder of Tarkovsky’s assertion that cinema
is poetic. Lyricism, of course, is primarily a literary concept, and one that is
frequently associated with the idea of ‘voice’, that is, a speaking ‘I’. Critics
such as Northrop Frye (1957), Marjorie Perloff (1985), Jonathan Culler (1986)
and Douglas Barbour (2001) offer accounts of lyric poetry that focus on the
presentation and negotiations of voice and subjectivity that involve reflexivity
and counter-narrativity. Theories of lyricism in film, such as P. Adams Sitney’s
lyrical film (2002) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinema of poetry (1976), replace
this emphasis on voice with an emphasis on vision, particularly in terms of the
image as emanating from some sort of subjectivity (whether a character, the
film-maker, or even the camera), in this sense a seeing ‘I’. The subjectivity of
this filmic lyricism cannot be equated simply with the representation of inter-
nal subjectivity and experience as in dream or hallucination. In his description
of the cinema of poetry, Pasolini (1976: 553–55) emphasizes that the immer-
sion in its ‘free indirect subjectivity’ is often a product of ‘obsessive’ stylistic
patterning of framing and editing that goes beyond the subjective shot and
aligns character, film-maker and camera in a network of subjectivities. As
a lyrical cinematic space, the Zone initiates and facilitates an interaction of
subjectivities, but it also functions as subjectivity, as a consciousness itself.
Much of the narrative explanation for the events that transpire in the
Zone relies on understanding the subjective qualities of these events. The
alternations between film stocks, as noted above, might be interpreted as
an indication of a shift in time or in perspective identified with a specific,
subjective point of view. The shifts between colour and sepia that occur
during the sequence with the recitations from Revelations may be interpreted
as representative of the Stalker’s dream-state or his memories. Anna Powell
(2007: 154) suggests that the tracking shot that displaces the journey through
the Dry Tunnel ‘reveal[s] physical fragments of Stalker’s personal memories,
remnants of his previous trips to the Zone’. But for Petric´ (1989–90: 33) these
representations of subjective experience in Stalker do not belong to individual
characters; rather they are ‘the author’s dream imagery rendered through
cinematic devices that trigger the viewer’s sensorial response’. Petric´’s
comment suggests that subjective experience here moves between subjects –
Tarkovsky and the viewer – but I would add that this movement includes the
cinematic medium. As a cinematic space, the Zone becomes the manifestation
of this intermediary subjectivity – its own cinematic subjectivity.
Two scenes lend themselves to this view of the Zone as cinematic subjec-
tivity. The first occurs as the men begin their journey into the Zone (Figure 4).
The camera tracks low to the ground towards and into a burned-out vehi-
cle containing skeletal remains. This tracking is accompanied by clear sounds
of movement through the grass, and just as the camera moves close to the
vehicle, a section of grass is pushed away, as if something was occupying the
physical space of the camera. The camera looks through the side window of
the vehicle as the Stalker, the Professor and then the Writer move into the

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 Where flowers bloom but have no scent

Figure 4: The passage through the ‘Dry Tunnel’ and the horizontal tracking shot.

frame of the window. The position of the camera here becomes a presence felt 10. Deleuze distinguishes
between two forms
by the characters. First, the Professor turns and stares briefly in the direction of the noosign; that
of the camera, then the Writer turns and looks, turns away and then quickly of the movement-
turns back to stare at the camera again. While they stare, their dialogue gives image and that of the
time-image. With the
no indication that they see anything besides the wreck of the vehicle and the movement-image the
dead body it contains. However, this presence that is an absence – at once noosign concerns the
physical (pushing the grass) and incorporeal (unseen by the characters) – rational links between
images, governed by
cannot be reduced to the unacknowledged presence of the camera outside the the sensory-motor
fiction. Instead, it is a manifestation of the Zone itself as cinematic subjectivity, schema: ‘between
two images or two
one that looks and sees as a camera does, yet exists not in space but as space. sequences of images,
But the cinematic subjectivity of the Zone is not limited to a lyrical sense the limit as interval
of a look or a point of view; it also incorporates the poetic sense of lyricism, a is included as the
end of the one or
subjectivity expressed in voice. In the second scene that suggests the subjec- as the beginning of
tivity of the Zone, the Writer attempts to enter the Room from a direct route the other, as the last
(despite the Stalker’s protestation). As the Writer approaches the Room, a image of the first
sequence or the first
voice tells him, ‘Stop. Don’t move’, over a shot that tracks backwards from the of the second’ (Deleuze
within the Room. The Professor and the Stalker at first assume that the other 1989: 277; emphasis
in original). In the
spoke the command, and then the Professor declares that the Writer called time-image thought no
out to himself. Yet one sees that the Writer does not speak. If it is the Zone longer appears in the
that commands the Writer to stop, then it has the capacity to produce sound. form of metaphor –
a circuit linking the
These characteristics of the Zone’s cinematic subjectivity – one that looks and ‘inside and outside’
speaks – are also a reflection of its cinematic specificity, one that is echoed in of the image, as in
the Stalker’s comment that while he can see flowers blooming in the Zone, Eisenstein’s films –
because the irrational
they do not have a scent (a distinctly cinematic limitation). cut undermines the
This imagining of the Zone as cinematic subjectivity recalls Deleuze’s explo- associative and the
harmonic relation
ration of the relationship between thought and cinema. For Deleuze, thought of images (Deleuze
appears in cinema in the form of the noosign, an image of thought or, as the 1989: 182).
glossary of Cinema 2 defines it, ‘an image which goes beyond itself towards 11. Through his
something which can only be thought’ (Deleuze 1989: 334). With the time- investigation of
image,10 the noosign emerges in ‘the irrational cut between non-linked (but Deleuze’s theories,
Frampton theorizes
always relinked) images’ (Deleuze 1989: 278). The noosign of the time-image his own concept of
is based on the interstitial gaps generated by irrational cuts, which produce thought in cinema,
‘not an operation of association, but of differentiation’ (Deleuze 1989: 179). what he calls ‘filmind’.
According to Frampton
Because of this gap, this ‘fissure’, the noosign requires ‘relinkage’ via thought (2006: 6), ‘filmind’
‘external to the image’ (Deleuze 1989: 277–78). In this sense, the noosign is imagines the film
itself as a thinking
both an image of thought and an image that evokes thought. Thought in the subject and thus ‘the
noosign of the time-image moves between its presence in the image and to theoretical originator
the viewer. Daniel Frampton (2006: 52, 172) sees this dynamic as trans-sub- of the images and
sounds we experience’.
jective film-thinking, which he later associates with viewing ‘film as a possi- Frampton’s ideas
ble poetic thinking’.11 The trans-subjectivity of Deleuze’s image of thought are provocative and
is important for understanding the Zone as a cinematic space, because the certainly suggestive of

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 David Foster

the view of the Zone as movement of thought beyond the image explains how the Zone at once func-
cinematic subject that
I am considering here.
tions as space and subjectivity.
But Frampton’s theory The process of ‘relinkage’ in Deleuze’s image of thought describes both
depends on a rejection the way the Zone is mapped as a cinematic space and the way the Zone func-
of what he calls
‘technicist’ language – tions trans-subjectively. Negotiating the space of the Zone requires the viewer
reference to technical to contemplate and think through the irrational and uncertain elements of
terminology relating Stalker’s reflexive style. In experiencing the shifts in colour throughout the
to film production – in
favour of experiential film, for example, the viewer may attempt to make narrative sense of these
language, which changes by associating them with the subjectivity of a character, say the
conflict with my view
of the reflexivity that
Stalker. But the viewer may also recognize these shifts as emerging from
defines the Zone. the process of film-making (choices of film stock and its processing) and by
Indeed, Frampton (2006: extension the subjectivity of the film-maker. In an interview, Tarkovsky states
110) rejects reflexivity
as a ‘technicist’ that the Zone is ‘a product of the Stalker’s imagination […] he was the one
concept. who created that place, to bring people and show them around, to convince
them of the reality of his creation’ (quoted in Tassone 2006: 61). Given that
in the same interview Tarkovsky acknowledges his affinity with the Stalker,
one might see the Zone as emerging from (and perhaps embodying) his own
cinematic imagination. Similarly, this trans-subjective dynamic is evident in
the tracking shot that covers the journey through the Dry Tunnel. The irra-
tionality of this shot comes in part from its subjectivity that departs from the
relative objectivity and narrativity of the shots that precede and follow it. The
shot demands the viewer to consider ‘who is seeing’, but also how this seeing
is accomplished. To think through these possibilities requires relinking the
tracking shot and the more narrative shots by way of contemplation of what
the Zone is (as space and subject) and how it communicates (poetically). The
Zone, then, is a space of thought that engages the viewer in cinematic think-
ing; that sees, speaks and that creates meaning from specifically cinematic
procedures. But this cinematic thinking is also an especially poetic thinking,
one that – by its tendency towards association, trans-subjectivity and reflex-
ivity – deals with ‘sentiment, memory, and imagination’, like ‘the Zone’ of
Marker’s Sunless.

POETRY IN THE ZONE

In the closing moments of Sunless, when images from the film are replayed
(including one of emus on the Île de France) through the distortions of
Yamaneko’s Zone, Krasna says:

Finally his language touches me because he talks to that part of us

which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls. A piece of chalk to
follow the contours of what is not, or is no longer, or is not yet. The
handwriting each one of us will use to compose his own list of things
that quicken the heart: to offer, to erase. In that moment, poetry will be
made by everyone, and there will be emus in the Zone.

This description of the effects of Yamaneko’s Zone, its translation of images

into contours that highlight form over content, also allow for images to be read
not referentially but in an associative manner. For Marker, Yamaneko’s Zone
encourages and produces poetic contemplation, affective poetic experience
and the poetic (re-)creation of images. Tarkovsky’s Zone functions in a similar
fashion. The experience of the Zone, for the characters and viewers who
navigate through it, is not simply a matter of a series of events. Rather this

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 Where flowers bloom but have no scent

experience demands contemplation, meditation, association and reflection that

might bring together political allegories, religious and ontological questions,
and desire – in short, a poetic thinking. But, given its cinematic specificity,
the Zone offers an approach to thought that comes from poetic cinema. In
describing the Stalker’s motivation for bringing people to the Zone, Tarkovsky
says:

Imagine a very rich man, who created, from a little of everything, a

world, a house to which he would bring his friends in order to create a
certain impression. […] It would be an experience for others, a fascinat-
ing sensation. That is the basis of creation in what could be called the
Stalker’s work.
(quoted in Tassone 2006: 62)

This remark recalls Marker’s own description of Tarkovsky’s body of work

in One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich/Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch
(Marker, 1999). Marker metaphorically envisions Tarkovsky’s films as ‘an
imaginary house […] where all the rooms open to one another and all lead to
the same corridor. Opening a door by chance, the actors of the Mirror could
cross paths with those from Nostalghia.’ One cannot help but think of this
corridor as the Zone, a space that connects to other spaces and other thoughts
in Tarkovsky’s cinema of poetry.

REFERENCES
Barbour, Douglas (2001), Lyric/Anti-lyric: Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Edmonton: NeWest Press.
Bird, Robert (2008), Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema, London: Reaktion
Books.
Bordwell, David (1985), Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Culler, Jonathan (1986), ‘Lyric Continuities: Speaker and Consciousness’,
Neo-Helicon, 13: 1, pp. 105–23.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Frampton, Daniel (2006), Filmosophy, London: Wallflower Press.
Frye, Northrop (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Johnson, Vida T. and Petrie, Graham (1994), The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A
Visual Fugue, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1976), ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies
and Methods: Vol. 1, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 542–58.
Perloff, Marjorie (1985), The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the
Pound Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Petrić, Vlada (1989–90), ‘Tarkovsky’s Dream Imagery’, Film Quarterly, 43: 2,
pp. 28–34.
Powell, Anna (2007), Deleuze, Altered States and Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul (1977), The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the
Creation of Meaning in Language, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Sitney, P. Adams (2002), Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943– 2000,
3rd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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 David Foster

Strick, Philip (2006), ‘Tarkovsky’s Translations’ [1981], in John Gianvito (ed.),

Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,
pp. 70–72.
Strugatsky, Boris, Strugatsky, Arkady and Tarkovsky, Andrei (1999), ‘Stalker’, in
Andrei Tarkovsky: Collected Screenplays, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 381–416.
Tarkovsky, Andrey (1986), Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Tassone, Aldo (2006), ‘Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky (on Stalker)’ [1980],
in John Gianvito (ed.), Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, Jackson: University of
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Turovskaya, Maya (1989), Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, London: Faber and
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http://www.cabinetic.com/intersection/5/vielma.html. Accessed 23
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White, Jerry (2005), ‘Brakhage’s Tarkovsky and Tarkovsky’s Brakhage:
Collectivity, Subjectivity, and the Dream of Cinema’, Canadian Journal of
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zizekthing.htm. Accessed 12 January 2010.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Foster, D. (2010), ‘Where flowers bloom but have no scent: the cinematic space of
the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker’, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema
4: 3, pp. 307–320, doi: 10.1386/srsc.4.3.307_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
David Foster teaches English and Film Studies at the University of Manitoba.
He recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Alberta. His disserta-
tion ‘Kino-Poiêsis: Towards a Poetics of Poetic Film’ theorized the possibility
of poetic film by examining the work of Chris Marker, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stan
Brakhage and Guy Maddin. His research interests include poetic and essayis-
tic film, the work of Chris Marker and film adaptation. His work has appeared
in Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies and Image [&] Narrative.
Contact: 641 Fletcher Argue, Department of English, Film and Theatre,
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 5V5 Canada.
E-mail: fosterd@cc.umanitoba.ca

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