Spitball Army

I am a member of an online community of film enthusiasts called The Auteurs. It is relatively new, and was started as a forum for people who share an interest in classic film. The group began when The Criterion Collection, a company whose mission is the preservation and restoration of important world cinematic works, revamped its website and recognized the desire of its followers to have a place to discuss topics related to Criterion releases and film, in general. As I mentioned at the outset, the group is new, but its membership seems to be growing daily.

A recent topic on the forum rallied Auteur members to contribute votes for a poll to compile the ten best films and filmmakers of all time, similar to the Sight and Sound poll that occurs once a decade. More about the poll itself later, perhaps, but let’s jump ahead in time. After about 100 members, including me, submitted lists, one of our very brave compatriots compiled the results. On the list, in a four-way tie for last place with The Godfather, Rashomon and Taxi Driver, was Stalker, a 1979 film by Andrei Tarkovsky that I had not seen and knew very little about.

There seems to be a cult of Tarkovsky on the Auteurs site. You can find some of these folks populating YouTube, and they are probably marking their territory elsewhere on the internet by posting comments on a variety of websites. They revere Tarkovsky, and I would agree with them that Tarkovsky made films, not movies. His work is just about as close to “art” as film gets, and his pacing is slow and deliberate. I had previously seen only two of his films (Solaris and The Sacrifice) and, while I respect the languorous tempo of his work, I realize that it isn’t for everybody, especially not a generation of people raised on a diet of Farrelly Brothers movies, action pics or butcher-edited TV reality shows. Probably the closest thing to a Tarkovsky film that the general American public has embraced recently has been the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. But Tarkovsky pictures are much slower than that, with narratives that are nowhere near that tight.

Aiming to fill a hole in my filmic vocabulary, and to be on a more level standing with my Auteurs cohorts, I rented Stalker.

A still from Stalker.

I watched it in two sittings over two evenings, which turned out to be a good way to approach the film. There is a natural break between its two parts just past the 60-minute point. Thus, the images and ideas from the first hour were allowed to gestate in the back of my mind before I watched the second half. Last night, I finished the film. I turned off the television, shut out the lights, and walked slowly and quietly to bed.

When I awoke this morning, I still felt a meditative quiet about me, and about the house. I poured a cup of coffee and stepped outside. There was an uncharacteristic fog drifting about twenty feet above the street, caressing the rooftops of the houses surrounding mine. As I stepped off the porch, I noticed what appeared to be fresh single strands of spiderweb dangling from the ends of the dogwood branches, some extending to the bricks at the corner of the house. All was quiet. It was about 7:45 a.m.

I paused on the step and sipped from the coffee cup. A bird sang from a tree next door. I ducked under a web and walked, calmly and slowly, up the driveway. It seemed as if the mood from last night’s film had escaped from the television and out of the house into the night, enveloping the bloom of a new morning. A fully-developed spider web glistened in the dew from the branches of a butterfly bush in the back yard. I approached the stairs that lead up to my office (where I am now typing this) and there, as if to warn me, as if to slow me down and heed me to take notice, as if they were lines of police tape advising me to use caution, were three more shining threads of spun silk. They crossed from one side of the staircase to the handrail on the opposite side.

I paused briefly before walking through and destroying the spider’s handiwork. It was gone in an instant, as quickly as an image from a film. But, like that image, my encounter with it was burned lightly in my consciousness. I want to wake up to this morning again, to experience this calm again, this peace. I feel that I’d like to watch Stalker again soon, as well.

On my way back to the house, I encountered the following scenario, which reminded me of a dream sequence from Stalker (if you’ve seen Stalker, you’ll recognize the tone; if you haven’t, I am sorry, but there don’t seem to be any licensed clips of it on YouTube).  I just so happened to have my camera with me: