Music and possible-zones – Geoff Dyer on Andrei Tarkovsky
posted by Dave Allen, 4 Comments
Garry Winogrand, “New Mexico,” 1957
Dyer: And what about you? Do you feel that the style you’ve arrived at is some sort of compensatory thing? Did you start out to be a straight-down-the-line novelist?
Sullivan: No, I never did. And I really relate to what you said about helplessness. Because you know that you do your best writing when you follow your interests, even when they don’t go the way you’d want them to, out of a kind of politeness. I’m often sheepish about forcing my obsessions on the reader, but I know that when I indulge that, I write better. So what became the guiding thing in my work is that I kept indulging that.
Dyer: That’s something we have in common. Too often, self-indulgence is used in the pejorative sense.
From a conversation with John Jeremiah Sullivan and Geoff Dyer.
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I sat down in my home office on the last day of 2012 and began to write. I actually had no idea what I would write. I described some ideas in my 2012 year-end post about being more focused in this coming year, wanting to do less, achieve more, so I figured that I should hold to that and start with the first item that appears on my list of possible subjects – my thoughts about a brilliant book: Zona by Geoff Dyer.
Why this book and the reason it aligns with this essay’s title will be revealed. But first, the extract from a conversation between Dyer and Sullivan above has them dwelling on self-indulgence, where both agree that it’s a good thing. I too agree; as Sullivan remarks, “you know that you do your best writing when you follow your interests.”
So what are my interests? Well the list would be long, as I’m sure Dyer and Sullivan’s would be too. Perhaps there’s a subtext to Sullivan’s quote: first focus on your interests, then indulge in them. So – music, reading, writing, philosophy, politics, and the Internet’s disruption of culture and business, are all high on my shortlist of interests. Regular readers of my essays here are no doubt attuned to those self-indulgent topics of mine. (And by attuned I accept that you might find my opinions boring or downright disagree with them, but then that’s what makes the world turn.)
Dyer’s book and his conversation with Sullivan became the inspiration for this essay, one that could have had a subtitle – my problem with contemporary popular music. Problem might be too strong of a word. I notice that I am becoming more self-aware especially in trying to make sense of who I am now and how, as I age, my relationship to music changes (actually, it would be more honest to say how my relationship with culture in general is changing.) Music that I have enjoyed in the past remains, obviously, just as it was recorded – often mellifluous tunes captured in vinyl like arthropods mummified in amber. Unlike those encased insects the songs can still take flight. Dyer and Sullivan have both made music a subject of some of their best work: Dyer – But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz
I tend to spend more time reading older books, especially biographies, diaries and correspondence and seeking out older films on Netflix and YouTube, searching for classics that I missed. This is not nostalgia, it feels more like adding Spackle to my cultural indexes, patching in if you will. Perhaps my curiosity in those departments also serves as an antidote to the more A.D.D. aspects of our current always-on culture. (Now I’m back to ‘mindfulness.’) With music I lean toward the new more than the old.
As a musician I have had a schizophrenic relationship with music: a clinician’s focus and a super-fan’s gooey embrace. Which explains how I can spend hours in the proverbial deprivation tank, letting the music of Burial
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Back to Dyer’s book. The subtitle to it is ‘A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room’ and I would call it, if I were high-minded, an exegesis upon Andrei Tarkovsky‘s famous film, Stalker. (I say famous even though you may never of heard of it, but at least amongst the cognoscenti it is famous.) Exegesis is too freighted with religious terminology though, something Dyer avoids when discussing Stalker. (Tarkovsky always denied that his films reflected religion of any kind.) In short, Dyer first saw Stalker about 30 years ago, soon after leaving Oxford University – the film has haunted him ever since and he has watched it numerous times. (I have seen it only once but have now ordered a DVD version
Sullivan: I ended up watching it in Russian, so I probably have a skewed view.
Dyer: How is your Russian?
Sullivan: I speak hardly a word. But it’s a good film to watch in a foreign language. It’s almost like watching mime. There’s so little dialogue, and you can tell without it what’s going on emotionally with the characters, and so I was able to follow. And also having read your description of it.
At the heart of the film is the Zone, a mysterious place that may or may not exist – a meteorite impact zone? a nuclear meltdown zone? who knows… Whatever it is, the Zone has been abandoned and therein lies its appeal: as Dyer notes “The paradox of abandonment soon kicked in: anywhere abandoned serves as a magnet.” A ‘Stalker’ serves as a guide to those who want or dare to visit. The film follows our Stalker and his companions, Writer and Professor, on a journey inside the Zone – maybe. In fact, Dyer suggests that because the camera is capturing everything then the camera creates/is the Zone, or maybe the Zone only exists as a figment of Stalker’s imagination – or ours? What is clear is that Stalker “lives” for his Zone.
Dyer: “I’ve watched it so many times now, and there’s that moment when he gets to the Zone, and he goes off to have a little walk on his own, and he collapses into the vegetation in this state of just bliss that this place that he loves so much, that he’s pinned his whole life on, is as he remembered it. And it’s just..I find it incredibly profound and moving.”
The Zone also contains the Room.
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Image: Jonas Bendikson
I was reflecting on Dyer’s reflections on Tarkovsky’s Zone when thinking about music. The concept of a zone is really intriguing, and the more I think about it the more I realize that Tarkovsky’s film, the actors, the cameras, the set, are a Zone of his own making, a Zone that exists at “the will of its creator.” Dyer: “Often, in Tarkovsky, when we think something is still it’s not; at the very least the frame is contracting or expanding slightly, almost as if the film were breathing.” The camera acts as another person in the Zone, intently watching Stalker, Writer and Professor. And it may be malign. And then comes the overlap as Dyer refers to revisiting Stalker the film as “going back to this cinematic Zone many times…” He also asks “what is the Zone like when there is no one here to witness it, to bring it to life, to consciousness?”
Which makes me think of music again, especially digitized music. Ones and zeros; now, in digital form, a musician or a band’s music doesn’t exist until someone interacts with it, when someone enters its Zone. This can also be said of vinyl records and CDs, as interaction is required to listen to them. And so, to be in the Zone is to literally be part of the Zone. Perhaps it’s a stretch to conflate a film, music and zones but I see analogies. And that’s where possible-zones come in.
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I mentioned at the beginning of this essay how I am trying to make sense of who I am now in middle-age versus the 22 year old Gang of Four musician, or the newly-minted husband-soon-to-be-a-father at 34. Well, in another of those serendipitous moments where, when doing research I came across an article just today… actually, wait a minute… is it really serendipitous if you discover something through research? I’d say no it’s not, as researching something increases the chances of finding it, so I’d have to say it’s not the ‘happy accident’ of serendipity. Where was I? Oh, yes. I found this article today: Why You Won’t Be the Person You Expect to Be, a scientific study about our inability to predict our future selves – although we are really good at remembering our past lives. It turns out we have always been terrible at considering what we might be doing in 20 years time. And interestingly, the article has many references to music. Here’s an extract:
“When asked about their favorite band from a decade ago, respondents were typically willing to shell out $80 to attend a concert of the band today. But when they were asked about their current favorite band and how much they’d be willing to spend to see the band’s concert in 10 years, the price went up to $129. Even though they realized that favorites from a decade ago like Creed or the Dixie Chicks have lost some of their luster, they apparently expect Coldplay and Rihanna to blaze on forever.”
I personally hope that Coldplay doesn’t “blaze on forever” but that’s a diversion. We obviously get well outside the zone when we look to the future, but that’s not my point here. It’s about living in the present really.
“Middle-aged people — like me — often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin,” said one of the authors, Daniel T. Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. “What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”
Weirdly, (or not) the article helped me look through the lens of who I am now; a guy who is very happy in his skin, growing more curious and inquisitive as he gets older, filling his house with books and building a giant Netflix list of classic films that he may or may not get around to watching, who is looking forward to receiving a ‘Stalker’ DVD in the mail. I think that’s a reasonable place to be for now…
What I’ll be doing in 20 years time is anyone’s guess. I don’t care to. I’ll always have my multiple music Zones though.
In closing, and re the film, here’s the ultimate value that the Zone brings. Dyer again:
“The Zone is a place of uncompromised and unblemished value. It is one of the few territories left – possibly the only one – where the rights to Top Gear have not been sold: a place of refuge and sanctuary. A sanctuary also from cliché. That’s another of Tarkovsky’s virtues: an absolute freedom from cliché in a medium where clichés are not only tolerated but, in the form of unquestioning adherence to convention, expected. There are no clichés in Tarkovsky: no clichés of plot, of character, of framing, no clichés of music to underline the emotional meaning of a scene (or, as is more usually the case, to compensate or make good for an emotional meaning that would be absent were it not for the music.) Actually, we need to qualify this slightly: there are no one else’s clichés in Tarkovsky.”
And finally: “I really, really like the Zone. In a weird way, even when I’m listening to music, that’s all that I really want to do is just get into a trance-act with music in some sort of zone.”
That sounds like happiness to me. Amen to that.
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References:
Geoff Dyer: Zona – A book about a film about a journey to a room and But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz
John Jeremiah Sullivan: Pulphead: Essays
Rick Moody: On Celestial Music: And Other Adventures in Listening
[Update: 1/5/13] In mentioning ‘mindfulness’ I was remiss in not including Roy Christopher’s essay: Mindfulness and the Medium.
January 8th, 2013 @ 2:13 pm
I have to admit that Zona is only marginally on my own radar, but I’m fascinated by the way that you have tied your own construct of memory and music to the Zone. It might be useful, however, to widen the net a bit and take in the social and artistic paradigm that Tarkovsky was working in while creating Stalker. As a preamble to Stalker, it’s useful to remind people that the Soviet Union once was home to one of the most creative, experimental, and productive cinema industries ever to flourish, all before the Conference of Socialist Writers in 1934 and the calcification of socialist realism in all of Russia’s arts. (As a personal note, I always felt that there was a direct line between pre-’34 Soviet Film and the explosion of musical expression in the post-punk years of ’78-85…) After WWII, Soviet cinema all but disappeared; for several years, every screenplay to be produced had to be personally approved by Stalin and production dropped from hundreds of films a year to fewer than a dozen. The films produced between 1945-54 often had the production values and motivational subtlety of a contemporary Tea Party youtube clip.
In spite of the artistic restrictions placed on Soviet film production, Tarkovsky enterd the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) the year before Stalin died. What a choice! Even with the best of intentions, it was understood at the time that one would never produce a film with the artistic ambitions that had flourished only twenty years earlier. Yet the students at VGIK were afforded an unbelievable opportunity denied virtually all of their fellow citizens– not only were they working with the few directors who had come up through the system with the likes of Eisenstein and Vertov, they had sole access to VGIK’s international film archive as part of their studies. The students were able to view the films of their countrymen that had long ago vanished from Russian screens as decadent artifacts of the corrupt intelligentsia. They also had access to Hollywood, European, and Asian films that would never have been released in the USSR. Just as Langlois’ curation of the Cinémathèque Française would directly influence the rise of the French New Wave, (and not dissimilar from how the Surrealists plundered both cinema and psychoanalysis) Tarkovsky built a personal aesthetic by drowning himself in the images of both entertainment and art cinema. But unlike Godard and the New Wave, Tarkovsky was both cursed and blessed by a historicity that prevented “authorship” in that both content and form were tightly restricted within the Soviet film industry. Tarkovsky enters VGIK, Stalin dies the next year. The Thaw begins the year he graduates, and as a newly-minted film director Tarkovsky sees the opportunity to help rebuild Soviet cinema, but only within very confined aesthetic limits. Like his contemporaries, Tarkovsky turns to allegory to overcome the thematic and stylistic limitations placed on anyone making films in the Soviet Union from the late sixties until glasnost. It’s a gross oversimplification to view Tarkovsky’s use of allegory as spiritual/Christian. Tarkovsky is uniquely aware of the power of myth and allegory in cinema. It is like The Staker (the movie) is The Room. Where the predisposed western critics see biblical allegory, Tarkovsky was just as likely to be writing John Ford or Bergman or Fritz Lang. But by writing with allegory, Tarkovsky could articulate everything that he couldn’t say. (Remember that at the time and place, to say what one meant risked being denied the ability to work, and memories of the gulag were still fresh.) Without the historical context of life in post-Thaw Soviet Union, it is impossible to “read” Tarkovsky’s allegory vis a vie political, personal, and intellectual life in post-Stalin USSR– but his film is a blank slate that still allows us to project our own fears and desires.
So, what is Tarkovsky’s Zone? We, the viewer of the film, see the zone just as the professor or the writer: a timeless industrial wasteland. Nothing special. Meanwhile, the stalker sees the zone in different dimensions, with distortions along boundaries that create the “traps” making progress so painstaking. Tarkovsky, on the other hand, sees manifestations of aesthetics and influences ripple out in front and behind him. Consider, as he sits in a darkened room at VGIK: where his audience has experienced decades of enforced realist stultification, he experiences the poetics of Bresson and Ozu. The movie theater _was_ the room. In a very real sense, he stood closer in time to Soviet Constructivism than we do to Nirvana’s Nevermind. The aesthetic wounds were fresh. He had internalized his sense of film history while looking at the recent past, and each film that came out of this zone was like the cloth tied to the bolt as he tried to move forward. (From a 2008 book about Stalker: When questioned by a studio representative about the film’s glacial pace, Tarkovsky supposedly retorted: I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.)
When I think of music, I think of both the room and the zone, of influences and transgressions and aesthetics and joys rippling out in invisible waves. As I write this, I’m listening to a torrent of the NME C81 cassette. I’m thinking about how Cabaret Voltaire’s “Raising the Count” could have been on any number of 2012 top-10 lists while it would have been unthinkable that it could have even existed projected back the same number of years into the past, to 1951. And about how it could sound contemporary in spite of the fact that it was all but invisible to the world for the last 30 years- an ephemeral bit of culture released on cassette to 10,000 people in 1981 that now survives thanks to a handful of private trackers and hard drives. I don’t enter the zone when I listen to music, I create the zone that only I can stalk.
January 8th, 2013 @ 4:51 pm
Anthony, thanks for adding a lot more context to my post. You clearly have a deeper understanding of Tarkovsky’s work than I do. I think you would really enjoy Dyer’s Zona as he makes some of the same references as you do.
I like that you point this out – “stalker sees the zone in different dimensions, with distortions along boundaries that create the “traps” making progress so painstaking. ” as in the film, at one point, the ground moves as if like quicksand, or as if someone was viewing it after taking LSD. It’s a strange distortion or time warp, and the time warp returns again after Professor goes back to retrieve his backpack turning up at exactly the same place, at the end of the “meat grinder” tunnel. Stalker and Writer have no idea how he got there before them.
You mention Cabaret Voltaire, which is quite a coincidence, as I was just discussing them with a colleague at North today. We were discussing how Raime reminded us of Cab Vol and how it would be hard for them to exist without Cab Vol having forged a path all those years ago, not to mention Throbbing Gristle et al…
I still have a physical NME C81 cassette btw.
January 8th, 2013 @ 6:20 pm
I had just started subscribing to NME in ’81, but they wouldn’t send the tapes to the US. I am jealous.
Recently, a friend unloaded nearly 20 years worth of Mojo magazines on me. I don’t remember there ever being a year in which I wasn’t music obsessed, and I’ve never met a genre that I wouldn’t give a chance. Randomly opening issues of Mojo from 1999-2005, I’m floored by how much of the music I’ve never even heard of. Not albums that I missed by artists that I know, but literally hundreds of artists that seemed important enough at the time that they received glowing reviews, but who just don’t even register as having existed twelve years later. (Of course, their relative absence in my musical world can be traced to the separation of the UK from US markets by the end of the 1990s, of problems with physical distribution, of the self-inforced isolation of the US indie/alt/experimental scenes. To me, the majority of UK musicians from 2000 with lasting influence in the US were those making electronic/dance music.) Then I read your article and considered that it was like so many of the artists had tried to make it through the zone without a stalker and just vanished. Meanwhile, most of the artists on C81 are still common currency, even among the 20-something college students that I interact with. What if Rough Trade was a stalker, just as Langlois had been a stalker for Godard, and VGIK’s archive a stalker for Tarkovsky? When thinking about music in 2012, I still look for the analogs for Fast Product, Rough Trade, or On-U Sound– if not labels in the traditional sense, some sort of guiding entity that is looking forwards and backwards at the same time, curating influences and looking out for the sounds from outside the margins. Unfettered access to the celestial jukebox is ultimately hollow and frustrating without a guide.
On a personal note, I was lucky enough to have been mentored in my early days of film studies by someone who had graduated from VGIK as one of Tarkovsky’s contemporaries. She had used her connections to bring in prints of scores of Soviet films that had never screened in the US, and she had first-hand experience with projects by Tarkovsky and Larisa Shepitko– two artists whose work still haunts me. With my interest in Russian cinema, I had subscribed to VGIK’s Soviet Film magazine in 1985, a simple act of academic curiosity that landed me on the FBI’s black list and resulted in my international mail being opened and read on a regular basis.
January 8th, 2013 @ 8:53 pm
Anthony, this is so spot on – “Unfettered access to the celestial jukebox is ultimately hollow and frustrating without a guide.”
We all need a Stalker…