Stalky and Co Inky Dinks

Or Sinker-nicities? Mark Sinker’s BFI Screen Classics monograph on Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s IF…. helpfully situates the film in the tradition of public school fiction. While Tom Brown’s Schooldays emphasizes knuckling under and discipline, Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Co celebrates defiance and rule-breaking. Kipling, of course, would posthumously supply Sherwin with a title, suggested by the production company secretary, when it became necessary to produce an inoffensive dummy script to con some school into supplying locations.

At this, my psychic ears perked up, as I had just encountered an unexpected reference to this work in the afterword to the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic. This is the work that was adapted, loosely but recognizably, by Andrei Tarkovsky to give us STALKER.

The book’s original title doesn’t sound very inspiring, but then when you find out what it means it’s VERY inspiring. The Zone is a strange, perilous place marked by the traces of an extraterrestrial visit. Objects have been left behind, some valuable and useful, all mysterious, along with weird areas of gravitational and other disturbance which can kill the unwary. A character eventually likens it to a roadside picnic: the aliens came, did whatever they had to do, and left, abandoning various unwanted items, and we are the ants or squirrels who come along afterwards and are baffled by the residue, its origins and purpose a total mystery.

Tarkovsky wasn’t taken by this explanation and omitted it from his film, allowing the aliens to seem more like God, and the humans’ relationship to them not quite as hopeless — though we’re still largely in the dark. He cut lots of other fun stuff too, like the specific artefacts, such as the mysterious “empties” — sets of two discs, not touching, but fixed in position relative to one another, like the two ends of an invisible cylinder. You can pass your hand between the discs, but you can’t separate them. A brilliantly baffling object or objects.

In his afterword afterwards, Boris, the surviving Strugatsky, is appreciative of Tarkovsky’s film, and tells of the novel’s struggles with the Soviet censors. He also explains that the name “stalker,” given to those brave poacher-smugglers who sneak into the Zone to retrieve empties and other valuables, derives from Kipling’s Stalky and Co, but he doesn’t explain why they thought this was a fitting name. A stalker, in hunting terminology (the criminal meaning had not yet been invented), is a very different rural occupation from a poacher, though some people may hold both occupations.

It was in reading about Stalky and Co in Sinker’s monograph that I flashed on why the Strugatskys (Strugatskies?) poached their title from old Rudyard. Stalky and his friends, being disobedient and rebellious, are always going “out of bounds” — heading into areas of the surrounding countryside declared off limits by the school authorities. It all made sense.

The word “stalker” thus entered the Russian language, but pronounced pseudo-phonetically, “stulker.”

Sinker, a kind of critical stalker himself, heading into forbidden terrain and bringing back intriguing and valuable stuff, explains also that for Kipling, the rebelliousness of Stalky & his chums is simply a testing of incipient adult resilience — the real public school rebels all went on to become pillars of the British Empire. And so with Mick Travis and his crusaders — they can be absorbed by society with ease, as we see in the non-sequel sequels. And even Anderson & Sherwin’s gleeful depiction of school shootings can be absorbed and enjoyed by the establishment, such as pig-bothering pm David Cameron. The system co-opts rebellion — that’s what it’s designed for. Redirecting revolution is a more powerful tool than straight repression, perhaps?

The Look # 1: Julie Flashes

Julie Christie flashes the camera in BILLY LIAR.

I am reading and enjoying Geoff Dyer’s Zona — it really is as good as everyone says. The kind of book I’d like to write, if I could settle on a film and if anyone would agree with me on which film was worth settling on.

Dyer has plumped for Tarkovsky’s STALKER, and his discursive approach echoes the antics of a lively mind watching a slow film — sometimes totally concentrated on the sounds and images in front of him, sometimes darting off into memory or fantasy, inspired by the movie but running on a parallel track. Here’s Dyer on a moment when Tark’s characters seem to meet the camera’s gaze ~

This is in direct contravention of Roland Barthe’s edict in his essay ‘Right in the Eyes’, that, while it is permissible for the subject to star into the lens–at the spectator–in a still photograph, ‘it is forbidden for an actor to look at the camera’ in a movie. So convinced was Barthes of his own rule that he as ‘not far from considering this ban as the cinema’s distinctive feature…. If a single gaze from the screen came to rest on me, the whole film would be lost.’

Either the quotation is doing Barthes no favours, or Barthes is a silly man who hasn’t seen enough movies. “Don’t look at the camera!” cries Francis Ford Coppola in APOCALYPSE NOW, playing a documentary director, ignoring the fact that in documentaries (which are, arguably, movies), characters looking at the camera actually ENHANCES the realism. It’s when they’re too good at pretending it isn’t there that the fly-on-the-wall approach starts to seem artificial, staged.

Nevertheless, in fiction films it’s true that there’s a convention — which only means that those, quite frequent moments when the rule is broken always seem mildly unconventional. In a mainstream film, the effect is noted, and the ticket-buyer says, “OK, this is a little unusual, but as long as the filmmaker doesn’t get too crazy, I’m going to allow it.”

My favourite video store story: two young men looking at prospective rentals. One picks up the Christian Slater vehicle KUFFS. The other says he’s seen it. “Any good.” “Aye, awright.” “Much action in it?” A micro-pause. “Ah… he talks to the camera.” Said as if this were, arguably, a form of action.

In BILLY LIAR, Julie’s lapse is momentary and obviously unintentional, but in good movies even flaws are good. This scene is already breaking from Billy’s POV, which makes it a violation of the movie’s own rules. If Julie is exceptional enough to merit a scene of her own, away from the prying eyes of the POV character, and devoid of any fundamental narrative purpose (well, it’s introducing Julie, swinging her handbag, and that’s ENOUGH), then surely she’s allowed to sneak a peek at camera operator Jack Atchelor. She’s Julie Christie, she has special privileges.

Inaugurating a little season considering some looks to camera, and what they might mean.

Not Films

I picked up two novels by William Trevor and one by Robert Holdstock from a bin outside a charity shop. I didn’t realize Trevor was the author of Felicia’s Journey, filmed by Atom Egoyan, swiftly forgotten by the world. But I liked the cut of his gibberish. Still haven’t read them, though. They are The Boarding House and The Love Department.

The Holdstock was Mythago Wood, and I just read that — terrific stuff. I’m onto the sequel, Lavondyss. These are technically fantasy novels, but Holdstock’s take on myth is an inventive and intelligent one, imagining mythical characters as being products/inhabitants of the Jungian collective unconscious, and simultaneously quite real and corporeal. He creates his own, quite convincing proto-myths, speculations about the kind of stories our Bronze Age ancestors told each other around the fire, stories which would later mutate into more familiar forms. The protagonists are normal people who get sucked into this semi-real world of mythic characters, like Alice into Wonderland but with scarier consequences. Literally fantastic.

I followed this with The Glister, a novel by the Scottish poet John Burnside, which my collaborator Paul Duane recommended. It’s set in a post-industrial wasteland rather like the Zone in Tarkovsky’s STALKER, but more realistically toxic and depressive. There’s also a serial killer and a teenage protagonist, but these “commercial” elements do not resolve in the expected ways. It reminded me oddly of Iain Banks’ Complicity, in the way it refuses to deal with its killer the way genre fiction is supposed to. Complicity infuriated me, but The Glister is quite something — the language and the philosophy are as striking as the pungent, carcinogenic atmosphere of the piece.

The Knick, directed (and shot, and cut) by Steven Soderbergh, created and written by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, is back for a second series. As good as ever, making it still the best thing I’ve seen from this gifted, quirky, sometimes erratic filmmaker. Clive Owen performing nose-jobs for heroin, the second black character with a detached retina in a Soderbergh show (see OUT OF SIGHT), a very nasty nun, and the use of the line “I brought you some hard-boiled eggs and nuts,” which is sure to delight all fans of Stan & Ollie and COUNTY HOSPITAL. In-jokes aren’t always to be applauded, but since I didn’t spot a single one in the first ten hours of this show, I’m quite willing to allow a burst of exuberance of this kind.

We did watch an actual movie — CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS, picked up from the library since we enjoyed the same team’s THE LEGO MOVIE (dirs. Phil Lord & Chris Miller). By chance, it takes place in exactly the same kind of hopeless, post-industrial seaside town as The Glister. Really good jokes: “I wanted to run away, but you can’t run away from your own feet,” says the hero after a mishap with spray-on shoes. It’s part of the New Breed, inaugurated by the first TOY STORY — when it goes emotional, it doesn’t feel the need to stop being funny. I wasn’t over-enamoured of the character design at first, but James Caan’s gruff dad character is masterful. The shape of the head puts me in mind of the Freudenstein Monster in Fulci’s THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, or of Isabelle Adjani’s weird child/lover in POSSESSION, but the moustache and monobrow raise it to a whole new level. Oddly, when he’s surprised and his eyebrow rises to reveal actual ocular equipment, dad just looks wrong.