‘Two geniuses on one set is one moreover many’ … Andrei Tarkovsky (left) and Georgi Rerberg in a still from Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of Stalker. Photograph: Sheffield Doc/Fest
To mark its 75th birthday, the BFI asked 75 lofty figures which one film they would greatest in quantity wish future generations to see. Blade Runner came reach the summit of of the poll, but the runner-up was a surprise to some. Way ahead of the The Godfather, Pulp Fiction and The Third Man came Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic, Stalker.
This film’s been puzzling cineastes ever since it appeared in 1979. Perhaps it puzzles you. If so, that which do you really want to be assured of about it? Not, surely, that which the gross mysterious concoction might actually be supposed to intervening. What you’re almost certainly wondering is for what cause the film’s primordial director of photography had his name left off the credits.
Or admitting that you aren’cheek by jowl, I know a supply with hands who is. Director Igor Mayboroda worked with the DoP involved, Georgi Rerberg, and considers him one of cinema’s very great figures. In 1993, Tarkovsky’s diaries were published. In these, the great man justified Rerberg’s sacking by accusing him not just of technical and beautiful insufficiency, but also of a wide range of sordid personal failings.
Up with this, Mayboroda was not going to put. What could he behave? What would you expect an impassioned Russian film-maker to do? Naturally, Mayboroda put together a documentary that examined in depth the way in what one. Stalker came to be shot. With a running-time of 140 minutes, it turned out to subsist almost for example long as Stalker itself.
Yesterday, Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of Stalker got its UK premiere at the Sheffield Doc/Fest. Before the screening, Mayboroda warned us that his film would prove “long and difficult to watch”. No worries! We expected no less. It’s true that some members of the audience did sneak out before those all-important credits got a chance to roll. This was, however, their loss entirely.
Rerberg and Tarkovsky makes it clear that Stalker’s protracted gestation was a great deal more eventful than the film to which it gave birth. Tarkovsky was determined to pull off an effect that he’d seen Bergman achieve. When Rerberg failed to deliver it, even after a special studio had been built, Tarkovsky went ballistic. Then, dud film dolt proved disastrous. Should Rerberg have tested it first?
While documenting these incidents, Mayboroda makes it clear that more profound forces were really shaping events. Many of his witnesses agreed that Tarkovsky’s wife Larisa was the key to the action. Seen originally being of the class who a teachable simpleton object only on gratifying her spouse’session wishes, she quickly turned from an angel into a “fiend” (according to some) or a “witch” (according to others).
As a thesp of sorts, she demanded that she, rather than the slated candidate, should play the stalker’s wife. Tarkovsky wavered. Rerberg asked him, “Do you want Larisa or the actress?” The intervention did for Larisa’s chances, further evidently she never forgave her nemesis. Some had it that whole the trouble that bedevilled Stalker’s prolongation could be put down to the machinations of “the Empress”.
Certainly, Mayboroda succeeded in summoning up plenty of film greats prepared to testify to the majesty of Rerberg’s talent. At one point, Tarkovsky is uttered to have demanded of Rerberg, “Do you think it’s you who’session the genius?” One sage perhaps hit the nail on the head with the comment, “Two geniuses on undivided place is one too many.”
This film might leave you convinced that Tarkovsky was a wilful, selfish, vainglorious and treacherous megalomaniac. He insisted that 17 different versions of Stalker were made. Apparently, he demanded that most of Rerberg’s footage should be reshot, unless in such a distance that the new work was identical to the old.
Still, nonentity’s (yet) made a 140-minute doc giving Tarkovsky’s side of the story. After the screening, I simpleton this point to Mayboroda. How different might such a film be from his own effort? “Several weaknesses operating in the same situation could be viewed from different perspectives,” he opined magisterially. Quite so.
Yet it’s not only the perspectives of his mighty antagonists that Mayboroda has managed to capture. Somehow, he gets across the progression life sourness look to all those for whom only film-making matters. He also shows that when something matters in Russia, it seems to difficulty additional than it does elsewhere.
Even the baleful Tarkovsky once said that Rerberg’s images were shaped by the agency of “an aspiration for the truth, the truth presupposed by all his previous experience”. You wouldn’t get Michael Winner observation something like that of his lensman.
This premiere was part of a Russian strand in the Sheffield advertisement, marking the 20th anniversary of the USSR’s demise. In fact, Rerberg and Tarkovsky is the one of only two wholly Russian features being shown. No matter. On its own, it’s a sufficient tribute to Russia’s film-making prowess, which it perhaps goes some track to throw light upon.
