The edge of perception: sound in Tarkovsky's Stalker

The intricate deployment of all the elements of sound – music, dialogue, diegetic and non-diegetic sounds, as well as the intervals of silence – in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky offers a complex multidimensional experience, creating in each viewer a unique response to sound. This article analyses the soundscape of Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker in order to understand the techniques employed, and how the use of sound creates a unique perceptual awareness in the audience. Rather than attempting to reveal meanings and symbols in the film, this article explores how, through a sensitivity to the possibilities of sound in film, it is possible to transcend the confines of its traditional uses and enable in its perceiver the freedom to engage that allows for the individual’s own sensitivity and subconscious mind to take an active role in creating a personal connection and meaning. In itself, accurately recorded sound adds nothing to the image system of cinema, for it still has no aesthetic content. As soon as the sounds of the visible world are removed from it, or that world is filled, for the sake of the image, with extraneous sounds that don’t exist literally, or if the real sounds are distorted so that they no longer correspond with the image – then the film acquires a resonance. (Andrey Tarkovsky 1987) When the artist Kazimir Malevich exhibited his work ‘White on White’ in 1913, he wrote about the reaction, saying, ... the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, ‘Everything we loved is lost. We are in a desert. Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!’ Even I was gripped by a kind of timidity bordering on fear when it came to leaving the world of will and idea in which I had lived and worked and the reality of which I believed. But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the ‘desert’, where nothing is real except feeling.