Was the black dog GOD?

I watched the film last night, and I was pretty sure of this theory but when I looked up Stalker in this forum to try and gain some clarity on it (the ending had me racked…) I didn’t see anyone mention it so I very well could be way off.
Personally, I thought the black dog was supposed to be god. The dog appears when Stalker is talking about something like about how god told the people he would come to them but make himself impossible for them to notice him? or something along the lines of him being with them but they wouldn’t notice him.
Also, just another small detail, at the end of the film Stalker says “GOD only knows…” and the camera is directly on the dog when he says this… Just my thoughts.
What do you think? And if the dog was god, what do you think this brings to the philosophy of the film.
Please be unflinching in you criticism if you have some..I’d like to know if I’m wrong.

I don’t think so, Tarkovsky was against that kind of symbols. He used to state that a film is “significant not in its literary retelling, its symbolism or visual metaphoricity, but in its concrete saturated existence”. The dog has a certain relation to the Stalker, the home, and maybe even the divine (since Tarkovsky was obviously aware of the Egyptian god Anubis), but it doesn’t directly represent anything in the film, and is rather meant to exist as part of a coherent whole.

No. Stop Trolling.

What exactly is “trolling” ?

Was the black dog GOD?

That.

I’m sorry but I just don’t follow.
I was trying to have a conversation of something I thought to be a legitimate question over a film…As I said, I could be way off, but that is the very reason why I asked the question.

It’s no trolling. I can see his point when thinking of Anubis as a guardian of the underworld and the black dog from “Stalker” as a guardian of the zone. But Tarkovsky obviously uses the mythological weight which the dog carries rather than making the dog a symbol.

I don ‘t take it as trolling either, and nor had i thought of the black dog as God- however important religion was to Tarkovsky. It would certainly add a whole new dimension to watching the film again! I don’t remember reading elsewhere on the dog as God either. Anyway, better receptivity to the spiritual in Tarkovsky than not.

ah i see Hidden behind the Screen is a Mizoguchi fan. Troll? I think not.

Attaching a spiritual aspect to the dog (and so much in Tarkovsky can carry a spiritual weight) , I’m reminded of Psalm 23, “for thou art with me”. And the dog in Nostalgia, lying in the great shot(s) of the home and fields inside an open cathedral.

A comfort, faithful companion (esp to those with faith?), guardian linked to home and safety, for the wanderer and spiritual struggler. Tarkovsky doesn’t spell out his meanings, though biblical quotes and references abound.

as my best friend is a black dog, i firmly believe dogginess is next to godliness.

@ Marc Tarkovsky was against that kind of symbols. He used to state that a film is “significant not in its literary retelling, its symbolism or visual metaphoricity,…

He isn’t against symbols – he uses them all the time (burning houses, water, dogs). He is against running a scene up to a symbol the way Theodoros Angelopoulos does in The Weeping Meadow.
He wants his symbols grounded.

The dog symbolizes fidelity (Synonyms: loyalty, faithfulness, reliability, trustworthiness, dependability, devotion, commitment) – something important to the Stalker.
You notice the dog shows up around the time (@ 1hr) the two travelers cause trouble by not following the Stalker’s orders.

Yes, and i think almost all viewers can sense faithfulness as a doggy characteristic even without thinking, putting it into words, or looking for symbolic meanings; there will be an extra subconscious and maybe emotional depth thru the dogs’ presence in both the films.

For Tarkovsky filming Nostalghia in Italy, the dog would probably carry an emotional link to family and home (as for many of us), and he was to be (self) exiled till his death

A great strength of Tarkovsky is his mix of the mundane and spiritual, the mundane become mysterious.

The black dog in Stalker as watchful friend, grounded in our experience, and yet mysterious too.

and then we have the horses at the end of Rublev. I presume lots of us will instinctively link horses with a sense of freedom, certainly swishing their tails in a meadow- or as earlier in the film, rolling by a river- (when they might be confined in a stable). Tarkovsky didn’t like the idea of obvious symbols, but also he would have been well aware of characteristics associated with familiar animals. He also liked to think children could understand his films even as intellectuals struggled.

Oh, I didn’t see your post as mine posted.
dogginess is next to godliness

ha ha, yes

Tarkovsky awoids cliches, and having a dog representing god or death or whatever would have been to easy and cheap. I’m sure the dog can mean any number of things, or maybe nothing in particular.

It’s been too long since I’ve seen Stalker to remember, just finished reading Roadside Picnic though. No dog in there, guess Tarkovsky just liked dogs.

For what it’s worth, I did not get “godliness” from the appearance of the dog, but I did not get some other direct meaning from it either. The dog seemed to me to be another one of those creations of The Zone that liminally exists between reality and dreams—it first seems as if the stalker is dreaming of the dog, and then the dog continues to be a part of the movie after the stalker “wakes”, and is another product of The Zone that sticks with the characters despite them not asking for, but still requiring of, them. Yes, a lot like in Solaris, where it’s not just base desire that brings a phantasm to the characters, but an inner need even they do not comprehend, and the satisfaction of which is unclear.

—PolarisDiB

I would think that Stalker’s daughter would be more likely to be God than the dog. That was my reason for creating this video using a song by the band Midlake and the final scene from the film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wlFzNAyGuQ

Wow thank you for all your helpful information…This was my first Tarkovsky film and as you may imagine I was quite dumbfounded by the end (not in a bad way)…I understood (or may have thought I understood) everything in the film up to the end with the moving glasses…That I did not understand.
But anyway, ok I’ve sort of abandoned the idea of the dog being god after reading some of your analysis, yet I do believe the dog has some sort of meaning, and that it’s meaning may be similar to that of a god, in that it looks towards the world of man trying to guide, but is unnoticed? perhaps. I don’t know…I will have to watch the film again sometime…It was quite the intellectual feast. I also plan on watching more Tarkovsky. Stalker deffinately left a lasting impression in my mind.

And yes Kenji I find Mizoguchi to be an amazing filmmaker, though I admit I need to see more of his work. Sansho the Bailiff is one of my favorite films aswell.

“I would think that Stalker’s daughter would be more likely to be God than the dog. "

I don’t know about the film, but the book at least quite strongly suggests that the children of all those that spend a lot of time in the zone are mutants that might resemble the visitors, and thus might be creatures with abilities and intelligence streching beyond that of humans. So for me, God is stretching it a bit far, just a superior being perhaps. Intelligence-wise, that is.

Even if the topic question is a joke, it is a very interesting one.

I don’t necessarily buy into this interpretation, however, i will be thinking of it next time i watch Stalker.

Yeah, I’m also rather skeptical about this interpretation. I mean, there’s a lot of coincidences that the OP mentions (such as when Stalker says “GOD only knows…” and the camera is directly on the dog when he says this) and it’s an interesting proposal, but I don’t think that was what Tarkovsky had in mind when he made the film.

Stalker actually reminded me of Philip K. Dick’s Valis oddly enough (perhaps it’s not odd, but it’s not an association I often make), but I don’t think there was necessarily a “religious” undertone the film meant to convey.

The topic question is not a joke, though…

I know this is thread is almost a month old but I feel like I might be able to shed some light on Tarkovsky’s opinions about symbolism.

“I am constantly being asked what this or that means in my films. It’s unbearable! An artist does not have to be accountable for his intentions. I did not do any deep thinking about my work. I don’t know what my symbols mean. I only desire to induce feelings, any feelings, in viewers. People always try to find “hidden” meanings in my films. But wouldn’t it be strange to make a film while striving to hide one’s thoughts? My images do not signify anything beyond what they are… We do not know ourselves that well: sometimes we express forces which cannot be grasped by any ordinary measure"
Gideon Bachman: Att resa i sitt inre. Samtal med Tarkovskij, “Chaplin” 1984 (4), pp. 158–163 [Pol. trans. Katarzyna Górecka].

So I guess that means that the dog was not god, it was a dog.

@Noampoam: I agree. Tarkovsky is really just looking for emotional impact, I don’t really think there is any particular “symbolic” meaning… at least not in the sense that you can “unravel” the plot and say “this is an allegory for the crucifixion of Christ.” There are surely biblic references, but I don’t think it’s quite that simple. You’d do best to approach his movies just like any other. Besides, when you’re constantly thinking about symbology and “inillectual” (read “academic”) junk, you miss all the good stuff. That goes for most other movies, too. So is the dog God? Nope, just blackie.

The dog is what Kant called an “aesthetic idea”: “a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it.”

Noampoam: That’s a great quote. I think growing up on a diet of Welles and Hitchcock, where symbols do have a certain correct interpretation, makes viewers miss the point with a lot of other (far better, in my opinion) filmmakers.

Stravinsky said something similar about music that I think fits just as well to film:

“For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc….Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.”

If a director has to rely on symbols to get points across, he’s not a good director; he’s Charlie Kaufman.

Sorry for bumping a 5 month old topic, but I had the same interpretation. Here’s the exact quote from when he wakes up from his dream and when the dog appears (translated of course, copied from the subtitles on my dvd):

And that very day two, two of them were going to a village which was about 60 stadia from… named… and they were conversing with each other about all these things. And while they were conversing and discussing, He Himself approached, and began traveling with them. But their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him. And he said to them: “What are these words you are exchanging with one another, and why are you sad?” And one of them, named…

He trails off from there because the other two have woken up.

The professor and the writer were just having a long, seemingly unimportant discussion on art and science and unselfishness, etc. The dog appears right after that while they’re sleeping, and travels with them for the rest of the movie. The stalker might have acknowledged the importance of the dog – it may have been what prompted that monologue in the first place – but the other two don’t recognize it at all. And there’s pretty much no point to their conversation, and they are both sad people. Everything else lines up, so I figure the dog must at least have some connection to God.

The black dog is a black swan

Disagree – it is here in the word unselfishness: The professor and the writer were just having a long, seemingly unimportant discussion on art and science and unselfishness,
You notice the dog shows up around the time the two travelers cause trouble by not following the Stalker’s orders.
The dog symbolizes fidelity (Synonyms: loyalty, faithfulness, reliability, trustworthiness, dependability, devotion, commitment) – something important to the Stalker.
i.e.unselfishness

The film is mostly about humanistic values as such – the ‘holy spirit’ to be found there in those values.

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,. or a dog just a dog, in this case. but my interpretation of it is closer to the one Robert mentioned earlier.