Tag / Stalker

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Nostalgia (1983)

My Tarkovskyian odyssey continues… FilmJuice have my review of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, the film he made in Italy prior to his self-imposed exile from the Soviet Union.

Nostalgia is a film that rather took me by surprise. Much less well known than the science fiction films Solaris and Stalker, and less-widely discussed than the historical epics Ivan’s Childhood and Andrei Rublev, the film can be viewed as an attempt to isolate and explore the same devout ambivalence towards the search for spiritual truth that exists in all of Tarkovsky’s films but without the genre scaffolding that accompanies his better-known works.

As with Mirror, Tarkovsky responds to the lack of genre boundaries by exploring experimental narrative structures: In Mirror, he used a non-linear structure inspired by the idea of images flashing before the eyes of a dying man. In Nostalgia, he uses a structure known as a mis-en-abime in which different layers of reality run together:

 

Nostalgia is a film that is fuelled by Tarkovsky’s unhappiness at the realisation that he would most likely never be able to return home to the Soviet Union. Tarkovsky explores these feelings through a complex narrative structure known as a mis-en-abime. The structure begins with the figure of Gorchakov, a respected Russian poet who visits Italy in preparation for writing the biography of a composer who left Russia a serf and returned a celebrated artist only to wind up ending his own life in a fit of despair. The fact that Gorchakov’s situation resembles that of Tarkovsky is evident from the details of the two men’s lives, from the fact that Gorchakov’s first name is Andrei, and from the fact that the film is littered with references to Tarkovsky’s real-world films and writings. The second level of the structure revolves around the subject of Gorchakov’s book, a man who left Russia a slave only to find success and later return home before killing himself in a fit of despair. The life of the composer thus serves as a warning to both Gorchakov and Tarkovsky. While Tarkovsky blurs the boundaries between himself and his protagonist, he also blurs the boundaries between his protagonist and the composer in a series of dreams that could just as easily feature the family of the poet as the family of the composer. The term mis-en-abime comes from the French and refers to the practice of painting blocked up windows to look like real windows through which one could see the world. Thus, the world is literally placed in an abyss, a truth refracted back up to the surface through layers of text and metaphor all pointing straight to the anguish that Tarkovsky was feeling about his looming exile.

What surprised me about Nostalgia was the fact that I think I now prefer it to Stalker.

Thematically, the two films are very similar in that they are both heavily symbolic works that deal with man’s search for meaning and conclude on images of profound spiritual ambiguity. They are also quite similar visually in so far as they both feature long takes comprising beautifully composed shots of architectural decline that mirror the protagonist’s mental state. What surprised me about Nostalgia was the way that it seemed to do pretty much everything Stalker tried to do but does so in a far more focused and purified manner, almost as though someone had taken Stalker and boiled it in a enormous cauldron until all that was left was a thick black paste of existential alienation. Where Stalker provokes, Nostalgia demands. Where Stalker eludes, Nostalgia disappears.

I did not expect Tarkovsky to make a better film than Stalker and yet Nostalgia is precisely that.

Another reason Nostalgia surprised me was that I have only just seen it for the first time and have encountered it at a time when my relationship with science fiction is in something of a state of flux.

Much of the coverage of contemporary science fiction revolves around the battle between people who want the genre to become more diverse in its representation and people who want to genre to remain wedded to the same old characters and story-patterns. Despite being both instinctively sympathetic to calls for more diversity and instinctively unsympathetic to the suggestion that science fiction should focus upon pandering to the deplorable tastes of right-wing Americans, I am struggling to find anything of interest in the output of genre imprints.

The problem is that the big genre imprints appear to be cutting back on the kind of experimental or difficult books that I have grown accustomed to reading. As margins are squeezed and companies become more risk-averse, the rational choice is to focus on the more profitable market sectors and my choice of novels has always been something of a minority interest. Given that I do not enjoy reading commercial genre fiction, the question of who is represented in those kinds of works can never be anything more than an irrelevant abstraction, at least as far as my choice of reading matter is concerned. It’s almost as though there were a debate raging about the diversity of professional rugby league teams: Instinctively, I am naturally inclined to defend the people calling for more diversity but even a suite of perfectly diverse and representative rugby league teams would fail to get me to go and watch a game of rugby. This is why my Future Interrupted column has tended to look at works that are published on the margins of the genre.

This alienation from the field has also had the knock-on effect of prompting me to consider the purpose of genre storytelling. The conventional defence of science fiction is that it allows writers to explore ideas and areas that are difficult to approach from a mainstream perspective. Works like Nostalgia suggest that this is completely and utterly false: Nostalgia does everything Stalker and Solaris try to do and yet does so without a single genre trope.

So, given that films like Nostalgia do science fiction better than science fiction and much of the interesting works of literary science fiction are being published by non-genre imprints, is it time for me to abandon science fiction to the people who want nothing more than character-based escapism?

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Stalker (1979)

Frequent visitors to this site will know that I value Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker above all other films. The reasons for this are really two-fold:

Firstly, I think that Tarkovsky’s films set the bar for a cinematic golden age known as the European art house movement. Tarkovsky was one of the first Soviet filmmakers to reach maturity having seen early works of European art house film and I think his films took those methods, combined them with approaches developed by Soviet filmmakers, and produced a series of works that have — in retrospect — come to define that particular sensibility. Stalker is special as it is not only devastatingly beautiful and enormously rich, it is also one of those rare films where everything seems to work both individually and collectively.

Secondly, Stalker is one of my critical compass points. It is not just that I tend to judge other films in terms of how well or poorly they compare to Stalker, it’s that my critical methods have been (consciously or unconsciously) been shaped by how well adapted they are to the task of writing about films like Stalker. Our culture teach us how to respond to the culture we consume and I have definitely found myself drifting closer and closer towards the task of writing about these kinds of beautiful but complex films.

I have actually written about the film before a couple of times before but I think I am most satisfied with this latest nihilistic take. FilmJuice have my review of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which has just been re-released on Blu-ray:

Tarkovsky may have been a genius but he was also the product of a very specific cultural moment. His films are littered with religious symbolism and articulate a profound yearning after spiritual truth but his stories inevitably seem to deposit their characters in states of complete existential crisis. The tension between the content of Tarkovsky’s stories and the style in which he chose to tell them speaks not only to the absence of religion in Soviet lives but also to the brutal materialism implied by Soviet Montage Theory. Indeed, if people can extract meaning from the juxtaposition of two completely unrelated images, how can we imbue this meaning with any form of value? If ‘meaning’ is just a product of the way human brains process information, what are we to make of our desire to find meaning in the chaos of our lives.

Tarkovsky’s Stalker is about man’s search for meaning and how all searches for meaning are doomed to failure. The world is a beautiful place, filled with bliss and horror but the meaning we place on these experiences are ours and ours alone.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Silence (2012)

SilenceFilmJuice have my review of Pat Collins’ art house travelogue Silence. The plot (such as it is) revolves around a sound-recordist who is dumped by his German partner. Depressed and more than a little lost, the sound-recordist reacts to his personal tragedy by returning to the Donegal coast in Ireland in order to make recordings of places completely devoid of human presence. However, whilst engaging in this anti-social dalliance, the sound-recordist realises that the sound of silence might yield something more than an absence of arsehole humans… something deeper and more spiritual. As I explain in my review, Silence is essentially a cinematic reconstruction of the experience of watching an art house film. In an art house film, the director presents you with a collection of beautiful images and invites you to reflect upon the thoughts, feelings and memories these images bring forth. In the case of the sound-recordist, the sound of silence summons memories of a childhood spent in an isolated fishing village on a tiny island off the Irish coast. A little while ago, I wrote something about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (apologies for the fucked-up formatting) in which I argued that the film was an attempt to use cinematic techniques to induce a sort of spiritual experience in the audience:

While there are many films that use evocative imagery to explore the belief that there is something out there that is bigger than ourselves, Stalker moves beyond the purely representative in order to fundamentally alter the relationship between film and audience. Yes… the hidden systems of the Zone neatly mirror the type of magical thinking that underpins most religions, and yes… the perversely benign Room serves as an elegant symbol for any spiritual end-point you care to name, but the film does not simply represent a spiritual experience, it actually compels the audience to have one by encouraging them to seek meaning in the film in much the same way as the Stalker seeks meaning in the Zone and the spiritual seek meaning in the world. This state of forced sympathy with a man who is either deeply disturbed or deeply religious pays off in an absolutely mesmerising final scene in which the Stalker’s daughter appears to move a glass with her mind as a train roars past in the background: Did the Zone actually exist or was it all a fantasy? Did the daughter move the glass or was it the train? Was the daughter gaining magical powers the Stalker’s reward for reaching the Room in the correct state of mind? Did the Stalker’s visits to the Zone alter the DNA he passed on to his daughter? Tarkovsky’s film is so rich and complex that these questions can be answered in any number of ways but which interpretation you happen to choose invariably comes down to a leap of faith no different to that of the Stalker or that of the spiritually minded.

Silence is clearly an attempt to reproduce this same trick by inviting the audience to identify with the sound-recordist and open themselves up to the possibility of a deeper silence. Unfortunately, Silence is let down by Collins’ failure to follow through and show us what this process of reflection and silent-listening might produce. In Stalker, we have the appearance of a dog and the possibility of the stalker’s daughter Monkey acquiring supernatural powers. In Silence we simply have the possibility that the entire thing might well have been a waste of time:

While Tarkovsky perfectly captures the combination of profound understanding and acute alienation that accompanies life-changing experiences, Collins is rather unclear on what it is that his protagonist actually finds at the end of his journey: Is it a sense of community? Is it the understanding that he should never have left his home? All we see is a wind-swept derelict.

It may seem a little unfair to unfavorably compare Silence to one of the greatest films of all time but I see the comparison as a compliment. Many directors reach for the art house tool kit and produce nothing more than a series of pretty images that signify nothing more than the compositional skill of the cinematographer. Silence is not an entirely successful film but it is an attempt to reconnect with an approach to filmmaking that has lain dormant for far too long. Great cinema should not merely entertain or move, it should transform and films like Stalker and Silence should be celebrated for pursuing that transformative potential, even if it is ultimately unsuccessful.

by Jonathan M

Two Films You Should See – Stalker and Perfect Blue

PerfectBluestalker-film-poster-tarkovsky

This year, FilmJuice have decided to compile a list of a hundred films that everyone should see. I was lucky enough to kick-off the series this week with my two selections: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue.

Unlike Western science fiction films that use spectacular action sequences and fast-paced narratives to excite and entertain their audiences, Stalker uses a combination of extraordinary visual richness and extreme narrative simplicity to coax its audience into a mood of thoughtful curiosity. To call Stalker a ‘boring’ film is both technically correct and completely misleading as the lack of complex plot and distracting characters is a deliberate move designed to force the audience to reflect upon what it is they are actually seeing. Having placed the audience in a state of engaged curiosity, Tarkovsky engineers the cinematic equivalent of a spiritual experience.

My reading of Stalker is somewhat different to the one I put forward back in 2009 but I think the two are broadly compatible.

The brilliance of Perfect Blue lies not just in its ability to handle the dovetailing realities of a disturbed mind in a manner that is both poised and extremely rigorous, it also uses these fragmented realities to critique a cultural environment that is extremely resistant to re-invention and experimentation. This is a film about how society dehumanises and destabilises those women who refuse to stay in the box allotted them by the men who would control their lives.

I have not written about Perfect Blue before but it remains one of my very favourite films.  The rape scene I discuss is triggery as fuck for obvious reasons but I think it remains one of the most brutally ambivalent cinematic sequences every produced. Horrific, self-aware and even more horrific because of its self-awareness.

by Jonathan M

Zona (2012) By Geoff Dyer – Then, after about 15 minutes, you’re spit out into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike!

Geoff Dyer is a man who knows the value of an unconventional job title. Rather than sauntering through life as a simple novelist, critic, travel writer, historian or essayist, Dyer has tried his hand at many different forms and somehow evaded becoming particularly associated with any of them. Geoff Dyer is not a novelist who writes criticism or a travel writer who produces novels, he is all of these things and yet none of them. Like a Renaissance princeling or Imperial Khan, his name is habitually appended with an ever-growing succession of baroque and idiosyncratic job titles ranging from the mundane (writer) and the old fashioned (intellectual) to the endearingly preposterous (intellectual gate-crasher). Frankly, if Dyer began describing himself as a servant of the Secret Fire and wielder of the Flame of Anor I doubt that anyone would be particularly surprised. Dyer evades encapsulation in the same way as Pynchon evades publicity… his elusiveness is central to his charm.

In a typically warm, insightful and engaging interview conducted by Colin Marshall, Dyer explains the reasoning behind his steadfast refusal to either commit to any particular form or abide by the rules of any of the forms he operates in.  Dyer’s end game is to create a body of work whose allure bears no relation to its actual subject matter. For example, you may have no interest in the life and work of D.H. Lawrence but this should not prevent you from being entertained by Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage (1997), a book about trying to write a book about D.H. Lawrence. Similarly, you might prefer the idea of burying your face in an ants nest to reading another novel about spiritually disaffected upper-middle class people but this should in no way prevent you from enjoying Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009).

With no apparent form or subject matter to call his own, the seat of Dyer’s charm is… well… Dyer himself. As Michael Silverblatt put it when he interviewed Dyer, there is something decidedly likeable about a man who travels the world only to obsess over finding the correct local iteration of his preferred breakfast. There is something instantly recognisable about a man who loves books and films but never the ones that he is supposed to be reading at any given moment. As in the works of J.G. Ballard, this persona may change slightly from book to book and from article to article but that voice and that character are present in everything that Dyer writes. Chances are that if you like the persona that Dyer presents in all of his writings then you will happily read anything that Dyer has to say as the true subject of Dyer’s books and articles is invariably himself.

Those immune to Dyer’s charms may well view Dyer’s methodology as supremely egocentric and dishonest. Indeed, how many people have purchased Out of Sheer Rage expecting an award-winning biography of Lawrence only to discover that the book is actually the amusing tale of a hapless writer who scoffs almond croissants goes on holiday and crashes his moped? These un-named and potentially fictitious critics may well be completely right about Dyer but they are also missing the point.

There are many reasons for deciding to read a particular book (plot, characterisation, social commentary, prose style) but one of the most compelling is that the process of reading someone else’s thoughts allows you to gain access to that person’s headspace for extended periods of time. To read a book is to experience something – a time, a place, a film, a relationship – through the eyes of an author and when that author has a set of sensibilities as distinct and engaging as those of Geoff Dyer then sharing that author’s headspace can become an end in itself. If the point of Dyer’s writing is to allow us to hear the world described by his voice then his latest work Zona (2012) is his most successful to date.

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by Jonathan M

White Material (2009) – deColonisation / reOccupation

One of the most troubling things about colonialism is its language. Colonisation implies a degree of tentativeness and impermanence as though colonies are fragile attempts to implant humans into a landscape that has yet to support them.  Colonisation assumes unoccupied space just as discovery assumes that the thing being discovered has never been found before. Jyotsna G. Singh addresses this semiotic baggage in the introduction to her book Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues (1996):

Since the early modern period, this discovery motif has frequently emerged in the language of colonization, enabling European travellers/writers to represent the newly “discovered” lands as an empty space, a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their linguistic, cultural, and later territorial claims. – Pp. 1

What is offensive about the notions of discovery and colonisation is the fact that most of the lands discovered and colonised by European settlers were actually inhabited.  How can one discover land that is already well known and colonise places that are already inhabited?  Easy… by making the people who were there first disappear. As a result, one should perhaps speak not of lands being ‘colonised’ but of their being ‘occupied’.

A different way of looking at this question is to point out that ‘colonisation’ remains a useful term precisely because of the moral and conceptual absurdity of its connotations.  If one speaks of lands being occupied rather than colonised by the British Empire then one allows for the fact that all human inhabitation is morally neutral because nobody has a natural right to the ownership of the land they inhabit.  We all occupy the land and time brings with it no legitimacy.  The crime of colonialism was not that the Europeans laid claim to land that was not theirs, it was that they laid claim to territory and then used those claims to justify the exploitation of the people who were occupying the land when they first got there.  Colonialism is not a crime against the land; it is a crime against people.  All land is occupied.  From the perspective of the land, we are all colonists.

Claire Denis’s White Material examines the process of decolonisation without the assumption that there is such a thing as legitimate ownership of the land.  Denis’s film presents Africa as both perpetual virgin territory and eternally dried-out, exploited and ancient wasteland.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Moon (2009)

Sometimes it isn’t easy to love the cinema.  Increasingly, the greatest popular art form of the 20th Century has become a means of oppression  :  Every year, the summer blockbuster season lasts that little bit longer.  The season of empty months.  Months during which the few decent films that do make it into cinemas are instantly forced out by over-hyped sequels and works of distorted genre.  Works so disjointed and violent in their imagery that they have come to resemble twisted parodies of the world we know.  Works that do not seek to elevate our collective humanity but to pervert it by filling our poor throbbing skulls with whole new vistas of psychosis and paranoia.  Vistas we can only escape from with the help of consumer products, the antics of boy wizards and bellicose robots.  Vistas produced by a media-industrial complex that keeps us supine and malleable lest we realise the living hell that we have made of our collective existence.  A collective existence so cruel and unhinged that were we to grasp its true nature for even a second we would all run screaming into the streets, tearing at our clothes and flesh in a hideous and brutal attempt to somehow get clean and free of a system that has crushed us beneath its heel for far too long.

But then a film comes along that seems to recognise all of this.

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