blog post # 345

stalker

there are few films that when you watch them, you are instantly transported to somewhere else. The 'other' place that you kind of think exists but you can't quite put your finger on it. Is it somewhere from where i grew up, somewhere that i have been to visit someone? is it from a dream or another piece of media that i have ingested and through my own id and heartburn coughed it up as a regurgitated own form of my life? few films manage this as few ice creams manage being as creamy and as thick and rich as the advertising men at walls would like you to think. Sometimes the book is better than the celluloid but every now and then something comes along that is both wholly different but also elevated from the original source material. it ingests the words and sentences that form a story and turns those words, full stops and paragraphs into an array from which it then manipulates and disorderly returns a value wholly different from the source material. For me, i am talking about Stalker. The 1979 film by Andrei Tarkovsky, a film taken and based off of the book by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Roadside Picnic. a film/book/idea that seems at once very cold-war, post-USSR, post-atomic holocaust but manages, in my eyes, to be wholly universal.


for some background i think it is important to look into the soviet union at the moment of both the books creation and also the films gestation. the book was written by the brothers in 1971 and published in 1972. A book that had such an impact in russia that it birthed a neologisms, a word that now had meaning in a language where it did not before. russian's speaking russian could think and feel and know what it meant to be a stalker as well as why it felt the way it did. in short it entered the plasticity of culture. in the book, unseen or known by the local population, 6 sites around the world are visited over 2 days by aliens. Inside these zones the nature of nature itself is broken down, reordered or left to random. time changes, locations change, objects cause strange phenomena that affects the people around the object or the zone itself. the book itself feels different from the film. the destruction and the decay of the zone are best left as a visual narrative which becomes a character of itself. the book is more, normal. it is about a man, he has all the problems of someone who has a job which is complicated and not straightforward. he could be a barrister or a social worker the problems at the core of them are the same. messy. an interesting concept in the book is that everyone is so aware of the theft of items from the zone, it’s an open secret as if you only have to reach in and touch something for it to then hold a high monetary value which is enough to risk life and limb to extract. the highest bidder is the king, the one who calls and changes the characters lives. its not enough to lose your legs to some alien slime you have to materially benefit as well. the theft however operates at a higher level, a metaphor for society which seeing as it was 1970’s and the writers were russian that means the soviet union. the decay of the zone is the ussr, the rotten decrepit corpse of something with once great theoretical potential which was quickly and inhumanely extinguished along with the countless millions of people killed or relocated. how do you deal collectively with a known violence like the russia/ussr from about 1900 until the then present time of the 1970’s? i think the answer is you do not, you cannot on one hand as they might kill you and there is no real platform to do it in. which is why russian science fiction is the only real way that people could moan and groan about the going’s on in their everyday lives.


if you look at sci-fi writing from around this period it is clear to see what is going on. the people’s problems at this point are not that they are going through purges, mass forced relocations or the disappearances of well known public figures as well as having to believe that everything that was happening from the terror to the concentration camps of the Gulag was somehow for the common good. By the time the 1970’s rolls around the pretence that anything negative or wrong that people were put through somehow meant they would all be better off for it had vanished. the common good was purely for the benefit of the uncommon few. The elite of the ussr society had enriched themselves and their relations through the complete mismanagement of absolutely everything else that anyone had ever hoped to build or dream. this is how we have to see both stalker and roadside picnic, yes it is easy to gush over the cinematography in the film and i imagine the original russian text had merrit from a prose perspective but the real feat and achievement is capturing this space and time of the specific country that it did. a country so vast and massive that it itself is pretty much a continent. what i mean by that, is its beyond simple, it is infinitly complex. somewhere along the complexity you view as a consumer of this narrative a owness of this other place and visually reinterperete it as your own place. the same way that eyeballs see upside down and back to front however the brain has the good fortune to reinterpret this signal on the fly. allowing us to view the world how we do.

there is nothing more that i would like to say about this than that.