Tarkovsky

luka

Well-known member
There's this military stockade, guarded perimeter, so we're kept in, penned into boring cardboard reality, but we slip through, evade the guards. All the archons of this boring world don't want us to be here and they don't want IT getting in and contaminating their grey stasis world.
 

luka

Well-known member
But we make raids, sorties, find precious bits of junk, bring them back. Each time, a little more familiar, a little more sure of ourselves, but the dangers are omnipresent and life threatening. And there's a hint of some deeper danger, something like radiation. Something mutating the cells. Deeper damage the longer the stay there. Altered by it.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's not a physical patch of ground, though you might find real world analogues of it, that exist for a time, before being discovered and folded back into the boring cardboard world

 

luka

Well-known member
Think about it also in these terms

luka said:
Imagine directly observe remember two timid would be lovers establishing a bubble of enclosing shared space within which we tentatively establish the shared language and the boundaries of the permissible. Reach out an arm, too fast? Retract, get reassurance, no, that was ok, return it, now lean in, now kiss. Imagine the voices, volume of them, rhythms of them, establish a mood, a shared diction. The tact and insight demanded
luka said:
Imagine a group of adolescent boys, how again volume is established, this vociferous, this callous feeling-tone, this ostentatious disregard for delicate sensibilities, your own and others, this body language, this violation of personal space, this deliberate volatility
luka said:
As an exercise study behaviour within these enclosed though porous social bubbles
 

luka

Well-known member
The establishing of the parameters and rules and possibilities of shared reality bubbles. can the stalker make it real enough can he bring them with him, or will they break it. You meet some people who are your personal kryptonite because they refuse you your very premises. They leave you with no ground to stand on. You're reduced to nothing. Fact Men. Gradgrind. There's no space to occupy and explore together, no opening out onto and into.
 

luka

Well-known member
And we know the landscape shifts and there are no fixed and reliable roads. You can't find your way back to happiness, to voluptuous bliss, to rapture, or awe. There are all sorts of locations we have visited but we can't find the way back. There's an aspect of grace or of happenstance.
 

luka

Well-known member
Sometimes you do find people you can take with you, not forever, just for a little while. And that's when it's at its most vivid and powerful. Sometimes you think you can show someone and you can't, that's when it feels like an illusion, and you can get sick, shrivel up, waste away. Cut off from the source of all renewals.
 

luka

Well-known member
There's no intellectual component to this, it's not an abstraction, it's the zone.
 

luka

Well-known member
In Dick you have the plasmate as this redemptive contamination, sealed up at Nag Hammadi and then let loose again hundreds of years later
 

luka

Well-known member
The establishing of the parameters and rules and possibilities of shared reality bubbles. can the stalker make it real enough can he bring them with him, or will they break it. You meet some people who are your personal kryptonite because they refuse you your very premises. They leave you with no ground to stand on. You're reduced to nothing. Fact Men. Gradgrind. There's no space to occupy and explore together, no opening out onto and into.

RD Laing talks about how one person or a conspiracy of people will act to destroy another's experience. This is happened to all of us, specially if we've been to an HR meeting. The denial of your experience, refusing to give it any validity. An act of violence which detaches you from the richness of your world and returns you to the white walls.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
I took the zone to be some kind of malicious zen space where the man/nature split is shown in its true light as a continuum, a feedback system. Man and nature as the "same essential reality, the producer-product." Its the increased pace of the flux and flow in the zone system that reveals this and creates a perpetual now that distorts past and future (time was funky in the zone, right?).

Time is funky in the zone yes. There is a sense that they're were both at the beginning and the end of the universe. An edenic quality that also distorts the split between man and world. Man-made items have become alien artifacts. Whether of not they possess magical attributes is not anymore the crucial wager because something even more fundamental has come into question.

Whereas the man-made items take on a non-human quality, the nature in the zone also seems to take on what we think of as mood or feeling. The boundary between what is and what judgements and aesthetics we impose on it is penetrated. The zone is melancholy not in a cultural way but in a sublime universal way.

The Stalker can only be happy in the zone which is important because the normal assumption would be that the zone would have no mood or feeling as there are no humans there to impose meaning onto it. But it still resonates with him, not on a normal happiness as we know it frequency but on some more mystical frequency.

I have to watch it again soon.
 

muser

Well-known member
another moment of dissensus synchronicity , had a dream about arguing with a mate about stalker last night, we agreed the argument was pointless because I hadn't actually watched it and only listened to the soundtrack. Which is true. Think it's a clear sign I should watch it this evening.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I finished Roadside Picnic the other day.... surprisingly very different from the film. One thing that struck me is how little time is actually spent in the Zone, there are only two scenes in the book, one at the start and one at the end (oh and one every tiny one in the middle in fact), the rest of the time is about people in the nearby town wheeling and dealing for artifacts and generally thinking and philosophising about the alien space on their doorstep.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The other day I watched Balabanov's last film, Me Too (the crude English translation) - it's about four generic people who go into a weird zone protected by the military which has different weather and so on, plus a strange tower at the centre believed to grant happiness to those who get there. Apparently Balabanov was inspired to make the film by seeing this spooky tower.... hmm, alright.

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
But the Balabanov film is some kind of comment on Stalker for sure... a riposte, a piss-take? Balabanov is a much more sardonic film-maker than Tarkovsky, I read it as a kind of querying of the idea of wishes coming true... what would that mean, is there something we should wish for? Is it just a totally banal question?
 

luka

Well-known member
Wasn't having a go at you in particular rich I just need my every statement to be applauded and I didn't hear any applause.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Sure, I didn't think you were especially, but felt I should enlarge.
I love Balabanov though that film feels slightly rushed or slight somehow. Maybe I'm projecting cos I know he died soon after, in my head he was ill and he hurried to finish it off before he died but that may not be true.
 

version

Well-known member
My DVD spreads the film across two discs. I remember watching it and feeling it could have ended when the first disc did. I'm glad it didn't as the whole thing's great, but still.
 
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