Stalker: The Zone as a Test of Faith

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in an unnamed country there is a forbidden, fenced-off region called the Zone, where an unexplained event — a meteorite, an alien visitation, no one knows — has left the ordinary laws of the world unstable. At the heart of the Zone is a Room, and the Room is said to grant the deepest wish of anyone who enters it. Guides called Stalkers smuggle desperate people past the soldiers and the wire, through the shifting traps, toward the Room. That is the entire plot of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and it takes roughly two hours and forty minutes, and almost nothing in it is what a synopsis would lead you to expect.

Solaris (1972): Tarkovsky's Answer to Kubrick

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Andrei Tarkovsky did not care for 2001: A Space Odyssey. He thought Kubrick’s film was a sterile catalogue of hardware, technically dazzling and emotionally frozen, science fiction that mistook the machinery for the meaning. In 1972 he made his reply. Solaris, adapted from Stanisław Lem’s novel, is the space film as a study of grief, guilt and the unbearable weight of memory, and it opens on reeds waving in a stream outside a country house on Earth, no rocket in sight,, held for so long that you begin to understand you are being retrained in how to watch.

Andrei Tarkovsky - vo.rs

Stalker: The Zone as a Test of Faith

Solaris (1972): Tarkovsky's Answer to Kubrick