contain  multitudes  •  by  Padma  Dorje  •  established  in  2003
contain  multitudes

Stalker's Wife

Stalker’s wife walks towards the wall and then sits down, turns to the camera and takes a cigarette from her packet. A dreadful moment, this, for me. By lighting and smoking a cigarette she turns herself, instantly, into something hideous. That sheepskin coat, we realize now, must stink of cigarettes— and her hair. And it’s not just that: I hate all gestures associated with finding, lighting and smoking a cigarette. Geoff Dyer, Zona

Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, released in the USSR in 1979, radiates an enduring sense of mystery and disquiet. I have seen it five times, though viewing can feel like a penance.  // Tarkovsky erupted: it actually needed to be slower and duller at the start so that anyone who had walked into the wrong theatre would have time to leave before the action got under way.INDEPENDENT

Zona by Geoff Dyer

Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, released in the USSR in 1979, radiates an enduring sense of mystery and disquiet. I have seen it five times, though viewing can feel like a penance. // Tarkovsky erupted: it actually needed to be slower and duller at the start so that anyone who had walked into the wrong theatre would have time to leave before the action got under way.
Ramblings on my favorite movie.tzal.org

Tarkovsky's Stalker

Ramblings on my favorite movie.
Geoff Dyer on the Soviet-era cinematic masterpiece.NYTIMES

Geoff Dyer’s ‘Zona’ Examines the Film ‘Stalker’

Geoff Dyer on the Soviet-era cinematic masterpiece.
MONKEY, IN PROFILE and in colour, still wearing that autumnal gold-brown headscarf, reading. Reading in the way people used to read, before there were so many books that they became a bit of a nuisance and burden, before there was even an inkling of the Kindle. Smoke is drifting. Nice-looking smoke, incense. Floating blossom. The loud cheep and chirrup of birds: Zone sounds, Zone blossom. But also the railroad and dockside moan of horns— sounds that were nowhere to be heard in the Zone, the quietest place on earth. We are on the brink, here, of one of the all-redeeming moments of any art form. It can’t be isolated from what has gone before, it gathers into itself the whole film. But by ‘all-redeeming’ I don’t just mean in the context of this film. It redeems, makes up for, every pointless bit of gore, every wasted special effect, all the stupidity in every film made before or since. Oh well, you think, none of that matters, all of that is worth it, for this. Geoff Dyer, Zonatzal.org

Monkey

MONKEY, IN PROFILE and in colour, still wearing that autumnal gold-brown headscarf, reading. Reading in the way people used to read, before there were so many books that they became a bit of a nuisance and burden, before there was even an inkling of the Kindle. Smoke is drifting. Nice-looking smoke, incense. Floating blossom. The loud cheep and chirrup of birds: Zone sounds, Zone blossom. But also the railroad and dockside moan of horns— sounds that were nowhere to be heard in the Zone, the quietest place on earth. We are on the brink, here, of one of the all-redeeming moments of any art form. It can’t be isolated from what has gone before, it gathers into itself the whole film. But by ‘all-redeeming’ I don’t just mean in the context of this film. It redeems, makes up for, every pointless bit of gore, every wasted special effect, all the stupidity in every film made before or since. Oh well, you think, none of that matters, all of that is worth it, for this. Geoff Dyer, Zona


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