Episode 15: On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - Part Two

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2018

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this second of a two-part conversation on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, Phil and JF explore the film's prophetic dimension, relating it to Samuel R. Delany's classic science-fiction novel Dhalgren, the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the affordances of despair, the spookiness of color, the transformation of noise into music, and the Chernobyl disaster. They even come up with a title for a novel Robert Ludlum never wrote but should have written: The Criterion Rendition! REFERENCES Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Stalker Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (foreword by William Gibson) H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space" John Searle, Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception Steve Reich, Come Out Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1 Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" Stanley Kubrick, The Shining The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Specter Vision Radio.
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martell.
0:21.9	For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to Weird Studies.com. On Tarkovsky's Stalker, Part 2
0:52.7	I think probably because of seeing stalker, I've had a
0:59.2	lifelong fascination with zones where the usual rules seem to have been suspended,
1:08.2	where something marvelous is possible. Well, I mean, just what we were talking about.
1:13.3	And there are a few different fictions of zones in this same sense. One of them is a novel called
1:20.4	Dalgrin by Samuel Delaney. Have you ever read this? I have, yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. Well,
1:26.4	then you know what I'm talking about because, okay, so the
1:29.1	novel, Dalgren is about a city called Balona, and some never explain catastrophe or disaster
1:36.9	has befallen it, and almost everybody has left the city. And it's just a normal-ass city.
1:42.3	I imagine it as being a place like Indianapolis, you know, just a normal kind of place.
1:46.7	I think it is in the Midwest in the narrative.
1:49.8	Yeah, I always imagine Indianapolis when I read it.
1:52.9	But the point is that almost everybody has left, and the only people who are still there
1:58.5	are either too dumb or too crazy to leave.
2:02.7	Some of them are people who lived there before,
2:06.0	and some of them, like the main character, the kid,
2:09.5	are people who actually have come to Bologna after this disaster
2:13.9	because they want to be in this zone. And it's very much like the zone in stalker.
2:22.4	Weird shit can happen. Time can go backwards. A house that's burned down one day can be back up
2:29.4	and whole and undamaged the next. There's a memorable moment where the clouds part and there's not one but two
	...

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