Stalker, Andreï Tarkovski, normal laws of physics, spatial realms, ID-Machine, phantasmatic operator, idiosyncratic epiphanies
Stalker is a film directed by Andreï Tarkovski shot in 1979 in U.S.S.R. The screenplay is loosely based on a novel by Boris and Arcady Strugatski: Roadside Picnic. The Stalker works as a guide who leads people through 'The Zone' - an area where the normal laws of physics no longer apply- to reach 'the Room', said to fulfill the wishes of anyone who steps inside. But police guarding the Zone is apparently authorized to shoot any contravened. The main figures are characterized by a deep disenchantment of their respective life that is why they feel that they have nothing to lose transgressing such a strong prohibition. So, they ride into the heart of the Zone on a railway works cars. From time to time, the Guides refers to a previous stalker named Porcupine, who led his brother to his death in the Zone, visited the Room, gained a lot of money, and then hanged himself.
[...] All the spaces in Stalker are submerged by water: rooms are flooded, walls are seeping. Above all, the omnipresence of water symbolizes the renunciation of intellect and a reconnection to our nature which is after all an integrate part of Nature. Their progression through the zone can be related to an initiatory trip, which subdues them by means of this absolving water. [...]
[...] Tarkovski offers us a raw, materialized jouissance. ‘This texture renders a stance of Gelassenheit, of pacified disengagement that suspends the very urgency of any kind of Quest' in compliance with Slavoj Žižek in ‘The Thing from Inner Space'. The nature is consistent with its own, all the bits and pieces of this decomposing landscape is significant. Tarkovski wants us to be present at his genesis of meaning out of natural contingency. III. Spiritual immanence through mercy of pure beauty It is the disintegration of the very material texture of reality, which provides the spiritual depth counterbalancing the nihilism. [...]
[...] Stalker immerses us in a physical poetry just like Bachelard daydreams: beauty seems to be the solution to reach an indirect connexion to the spirit of the world. Therefore, Zone's nature appears, in the literal sense, to be sublimed. The primitive persistence of the visual harnessing arouses a very pure amazement, a gaze which does not just settle for hanging over the world and in doing so considering it as a lever of intelligibility but more accurately it suggests that the world is in itself intelligent, clairvoyant. [...]
[...] Stalker – Andreï Tarkovski (1979) Stalker is a film directed by Andreï Tarkovski shot in 1979 in U.S.S.R. The screenplay is loosely based on a novel by Boris and Arcady Strugatski: Roadside Picnic. The Stalker works as a guide who led people through ‘The Zone' - an area where the normal laws of physics no longer apply- to reach ‘the Room', said to fulfil the wishes of anyone who steps inside. But police guarding the Zone is apparently authorized to shoot any contravened. [...]
[...] The Zone is told to create a concrete, physical embodiment to the drives. In fact, the zone is a space in which a cursed incarnation is granted to the deep drives. The zone's nature is covered by the skin of imaginary: here, the virtual and the real are intertwined in the same substrate of the word and the fantasy skin is everything but inconsistent. No more ego, here all the projections of ourselves in regard to the civilization's norms disappear. [...]
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