“It was not a case of love at first sight: the first time I saw Stalker I was slightly bored and unmoved. I wasn’t overwhelmed (to put it slightly stupidly, I had no idea that, thirty years later, I would end up writing an entire book about it), but it was an experience I couldn’t shake off. Something about it stayed with me.” Geoff Dyer, Zona

Stalker

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.

Stalker

It’s not—as Stalker claimed—that all the world’s a prison; it’s just that a lot of what’s being shown on the world’s screens—televisions, cinemas, computers—is fit only for morons. Which is another reason why, in the long years since I first saw Stalker, I am as badly in need of the Zone and its wonders as any of the three men on the trolley as they sit there and the blurry landscape clangs past. The Zone is a place of uncompromised and unblemished value. It is one of the few territories left—possibly the only one—where the rights to Top Gear have not been sold: a place of refuge and sanctuary. A sanctuary, also, from cliché. That’s another of Tarkovsky’s virtues: an absolute freedom from cliché in a medium where clichés are not only tolerated but, in the form of unquestioning adherence to convention, expected. Geoff Dyer, ZONA.

Stalker