{"id":3675,"date":"2011-04-29T17:09:10","date_gmt":"2011-04-29T22:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=3675"},"modified":"2021-08-12T08:05:57","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T13:05:57","slug":"stalking-the-cinema-stalking-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/04\/29\/stalking-the-cinema-stalking-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Stalking the cinema stalking the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a version of something that comes late in Chapter One of my Ecologies of the Moving Image<\/strong> manuscript. This follows a description of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker<\/strong> (USSR, 1979), which I take as a kind of paradigmatic model for the process-relational framework the book develops. Here I discuss the film in its relationship to its social and material contexts, including that of the Chernobyl accident, which occurred seven years after the film was released, but which the film might just have anticipated.<\/em><\/p>\n

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After the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, the film [Stalker<\/em>] took on even greater resonance. The Chernobyl disaster led to the almost immediate death of several dozen people, the radioactive contamination of large parts of Ukraine, Belarus, and Eastern (and Western) Europe, the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from an area some thirty kilometers across, and a legacy of radioactivity-related diseases and illnesses affecting thousands. The evacuation area around Chernobyl was called \u2018the Zone\u2019 (as was a later film by Ukrainian director Yuri Illienko, Swan Lake \u2013 The Zone,<\/em> which riffed on both the Chernobyl and Gulag experiences), and unofficial tour guides to the evacuated area referred to themselves as \u2018stalkers.\u2019<\/p>\n

Biblical resonances within the film emerged in interpretations of Chernobyl as \u2018wormwood,\u2019 the literal meaning of \u2018chernobyl\u2019 and, according to Russian and Ukrainian interpretations of the Book of Revelation, the site of the apocalypse. A video game called \u2018S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl,\u2019 created by a Ukrainian design team and now with over two million copies distributed worldwide, combines all of these themes and adds its own mutants, physical anomalies, radioactive waste, and the like.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

The film has thus served as a source of imagery and a template for the hopes and fears of Soviet (and post-Soviet) citizens in the wake of an ecological catastrophe, a catastrophe that catalyzed an environmental movement which was to contribute powerfully to the demise of the Soviet Union itself.[2]<\/a> In its often cited prescience, Stalker\u2019s<\/em> \u2018cinematic materialism\u2019 can thus be taken as both a symptom and an affect-laden carrier of hopes and fears that would ultimately bring the Soviet Union to its end.<\/p>\n

The making of the film contributed to this layering of political and environmental overtones. It was filmed twice, both times under challenging conditions, since Tarkovsky was considered somewhat of a dissident and was not always allowed to film what he wanted, yet the respect and international admiration for his work provided him a measure of protection. The first version of the film was destroyed during processing. Rumors circulated that it was destroyed by Soviet censors, though it seems likelier to have been a matter of ineptness and defective film stock.[3]<\/a> It took several months for Tarkovsky to convince Mosfilm to fund and allow a refilming, which they did on the principle that this was not the same film but a sequel to the (missing) original. Tarkovsky later conceded that this was fortunate, since the second version veered even further away from science-fictional themes into the metaphysical.<\/p>\n