![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/24.media.tumblr.com\/tumblr_lm8hnuT66W1qhqfw3o1_1280.jpg?resize=254%2C168\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Teaching my film course (especially in its current rendition as “Ecology Film Philosophy”) and the book that goes with it (Ecologies of the Moving Image<\/em>, which will be publicly available in July) — and especially teaching the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker<\/em>, which serves as a sort of template for the book — makes me feel like the Stalker in the film.<\/p>\n “Stalkers” are guides to the Zone, which in the film is a mysterious, anomalous, and prohibited zone into which people go in the belief or hope that their deepest wish will be granted. (It’s more complicated than that, as you know if you’ve seen it.) The word caught on among those who led unofficial tours into the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and among those who play the video<\/a> game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the course (and book), the Zone is the zone of cinema,<\/a> the zone of the dream-world made possible by moving imagery that moves us in ways we can never quite fully decode or deconstruct. The Zone is also the process-relational<\/a> ecophilosophical<\/a> perspective on things, us, life, Earth, and everything. As the students’ guide to this territory, I’m selling them on the idea that there’s something worth exploring in this Zone, that it takes time (and patience) to get a handle on, and that they don’t already know what it is (though on some level they do, too).<\/p>\n Teaching the book is also making me want to find analogies to the relationship between the book and the course based on the book. That relationship is a little like the relationship between a musical score (or studio recording) and a live performance of that score (or recording). Or like that between the score\/recording and a series of participatory performances stitched together by colloquium-like reflections and adumbrations of the material, which changes in the process of its being played.<\/p>\n It’s also like the relationship between a cookbook and a multi-course, several-day series of dinner engagements based on recipes in the book. The recipes don’t include the actual ingredients (the films), the taste of the dishes in the sequence of tasting and sipping as it unfolds around the dinner table (the viewing), or the conversations that emerge around it all.<\/p>\n On the positive side, though, the ideas are ingredients, too, and you can get them from reading the book. And to make all the dishes in the book, one would have to watch a lot of films — many more than could be fit into a single course.<\/p>\n I am enjoying it, and the students seemed to enjoy Stalker<\/em>. For a slow, 2 hour and 40 minute Russian film from the 1970s, that is a feat in itself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Teaching my film course (especially in its current rendition as “Ecology Film Philosophy”) and the book that goes with it (Ecologies of the Moving Image, which will be publicly available in July) — and especially teaching the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, which serves as a sort of template for the book — makes me feel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688745,689701],"tags":[212,317,318,58900],"class_list":["post-6700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema_zone","category-media_ecology","tag-chernobyl","tag-stalker","tag-tarkovsky","tag-zone"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-1K4","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3675,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/04\/29\/stalking-the-cinema-stalking-the-world\/","url_meta":{"origin":6700,"position":0},"title":"Stalking the cinema stalking the world","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's a version of something that comes late in Chapter One of my Ecologies of the Moving Image manuscript. This follows a description of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker (USSR, 1979), which I take as a kind of paradigmatic model for the process-relational framework the book develops. Here I discuss the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/04\/tarkovsky.stalker-275x207.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8737,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/04\/25\/30-years-or-30000-spectral-stories-of-chernobyl\/","url_meta":{"origin":6700,"position":1},"title":"30 Years (or 30,000): Spectral stories of Chernobyl","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 25, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I'll be giving this talk\u00a0at the University of Kansas on\u00a0Thursday. It'll be exactly two days after the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. And 16 days before the\u00a030th anniversary\u00a0of Mikhail Gorbachev's speech about the accident. Pravda (Truth)\u00a0first reported in any detail on the accident on May 6 and 7.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"12936507_10156686380240175_3276137965878156821_n","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2016\/04\/12936507_10156686380240175_3276137965878156821_n-275x213.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7066,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/12\/01\/toronto-talk-ukraines-anomalous-zone\/","url_meta":{"origin":6700,"position":2},"title":"Toronto talk: Ukraine’s anomalous Zone","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 1, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"My upcoming talk at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs comes from the East European strand of my research. The talk will be called \"Becoming Tuteishyi: Peregrinations in the Zona of Ukraine, with Walter, Gloria, Andrei, Bruno, and Other Explorers.\" The description reads as follows: Drawing on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-iepaKiYQzVY\/UGIuXGIPqlI\/AAAAAAAAB-M\/uqxDt8WBSZI\/s1600\/revolution_s01e02_sc.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":11576,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/02\/13\/zone-as-metaphor-metaphor-as-zone\/","url_meta":{"origin":6700,"position":3},"title":"Zone as metaphor, metaphor as Zone","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 13, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"My book Ecologies of the Moving Image takes Andrei Tarkovsky's Zone, so richly depicted in his celebrated 1979 film Stalker, as a kind of master metaphor for how cinema works and, by implication, how art in general works: it beckons its receiver into following it into a zone where, at\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/02\/stalker-1979-002-00m-ln4-dog-running-through-water_0-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/02\/stalker-1979-002-00m-ln4-dog-running-through-water_0-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/02\/stalker-1979-002-00m-ln4-dog-running-through-water_0-1.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/02\/stalker-1979-002-00m-ln4-dog-running-through-water_0-1.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":5143,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/08\/04\/film-philosophy-article\/","url_meta":{"origin":6700,"position":4},"title":"Film-Philosophy article","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 4, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"The new issue of Film-Philosophy is out, and it includes my article \"The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema.\" The abstract is below. The first half of the article is an early version of the paper I gave at the recent Moving Environments conference, which encompassed material from the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/08\/tarkovsky.stalker-275x207.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6185,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/10\/22\/2-or-3-things-about-the-cinema-book\/","url_meta":{"origin":6700,"position":5},"title":"2 or 3 things about the cinema book","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 22, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Ecologies of the Moving Image is a book of ecophilosophy that happens to be about cinema, and about the 12-decade history of cinema at that. What makes it ecophilosophy? It is philosophy that is deeply informed both by an understanding of ecological science and an interdisciplinary appreciation for today's ecological\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_EWY1PJsPzBA\/Sy7A-os24mI\/AAAAAAAAAyI\/71YlZjgAk8M\/s400\/stalker26.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6700"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6713,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6700\/revisions\/6713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}