Geoff Dyerʼs ‘Zonaʼ Examines the Film ‘Stalkerʼ - The New York Times 2019-12-22, 11(47 SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW A Place of Our Deepest Desires Geoff Dyer’s ‘Zona’ Examines the Film ‘Stalker’ By J. HOBERMAN MARCH 2, 2012 The jacket of Geoff Dyer’s “Zona” describes it as “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.” It is also a hall of mirrors in which the author watches himself watching (and remembers himself remembering) a movie that, according to his impressively detailed description, ends with a character looking at us, looking at her. At once audacious post-postmodernist memoir and après-DVD monograph, “Zona” considers Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” (1979), the last movie the great Russian director would make in his native land. Dyer, a novelist, critical polymath and regular contributor to the Book Review whose oeuvre includes book-length essays on jazz, photography and D. H. Lawrence, isn’t the first literary author to write a book about a single movie. Some years ago, Salman Rushdie initiated the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series with a slim volume on “The Wizard of Oz”; more recently, Jonathan Lethem wrote a booklength essay on John Carpenter’s sci-fi thriller “They Live.” But “The Wizard of Oz” is more culture myth than movie, and “They Live” is a disreputable genre flick that pokes fun at the Reagan era. “Stalker,” by contrast, is a doggedly ambitious masterpiece by a major filmmaker. It also presents something of a challenge to describe. “Stalker” is over two and a half hours long; its pace is deliberate and its payoffs, by movie-movie https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/books/review/geoff-dyers-zona-examines-the-film-stalker.html Page 1 of 4 Geoff Dyerʼs ‘Zonaʼ Examines the Film ‘Stalkerʼ - The New York Times 2019-12-22, 11(47 standards, amazingly paltry. Most of the action takes place amid voluptuously overgrown industrial ruins. Tarkovsky characterized cinema as “sculpting in time,” and the characteristic camera movement in “Stalker” is a high-angle tortoise crawl over some waterlogged stretch of detritus. His hyper-real images seem etched into the screen; his drip-drip sound design is even sharper. With its emphasis on landscape, texture and atmosphere, this brooding, dystopian science fiction — freely adapted from the novel “Roadside Picnic,” by the Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris — is as much environment as movie. To the degree that “Stalker” has a plot, it’s the mock-epic odyssey of two less-than-attractive Russian intellectuals, a writer and a scientist, guided by the title character, a tormented fool with the shaven head and dirty rags of a gulag inmate, to the heart of a polluted, post-apocalyptic government-restricted area called the Zone. There’s no human presence, and the laws of nature have been altered, perhaps by the aftereffects of an extraterrestrial visitation. (In the novel, it’s a Soviet Roswell.) Within the Zone is the so-called Room, a space wherein one’s secret hopes are revealed and even realized. Maybe. The Zone and the Room are distinguished by the near-complete absence of anything anyone would consider special effects. Dyer casts himself as “Stalker’s” stalker; getting there, as cruise lines used to advertise, is half the fun. “We are in another world that is no more than this world perceived with unprecedented attentiveness,” he writes, and his own close attention is admirable. Taking pains to nail the feel of Tarkovsky’s locations (“the echoey, intestinal, glass-strewn, stalactite-adorned tunnel”), Dyer recounts the film’s story from first shot to last, while supplying his own chatty annotations. In addition to waxing confessional, he conjures the filmmaker’s formidable personality. Tarkovsky was a perfectionist. The script for “Stalker” went through countless rewrites and, according to Dyer’s account, was largely reshot after faulty film processing ruined half the footage. Tarkovsky suffered a heart attack while “Stalker” was in postproduction, and he had courted catastrophe from the get-go. Originally, the film was to be shot in the wilds of Tajikistan; an earthquake mooted that plan, and the production moved far away to Estonia. The new location was downriver from a chemical plant — exposure to the toxic runoff may have contributed to the cancer that killed Tarkovsky a decade later. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/books/review/geoff-dyers-zona-examines-the-film-stalker.html Page 2 of 4 Geoff Dyerʼs ‘Zonaʼ Examines the Film ‘Stalkerʼ - The New York Times 2019-12-22, 11(47 “Zona” comes armed with source notes and a bibliography, but as if seeking respite from Tarkovskian heaviness, the writer skews light. However droll, his self-regarding asides can be wearisome: “Every time I see people drinking in films I am immediately seized with a desire to have a drink myself.” And? Most enthusiastic about his enthusiasm for Tarkovsky, Dyer is highly protective of his “Stalker” experience, provocatively hyperbolic (playing with the notion that “cinema was invented so that Tarkovsky could make ‘Stalker’ ”) and overly eager to clear the field of potential rivals. Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura,” a movie Tarkovsky admired as a useful precursor, is, per Dyer, “the nearest I have ever come to pure cinematic agony.” Other European masters are lightweights (“Belle de Jour” and “Breathless” are “unwatchable” or worse), while Dyer found another Tarkovsky favorite, Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest,” to be “a bit of a struggle.” The cult of “Stalker” is not limited to Dyer alone; while exacting in his judgment of Tarkovsky’s epigones, he is pleased to mention the film’s celebrated fans, including Bjork and Cate Blanchett. Still, Dyer’s evocation of “Stalker” is vivid; his reading is acute and sometimes brilliant. Robert Bird, the Tarkovsky exegete he most often cites, has elsewhere characterized the Zone as the filmmaker’s quintessential space: “The Zone is where one goes to see one’s innermost desires. It is, in short, the cinema.” Dyer agrees and notes that the stalker who guides us there, “a persecuted martyr” transporting the viewer to the place “where ultimate truths are revealed,” is the artist himself. Tarkovsky strenuously resisted any allegorical interpretation of his work, but the movie is in some sense autobiography. (He wanted his wife, Larisa, to play the stalker’s much put-upon spouse.) Just as Tarkovsky is the real protagonist of “Stalker,” Dyer is the true subject of “Zona.” As the stalker’s party approaches the Room, the footnotes, some running to six pages, proliferate. The author waxes increasingly personal in contemplating the nature of his own deepest desires, describing old girlfriends and LSD trips, elaborating on his missed sexual opportunities and his affection for dogs, at one point wondering, “What kind of writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?” Film critics are sometimes paid a left-handed https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/books/review/geoff-dyers-zona-examines-the-film-stalker.html Page 3 of 4 Geoff Dyerʼs ‘Zonaʼ Examines the Film ‘Stalkerʼ - The New York Times 2019-12-22, 11(47 compliment that their review was more enjoyable than the actual movie. That won’t necessarily be the case here — not because Dyer isn’t a stylish wordsmith, but because it’s likely that many of his readers have never seen “Stalker.” Does one need to know the film to fully appreciate Dyer’s riff? Or, would “Zona” be best read in complete innocence, as a novel in the form of a free-associative, wildly digressive audio commentary on the DVD of a movie too crazy to possibly exist? (In either case, Dyer is giving a performance, and it’s another Russian genius who presides over his book, namely Vladimir Nabokov, who contrived with “Pale Fire” a novel composed of a poem and its unhinged commentary.) Joking that the Zone “is one of the few territories left — possibly the only one — where the rights to ‘Top Gear’ have not been sold,” Dyer is fully attuned to the absurdity of Tarkovsky’s movie as well as to the chutzpah of his own highfalutin novelization: “If someone will deign to publish this summary of a film that relatively few people have seen, then that will constitute a success far greater than anything John Grisham could ever have dreamed of.” Dyer is too modest; with a first printing of 30,000 copies, he has already, by his own standard, bested one of the best-selling novelists of our time. “Zona” is extremely clever — and that’s one thing Tarkovsky never was. ZONA By Geoff Dyer 232 pp. Pantheon. $24. J. Hoberman’s latest book, “Film After Film; Or,What Became of 21st Century Cinema?,” will be published this spring. A version of this review appears in print on March 4, 2012, on Page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: A Place of Our Deepest Desires. © 2019 The New York Times Company https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/books/review/geoff-dyers-zona-examines-the-film-stalker.html Page 4 of 4