(no subject)

[proximoception]

Tarkovsky's attempts to anchor in real earth and real time I find entirely admirable, but not always successful - but where you're unable to immerse yourself on one viewing you might be on another. It's just quite risky. The long takes can push you right out of the viewing experience, or pull you too far in in hypnotized disregard of where the story went. For me Andrei Rublev was a fantastic experience, Solaris an interesting ordeal, but I feel like either could produce either watched some other year.

But when it works! The vertical shot of everything underwater had me in tears. Seemed just the best thing that could have happened.

His problem, one assumes, was finding subject matter where audiences would understand the value added by being brought back to the second-by-second, inch-by-inch existence we usually expect movies to free us from. (Insert dasein/design pun here.)

This project fits him perfectly. That first terrifying approach to the building was all of Lost at once, more tan that was the Last Tycoon nickel scene, more even than that was how I played for years as a child. Furtive pruposeful movements beside a field, some weeds, a stretch of fence, a decaying brick, all of this made your world precisely because it hadn't made another. You got to place it, it was open to your modifications. And you were grateful to it - not everything permits that sort of nothing to operate on. The specifics mattered even though / precisely because they weren't use- or recognition-stamped. They stood in for the continuities of the final world, were film rather than scenes.

A friend of mine had a backyard that opened somehow (Crowley's Somehow) into a secret place with a stream in between a garage's back wall and a tree-and-fence barrier. I think the "stream" may have been a flooded ditch, in adult parlance, and given the dimensions of lots in the neighborhood it all must have been a couple hards by a couple yards. But it felt cut off from everything, to the extent that I remember not understanding at the time precisely how I'd gotten there from my friend's yard. The friend had shown it to me but never much cared about it. I thought he was the luckiest human alive. There was nothing to do there but make sounds and stories, though of course make-believe of that sort has more in common with dreams than with stories: you forget or neglect the beginning, deviate further and further from any kind of end until one drops like an anvil. You're done because you're hungry, or some other rock brushed your bubble.

As a good hater of "belief in belief" - the sin of pride of those atheists who don't expect others to be capable of the sort of reasoning that led them clear of religion - I couldn't have been more ambivalent when it was suddenly clear that this rule-heavy odyssey of pretending was associated with that other kind of faith. But just as Tarkovsky's filming proclivities fit travel in the Zone, loco-imaginative child games do kind of fit religion. A time-honored avenue of skeptical invective against believers that I've always avoided, which may have been why it shocked me so - I just don't think of faith that way. For me it really did make it suddenly harder to condemn, as did the fact that, given when, where, among whom it was made, the issue here isn't ridicule but proscription.

Suppose there's a thing to it other than what it thinks is there, something sideways from it, finally natural rather than beyond nature, but with which communication (more in the sense of between wings of a house than words between heads) is enabled only by this exagerration of categorical gaps. As though we moved in a thick fog through which only a scream could come across as speech. The Zone dog that follows him home isn't what he's there for, but it's what he gets (meaningful, then, that the scientist too has a number of dogs, can't take another when it's offered?). That Marvellian dissolution into green - could he have managed it without the promise of nearby gold? One of the most beautiful things was the Writer and Professor being sucked in despite themselves, their plans and antipathies and ennui and whatever else. They want this house to be more than a house. (Disturbing realization that one of my favorite movies, eXistenZ, may owe a hell of a lot here).

As any house is more than a house. Whatever hoops you need to jump through to permit yourself to love this self, these others, this life, this room you immediately should. Better the ones you don't trip over, the ones not lined with razors, not on fire.

The matter of fact setting and nature of the miracles the girl performed were also perfect, along with being perfectly surprising. But why didn't she seem happy? I am not a Soviet Russian, and I know I sometimes mess up getting what faces mean, don't mean in (e.g.) French movies, Japanese ones. Was the point that she wasn't excited - to her it was no miracle at all, just how she and the world do things? Or were we to take this as a final ambiguity, given the earlier talk about blowing up the Zone so the wrong people don't access its power (or power to make us think there is a power, just as real and frightening)?

Comments

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

i find grashupfer's use of the verb trampoline to be apt. i feel like a lot of what you say, eloquently and poetically, comes from yourself and not the work -- you use aspects of the work as a launching pad to muse on the subjects they occasion. which i think is great and a great use of this exercise, but what i was trying to nail down with my question is very much about the film itself and the director's intent. it appears to me you don't think he intended there to be a single discernable reason for the sepia (unlike in oz). i feel like there should be, that there is, and i'm hoping someone else can shed some light on it. my personal thoughts on the message of the movie aren't concrete because i don't feel i fully understand his agenda.


and even so, i don't see the ambiguities you do:

the train (real world) moves the glass at the beginning, in the sepia, with the well-known classical piece in the background; the girl moves the glasses at the end the movie just before the train (real world) rattles the glasses, now in color, with the well-known classical piece in the background. they're bookends and the action of the train is clear in both.

i don't think the movie allows for the possibility that the zone is a myth created by the stalkers. we're given plenty of evidence that it's not, and i find that it's fundamental to processing the story to accept as true that the zone has killed virtually everyone who has entered it. the stalkers return because they're the ones who have learned (teacher to student to student) how to navigate the zone -- how did the first teacher learn? trial and error, i assume.

that the zone follows different laws (call it magic, miracles, or as asimov would have it, technology) i also find fundamental. we have plenty of evidence of that. i find that the ambiguity lies in how the room operates, precisely because so little is known in fact. in that instance, yes, i think the movie shows a possibility that the stalkers either don't know or aren't willing to tell the whole truth about the room.

i'm not sure where the observation comes from that stalker has brought color to his wife -- there's only a brief moment where she appears in color at all, and her epic monologue at the end finds her in sepia, just as she was at the start.

i think there is plenty of room for ambiguity even after marking out some of the unambiguous fundamental bases, and for me, i can't even begin to analyze the ambiguous without some ground to stand on.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Seemed to me all evidence of supernaturalness was carefully ambiguous. And people not returning, if true at all, may have had something to do with the army shooting them. If there was plenty of clear evidence I'm missing can you name some? The Stalker inveighed against the others for their lack of faith at the end, after all, and his wife didn't defend his accuracy, just that he made joy possible.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

the lack of faith s. inveighed against was faith in the room, not the zone itself.

evidence with respect to the zone:

the professor quoted at the beginning

the stalker is quite sincere throughout - there's nothing to indicate he's running a scam

the soldier at the outskirts are clearly trying to keep people out, with deadly force, yet they have no presence within

there are no other people in the zone

all of the evidence of civilization is decayed and broken (utility poles, other junk)

the flowers have no scent

the rusted-out, overgrown tanks and weaponry show there had been an attempt to establish a military presence in the zone which failed, yet the tanks didn't flee, they were abandoned

when w. approaches the house alone he (alone) experiences a rush of wind on an apparently calm day; a voice tells him to stop (but not s. or p.)

p. goes backward to retrieve his knapsack at the point where part 2 starts, and is encountered by s. & w. who have been traveling forward yet inexplicably ended up where they started; the zone

wants p. to have his knapsack so it provides him a means of retrieving it yet still being guided forward

the nuts with the streamers don't appear to follow a natural trajectory

it may be just be an editing flub (though i doubt it), but when they reach the room with the mounds of powder, a bird swoops across the mounds, and disappears from plain sight; then the same bird

reenters the scene where it started in the foreground (or a very similar bird does), to the right of its initial position, flies across a slightly different path before successfully landing near a

pipe opening and looking around

w., having gone ahead alone, and apparently crossed the mounds to the reach the pipe, and has apparently traveled in the pipe and been spit up again into the mound room: he awakes from having been

knocked unconscious and lies outside the pipe with his hands stuck in his pockets (as if he has been carried and was not moving of his own free will); s. says w. has been inside the pipe (or "meat

mincer") and w. doesn't dispute this, is in fact angry for having suffered the ordeal

despite all of the telephone lines being broken, a telephone rings in the antechamber to the room, it's someone from the outside world with a wrong number -- they think they're calling a clinic

the professor is then given the inspiration to gloat about his revenge on the man who cuckolded him and the phone can dial out to the outside world

there is (to some extent) working electricity in the antechamber

the dog stays near the skeletal corpses of what might be its owners -- a woman and man apparently locked in an embrace, kissing, with no obvious cause for their death

it begins to storm and rain in the antechamber and yet there's bright light -- from where?

monkey uses telekinesis to move the glasses on the table, knocking one off the table

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

All totally ambiguous, eminently susceptible to natural explanations, even the corpses since this is a shot-on-sight protected area - and why would anyone doubt a magic room if they accepted the Zone itself was magical? It's all "I'm in a haunted house - did that sculpture turn to look at me? Did someone just whisper?" level stuff. Even the working phone and electricity could be explained - suppose the military's been performing some secret experiments there. Militaries have been known to. Everything fits the pattern of strange-but-not-quite-strange-enough-to-be-sure-it's-something-more.