Stalker

11/30/21. Hadn't seen any Tarkovsky (or much world cinema or art films at all) in... 5 years?

I seem to like Tarkovsky's blend of the rational and the mystical. Psychedelia is never precisely my taste, and I don't watch movies for hard reason, so he complements an intellect I can respect and follow with spirituality that can inspire me. This is a good balance for me, at least in theory -- in practice it could be a little more approachable than Tarkovsky. If he made movies for people with my taste in rational vs. mystical, he still probably didn't make them for American Millennials, and there's a certain remoteness I must at least partly attribute to our different cultural contexts. I can imagine movies marketed to my demographic with scenes like the procession down the pipe -- like in premise, and unlike in execution. The premise is timid procession down a mysterious pipe. The scene would be a minute at most, with music and a joke. In Stalker the scene is silent minutes of awkward camera angles, betraying their own suggestions and defying intuitive interpretation. I don't know how to resolve these things, and there are plenty in Stalker. I like the balance of spiritual and philosophical, and that goes far enough to sustain my interest since college in revisiting Tarkovsky, but it's tough. I can't quite access. I need some help, maybe Wikipedia, or I need to watch more like this.

The religion of the Zone and the Room seems to require blind faith (you have to believe before any of it works, but how can you believe before any of it works?) and seems to only exist as it supplies blind hope ("maybe it contains the meaning I can't find anywhere else"). It seems that if people didn't need it, it wouldn't exist, and if the miracles don't work for you, you didn't believe enough. This all sounds familiar -- but maybe my animosity for common Christian thought is forcing the parallel.

There's much more analysis potential here, but if this is all I got from the real-time experience of the movie, would it do much good? I typically watch movies for the real-time experience, I think. I liked the experience.

I will say Tarkovsky movies have been prodigiously soporific for me. In my whole life, I can only ever remember falling asleep once during a movie (early-childhood amnesia notwithstanding). That was middle school at the latest. And I can probably count on one hand the times I remember feeling sleepy whatsoever. Three of those were Tarkovsky: two Solaris and now one Stalker. That's exceptional, or exceptionally coincidental. My point is I'm abnormally wakeful during movies, and Tarkovsky has made me disproportionately sleepy. His movies are like funeral marches. Slower than thought. I don't mind this though: if I can keep my attention from drowsily drifting, it just adds to the fantasy. Wikipedia: "The film contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, with an average shot length of more than one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes."

Non-exhaustive list of things I don't understand:

• the flips to and from sepia
• the preoccupation with the train rattling the apartment
• the dialogue
• the plot
• the movie