Blog Posts

Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker is an elusive, beautifully cryptic story that smells as if it foretold the disaster of Chernobyl that occurred in 1986. Which was several years after the film was completed. Creepy? Yes. There’s an eerie resonance that echoes throughout the narrative of the film, where a man known as the stalker acts as a tour guide taking a writer and professor on a carefully, nearly calculated journey into the place that is known as the Zone. The Zone is an abandoned land of corroded buildings, farms, trees, fields, and seemingly feels like it’s an alternative reality that provides…

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I think Alan Watts said it best that,“When we think of a moment of time, when we think what we mean by the word “now”; we think of the shortest possible instant that is here and gone.” Similarly, I feel Tarkovsky uses a conjecture of Watts’s thought on time in his stunningly, poetically, visual film The Mirror. Essentially, it’s like watching a montage of someone’s life that’s being manipulated by pushing the narrative backwards and forwards through the movement of the film. Also the use of slow motion is utilized in various scenes such as when the wind breezes through…

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Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, Solaris appears to be a standard science fiction story, that seeps into a deep and lengthy mediation of our own perceptions of time, identity, and grief. It’s a story about space, without really showing us space. Oddly, enough the film gives off a claustrophobic vibe with the minimal usage of sound and painfully slow tracking shots that transports the audience as if they were actually on the lonely space station with the delirious scientists. The only space visuals revealed are of the ocean that makes up the planet Solaris as well as video footage of it’s clouds…

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