Review by New York Times Review
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 book-length 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 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 hear-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. "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 putupon 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 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. J. Hoberman's latest book, "Film After Film; Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?," will be published this spring. 'We are in another world that is no more than this world perceived with unprecedented attentiveness.'
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 4, 2012]
Review by Library Journal Review
Some films inspire devotion in viewers, while others spark obsession. Novelist and nonfiction author Dyer (Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi) has become obsessed with the 1979 Russian film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Dyer gives the reader an impressionistic, deeply subjective tour of a cerebral film featuring a character who guides people through a forbidden wasteland zone. The author claims the work contains the "quality of prophecy" and has always "invited allegorical readings." As he explicates the film, Dyer supplies lengthy, deliberate digressions on such topics as drinking in films, the annoying quality of coming attractions movie trailers, and his perceived similarities between Stalker and The Wizard of Oz-the latter film he admits he's never seen and never intends to see. The book is a bit of a bumpy ride, not for all tastes. Verdict Some readers might enjoy getting inside Dyer's head, and his book is distinguished by his stylish if disjointed prose. However, because relatively few have seen the Tarkovsky film, this remains an optional purchase.-Stephen Rees, formerly with Levittown Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Stalker--though, this being a Dyer (Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, 2011, etc.) book, it's about plenty more besides. Stalker is a relatively obscure entry in Russian director Tarkovsky's oeuvre, but it's exceedingly receptive to critical analysis. The film follows three archetypes--Writer, Professor and Stalker--in a mysterious and heavily guarded wilderness as they ponder the meaning of life. Dyer doesn't provide a critical analysis of the film so much as a scene-by-scene walkthrough of it, just to see where it takes him--which is pretty far. He riffs on The Last of the Mohicans, Chernobyl, his affinity for particular brands of knapsack, the effect of aging on one's enthusiasm for cultural consumption, and more. At his most far-flung, he recalls his squandered opportunities for mnages trois. Such digressions are vintage Dyer: Inserted as footnotes or parentheticals, they sometimes go on for so long that it can be hard to recall the scene in the movie that prompted the comment in the first place. He delivers a few too many hokey puns, and he sometimes overreaches to argue for the film's ongoing influence. (A claim that the film works as a 9/11 allegory is particularly forced.) The lack of a strong thesis is frustrating, and ultimately this is a lesser Dyer book. However, it gets over on his enthusiasm for the film and on his infectious admiration of Tarkovsky's philosophical reach. The "room" at the center of Stalker represents our need to locate our deepest desires, Dyer explains, and in that context maybe talking about those failed three-ways was necessary after all. A digressive but impassioned mash note to a film that defies easy summary.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
