Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (2011)

Who cares what anyone else thinks about Stalker, one the most subjective and solipsistic examples of narrative cinema ever put to film? Well, I needed to think about Stalker for a project so I read this book and I wanted to read Geoff Dyer for a long time.

stalker

What happens in the Zone stays in the Zone. I’m getting ahead of myself. Stalker is kind of like Van Morrison’s voice and that horrible Greil Marcus book about Van Morrison was still leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Zona was very readable and I did get some factoids about Tarkovsky I didn’t know but really I’ve avoided biographical information about Tarkovsky because, you know, Stalker, it is a film you dream not something you think about. I’ll leave the thinking to the fools. Dyer’s prose are almost too slick. He effortless weaves anecdotal experiences about the film, historical data scree, and critical scalpel work. He’s obviously showing off how easily he can do this and it is kind of annoying. He also tries to hard to prove that even though he is now a silver fox, he is still up on hip music and capital D drugs. At least he acknowledges the debt the film has to LS capital D (at least to how it is perceived in the West). What I love is that he clearly gets little visual details wrong about the film (clearly HE CANNOT BE GETTING little details wrong about the film) but I think he wants the reader to go and watch it and scream and shout, “Dr. Dyer! But! But! But!” alá Codrescu’s Posthuman Dada Guide. Watch the film fools.

stalker

dier (just a little bit)

Don’t mind if I do.

I definitely want to read The Missing of the Somme.

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Gotta get this in somewhere: * is to ** as They Live is to Stalker. ( )

Quick review. I may write more later.

I recommend this for anyone who's seen the movie Stalker (a science-fiction road trip by director Andrei Tarkovsky that's a modern classic of Russian film) and for anyone who wants a glimpse into the mind of a true cinephile.

By "true cinephile" I mean not an aficionado of film, but a habitué of the cinema as a physical place, someone for whom cinema-going is — and, more to the point, was — an essential part of the movie-consuming process.

The key thing that occurred to me as I read Dyer's book about this fairly infrequently viewed movie is that there's a clear and maudlin parallel between his concept of cinema and the facts of the world in which the film was made. Both were systems defined by a culture of significant deficits. The movie was released in 1979, during what we have come to understand as the waning years of Soviet communism, an economic engine that worked, when it did work, in fits and starts covered up by a veneer of bravado saber-rattling.

Dyer's depiction of his core film-going years is one in which his viewing was defined not by what he wanted to see — the case in our Netflix-friendly, Tivo-enriched, BitTorrent-supported era — but by what was available. I think his depiction of how limits shaped cultural consumption is on par with what Jonathan Lethem accomplished in his recent 33 1/3 book on Talking Heads' album Fear of Music. Lethem has a clear view of his past, but doesn't wallow in it. Dyer's evident nostalgia for that period is at times like that of Stalinists who miss standing in line for a loaf of bread — it is, more than anything, an act of willful disregard for modernity.

Dyer's relative distaste — his adoption of the robe and role of the old fogey — for the world in which he finds himself isn't just related to film. He evidences a professor emeritus' generational cluelessness, for example when he riffs about how the index finger has less of a privileged role in our post-rotary-phone age. Clearly this is an individual with limited experience on a touch-screen device. (At the risk of venturing into the sort of first-person aside that is very much Dyer's mode: I had a severe cut on my right index finger while I was reading a hardback copy Dyer's book. I found that using my touchpad on my laptop and the screens of my phone, iPad, and iPod Touch to be an initially painful and, later, at best awkward experience, as bandaids impeded use, as did the wound's scab as it formed.)

Beyond that, Zona is a book about obsessions, both Dyer's for the film and Tarkovsky's for the process of filming. The book is frustrating, because it feels like it was written fairly quickly, and benefited from limited acts of revision. Still, the full range of associations that Dyer draws within the film's working parts and between the film and the world at at large is phenomenal. The personal asides have gotten the book a good amount of negative attention, but I think of them as an expression of how much the movie — how much movie-going — bleeds into Dyer's sense of his own life. A lot of critiques of those personal asides neglect to note that they appear mostly as footnotes, not in the actual main body text of the book. Then again, those footnotes are often so long as to make it unclear on the page which one is reading: the main or the supporting text. At least in the hardcover book, there is no apparent distinction in how both are treated typographically. There is simply a thin line dividing them.

As I read the book, I came to think of that thin line as being not unlike the line in Stalker that divides the world from the Zone that is the initial destination of the title character and his traveling companions.

There are references to sound throughout — especially a certain “clang” that Dyer seems to feel is the movie’s intrinsic soundmark. I was a bit anxious about their potential absence from the narrative in advance of reading the book, because after scouring many reviews before reading Dyer’s actual text — taking a slow approach somewhat aligned with the film’s own vision of a journey: reading various writings about this book about a film about a journey to a room before reading the book itself — I found little mention of sound. The score to Stalker is by Edward Artemiev, one of the most essential electronic musicians in Russian history (I interviewed his son, Artemiy Artemiev, who runs the label Electroshock, back in 2003: "Shock the Bear"), and the music is an essential part of the movie's structure and effect (I highly recommend listening to the track titled "Train"). It’s quite likely that the “clang” that registers with Dyer is the railway noise that Artemiev folded into his richly layered, yet still often threadbare-ambient, score. I read Tatiana Yegorova’s book Edward Artemiev’s Musical Universe when it was first released, and I think I’m going to stalk it now for its Stalker material.

The struggle of Dyer's writing (and perhaps his life) has been to find out what he really wants. His books are generally him viewing himself through the cognitive lens of other people's thoughts and art. This time the focusing device is Tarkovsky's film, STALKER, which Dyer ruminates, is all about finding out what one really wants, and the perils that lie within (and at the conclusion of) such a quest. One of Dyer's lightest writings, ZONA is just barely a book rather than an essay, due only to the sheer volume of personal illustrations and digressions he attaches to his main text. These textual turns upon himself, like the over-arching task/quest mentioned previously make this also his most personal and seemingly cranky book (how he hates cigarettes! And burnt matches! OH!!), well in the literary tradition of those other UK cranks, V. S. Naipaul and Martin Amis. However, finding what he wants, what is worth wanting & hoping for, as well as the worth of hope are revealed in these grumpy, yet thoughtful details as they were to him in Tarkovsky's classic. ( )

I inished reading "Zona" by Geoff Dyer. It is an interesting book about "Stalker" by Tarkovsky but also about Dyer himself, what he reads, what he watches, what he likes and quite definitely what he dislikes, his hopes and wishes, were he granted access to the Room. I enjoyed reading this. The references are fascinating. His side excursions at times amusing, sometimes a bit too much about him. ( )

This is a book about a film about a journey to a room, as the book's subtitle says. A book about the experience of watching Tarkovsky's Stalker, a movie the author loves. He says "if I had not seen Stalker in my early twenties my responsiveness to the world would have been radically diminished".

I don't think you have to have a vivid memory of that movie to enjoy this book, because I have only a dim memory of it, perhaps because I did not see it "live" (when it was first released). However, I think you have to share Dyer's experience of seeing many movies, over a long period of time. I think mainly you have to have some movie that plays the role in your life that Stalker does in his.

I enjoyed this book very much. I like the way Dyer writes, and I like his idea that something you see when you're young both enlarges and limits your perception—enlarges, because what you see makes the scope of cinema wider (or whatever art it is); limits, because once you've been astounded by something, you're not going to be astounded again in the same way by anything else.

I also went through a period of watching innumerable movies. For me it was in grad school. But it's like he says: you gradually watch these masterpieces and become familiar with the "grammar and history of cinema" so that a movie like Stalker is accessible and approachable.

He also says the best movie of your life, whatever you think it is, is something you saw in your teens or twenties. This may be true; may not be. I'm still asking people.

This is a wonderful book for people who are nuts for cinema. ( )