Geoff Dyer: Zona

[Eric]

Tarkovsky was a very serious person. His films are some of the greatest I've ever seen. I saw all of those at least 20 years ago. I hope this Dyer is not using, i.e. exploiting, Tarkovsky for his own ends, as the whole of Tarkovsky's oeuvre should be examined as a whole. I fear that Dyer's book is based on a number of other works about Tarkovsky, as several have now appeared since his death including, recently one by his last interpreter between Russian and Swedish, Laila Alexander-Garrett.

There seems to be no reason to pull out "Stalker" on its own. His other films, such as "Andrei Rublyov", "The Mirror" and "Solaris" also show aspects of Russia that were rarely tackled at a time when Russia was the leading state of the Soviet Union. And Tarkovsky proved to be the exception to the rule of conformist and heavily politicised Russian film-making. The Russian establishment no doubt allowed him his freedoms because they realised that he was good propaganda abroad, showing that the Russians did not entirely follow their own canon of socialist realism. But in the end, Tarkovsky was obliged to make films abroad (Sweden, Italy) and these are not as convincing as the ones he made back home in Russia.

"Stalker" was, incidentally, filmed in the port area of Tallinn, in what was then the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the first book about Tarkovsky's work published in the Soviet Union was by the Estonian-Russian Tatyana Elmanovich ("Ajapeegel" [Mirror of Time]; 1980). This is a serious book, where Elmanovich examines four early Tarkovsky films, including "Stalker". Tarkovsky also used a couple Baltic actors (one Estonian, the other Lithuanian) for a couple of his key films. And his last film was filmed on the island of Fårö, off Gotland, Sweden, because by that time Ingmar Bergman had lent him his film crew.

Another book worth reading (this time available in English) is "Sculpting in Time" (1986) which is Tarkovsky's own reflections on the cinema and his own work. His father Arseni Tarkovsky's poetry is heard recited in the film "The Mirror" if I remember rightly, but I'm not sure how much of this poetry has ever appeared in a good English translation. Arseni T was also a prodigious translator from various Soviet languages and Polish.

So given what I've read in Leyla's review and on the net, I'm pretty sceptical about how seriously Dyer is examining Tarkovsky as a film director, rather than just pulling out one film that he's seen again and again, and embroidering upon it, adding anecdotes about himself.

[leyla]

Eric, I don't know how you can make statements like ' I fear that Dyer's book is based on a number of other works about Tarkovsky', or 'I'm pretty sceptical about how seriously Dyer is examining Tarkovsky' without reading the book. It sounds like you know a lot about Tarkovsky, and what you say is interesting, but so is what Dyer says. It does concentrate on the one film but it never purports to do otherwise. It is not meant to be an exhaustive book about the director, it is a book about that one film. You can't criticise a banana for not being an apple.

[Liam]

it is a book about that one film

I hate to disagree with you, dear, but it's not even that: it's about Geoff Dyer's obsession with... Geoff Dyer; The Stalker is used merely as a prism through which the author can enumerate and dwell on his neuroses, some of them sexual, .

[leyla]

Haha, Liam :-) I agree that there is a lot of himself in Dyer's books, but that is what makes them so appealing to me. I think it depends on whether one finds him witty, and sparkling company, or not. Dyer is without pretension, he freely admitted that when he embarked on his book on jazz, he knew nothing about it. He sees writing as a self-exploratory as well as an explanatory process, if that makes sense. I did find some of the set by set dissections a little slow, but there was always a funny anecdote to rekindle my interest. I think if Dyer had stuck to the subject of the film, I probably wouldn't have stuck it all out. But you and Eric and other non-fans have backed your point of view up with some valid arguments, so we'll have to disagree peacably! I wonder if I would find Dyer as compelling if he wasn't so charismatic, funny and attractive? But then he wouldn't be Geoff Dyer, I suppose.

[Eric]

I've been a Tarkovsky fan since the 1980s. I just think that this stalker chappie (yes, I got Liam's pun) is a bit odd, somehow, focusing on the one film, while Tarkovsky directed several more. I don't want to read "Dire on Dire", but would like to read sensible and sensitive books about Tarkovsky, not Dire. The Elmanovitsh one I mentioned before was an excellent start.