Episode 15: On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - Part Two

In this second of a two-part conversation on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, Phil and JF explore the film's prophetic dimension, relating it to Samuel R. Delany's classic science-fiction novel Dhalgren, the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the affordances of despair, the spookiness of color, the transformation of noise into music, and the Chernobyl disaster. They even come up with a title for a novel Robert Ludlum never wrote but should have written: The Criterion Rendition!

REFERENCES

Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Stalker
Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (foreword by William Gibson)
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"
John Searle, Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception
Steve Reich, Come Out
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"
Stanley Kubrick, The Shining
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle