Mark Fisher.

Mark Fisher (11 July 1968 – 13 January 2017) was a British writer and cultural theorist.
The Quietus | Features | Tome On The Range | Mark Fisher On Kubrick, Tarkovsky & Nolan: An Extract From The Weird And The Eerie:
"Andrei Tarkovsky’s two great films from the 1970s — Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) — are extended engagements with the alien-eerie. In both cases, Tarkovsky’s versions went against the grain of the source material from which they were adapted: Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961) and Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1971). What Tarkovsky subtracts from the novels are their satirical, ironic and absurdist elements, in favour of his habitual focus on questions of faith and redemption. But he retains the novels’ core preoccupations of encounters with the unknown.

Solaris concerns a so-called sentient ocean planet. Tarkovsky downplays the science of “Solaristics”, which plays a large part in Lem’s novel: the vast range of speculations and hypotheses that have been advanced about the planet. Instead, he concentrates on the impact of the planet on psy- chologist Kris Kelvin. When Kelvin arrives on the space station orbiting Solaris, he finds that his friend Dr Gibarian is dead, and the two remaining onboard scientists are furtive, spending most of their time skulking in their own quarters. He quickly learns the reason for their withdrawal, when a simulacrum of his late wife Hari, who had committed suicide a few years previously, appears, in a state of great confusion, not remembering anything and not knowing where she is. The scientists have come to call these apparitions “visitors”, and each has his own to come to reckon with — messages of a sort sent by Solaris, their purpose and intention unknown. In panic and disgust, Kelvin forces “Hari” into a space capsule, which he sends off into the cosmos. However, Hari — or rather another version of Hari — returns. In one of the most unsettling scenes in the film, we see that “Hari” has no zip on her dress. Why not? Because the planet has constructed “Hari” on the basis of Kelvin’s memories, and the memory of that dress (hazy and incomplete in the way that memories are) did not include a zip.

What does Solaris want? Does it want anything, or are its communications better thought of as automatic emissions of some kind? What is the purpose of the visitors that it sends? You could almost see the planet as a combination of externalised unconscious and psychoanalyst, which keeps sending the scientists undischarged traumatic material with which to deal. Or is the planet granting what it “thinks” are the wishes of the humans, grotesquely “misunderstanding” the nature of grief, almost as if it is an infant gifted with great powers? The film turns on the eerie impasse that arises when mismatching modes of intelligence, cognition and communication confront one another — or, it would be better to say, fail to confront one another. The sublime alterity of the Solaris ocean is one of cinema’s great images of the unknown.

In Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the alien trace is the Zone, a space in which physical laws do not seem to apply in the same way as they do in the outside world. The fairy tale theme of granting wishes, implicit in Solaris, becomes the major preoccupation of Stalker, which centres on the idea that there is a “Room” somewhere in the Zone which can make the deepest desires of those who enter it come true. The “stalker” is a kind of self-taught expert on the Zone who guides those who want to explore this treacherous and wondrous space. In the Strugatskys’ original novel, the stalkers were part of a criminal network dedicated to extracting artefacts from the Zone. In Tarkovsky’s film, the stalker remains a renegade figure — some of the early scenes show him leading his charges past fences, military checkpoints and gun emplacements — but his motives now are spiritual rather than materialistic. The stalker, with his respect for the Zone’s mystery, his sensitivity to its dangers and its volatility, wants others to be transformed by contact with its marvels. However, the two generically-titled figures who join him on this trip —“Writer” and “Scientist” —prove too cynical and untrusting to explore the Zone in that spirit, to the stalker’s bitter disappointment. It is not only reaching the Room that is perilous — the Room has its own dangers. We learn that another stalker, Porcupine, had gone to the Room after leading his brother to his death. But instead of returning his brother to him, the Room gave him money. In offering to grant them their deepest wishes, the Room presents a judgement on their being.

Stalker is remarkable for the way in which it constructs an eerie space without the use of any special effects. Tarkovsky used an extraordinarily atmospheric location in Estonia: an overgrown space, in which human detritus (abandoned factories, tank traps, pillboxes) is overcome by resurgent foliage, in which subterranean tunnels and derelict warehouses are recruited into a dream geography, an anomalous terrain full of traps that appear to be metaphysical and existential more than they are direct physical threats. Nothing is uniform here: time, as well as space, can curve and fold in unpredictable ways. The audience comes to appreciate the quality of this terrain not so much through what it actually sees, but from what it intuits via the artistry of the stalker. Cautious, always alert to potential dangers, drawing on his past knowledge but aware of the way in which the Zone’s mutability so often renders previous experience obsolete, the stalker invokes a space bristling with unseen menace and promise. Humble in the face of the unknown, yet dedicated to exploring the outside, the stalker offers a kind of ethics of the eerie.

For Tarkovsky, the Zone is approached largely as a space in which faith is tested. He avoids the idea, mooted in the title of the Strugatskys’ novel, that the Zone could be nothing more than an accident. Instead of being a miraculous sign of some kind of providence, the Strugatskys suggest, the Zone and all its “magical” properties, could be no more than the trash unintentionally left behind after the alien equivalent of a roadside picnic. Here, the eerie becomes an absurdist joke."


The Quietus | Features | Tome On The Range | An Extract From Mark Fisher's Ghosts Of My Life:

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