stalker material - documentation /duration 00:07:22

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painted with light /by arvo iho

“People now nothing of their subconscious desires.”
Where they are now building on the ‘boiler’ was the gate to the Zone in the film ‘Stalker’ by Andrei Tarkovski. In the industrial estate between Old Narva and Leningrad Avenues all the trips using the flatbed railway truck were filmed. At the bridge over the River Pirita the flatbed truck halted, that’s where they got off and headed in a northerly direction. The Zone itself started in the riverbed of the Pirita. There were four tanks standing there that looked as if they’d been destroyed, a few machine guns and a couple of armoured vehicles. On top of one a soldier’s skeleton was placed behind a machine gun. This was the world of the Stalker where none of the soldiers dared to enter any further.

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dormant images /by claus löser

On 1 May 1981 of all days Andrei Tarkovsky‘s movie Stalker opened in some cinemas in the GDR. The news of this curious, cryptic, philosophical and in every respect unusual work spread like wildfire in the circles of people seeking ways out of the intellectual dilemma of everyday existence under really existing socialism. How was this possible? The fact that it was from the Soviet Union of all places that a film reached us that struck these hidden chords in us? Because the amazing thing was that we immediately felt at home in this apparently hermetically sealed world of the Zone. This was by no means because occasionally in common parlance the GDR was still called the Zone! This banal connection didn‘t even occur to us. Rather it appears as if through this film sentiments were formulated that had long slumbered within us, as if through the Stalker more or less dormant images were being awakened. It is quickly said that a single work of art could be in a position to characterise a whole generation. There it would first have to be clarified how this generation is to be defined. Nevertheless, it appears to me that such a characterisation exists here. There was life before Stalker. And there was a different one afterwards.

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captive in time /by matthias lindner

“The machine-gun-man on the … motorcycle.” The projection opens with words from the contemporary witness Arvo Iho, the only comprehensible speech in the video installation. The former intern on the set bears witness in this way to the starting point of Polster’s video – the former locations of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. In the course of the 40 minutes Polster will modify additional typical Tarkovsky scenes and ambiances/environments: the train trip and the waterfall, the large areas of fog, fire, landscapes full of ruins. For Tarkovsky the aesthetic point of departure was always the idea for a movie, the tale of a character with its insoluble captivity in time. He sought cinematic images which follow a poetic logic because they are based on observation: “In my view poetic reasoning is closer to the laws by which thought develops, and thus to life itself, than is the logic of traditional drama.” (Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 1984, eng. University of Texas reprint 1986, p.  20)

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going behind the images /by hajo schiff

JOURNEY
Everything starts with an image – and it will also end with this image. What expands in between to a 39-minute 7-channel video projection is a stream of associations, interpretations and effects derived from it. An extremely subjective world of images carries you off, not unlike its cinematic model, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, after a train journey into a ZONE which can never be exactly comprehended behind the image and between the images. And there everything is not just what it appears to be. Strange explanations, rapid tracking shots and many quite, often idyllic moments carry us off into a world where the resigned weariness of knowing the score, of always having seen everything before is no longer valid, Because perception becomes questionable. What is it that is to be seen there?

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