Supervisors info:
Μυρτώ Ρήγου, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Επικοινωνίας και ΜΜΕ, ΕΚΠΑ.
Ευαγγελία Διαμαντοπούλου, Λέκτορας, Τμήμα Επικοινωνίας και ΜΜΕ, ΕΚΠΑ.
Έλλη Φιλοκύπρου, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Επικοινωνίας και ΜΜΕ, ΕΚΠΑ.
Summary:
Tarkovsky produced cinema in a way that approaches the “search of the lost time”. In this essay, we will explore how the Russian cinematographer perceived cinema as “imprinted time”. In Stalker film (1979), Tarkovsky invites us to re-consider the past as voices and images of an absent existence, which is able to gaze back at us, through objects delivered to decay. In the Zone, as the body 's passing through the ruins, new associations with the world are revealed. And though thinking has traditionally displaced the sensory dimension from the process of perception and understanding, inside the Zone, sensibility emerges as an integral element of thought, because the moving image produces a kind of return to the forgotten senses through the awaking of the perceptual memory.
Tarkovsky, in his work, insisted on the value of the perceived experience. He insisted on the equal participation of sensory perception in our associations with the world. Thus, the Zone is the area where the memories, emerging from the remnants and ruins of a former industrial zone, awaken the forgotten and “spiritualized” passions of the world, by claiming equal participation in the procedure of thinking. And if the two men have crossed the borders of the Zone, in order to decode the “phenomena”, that are taking place within it, in a way that is traditionally akin to logocentric knowledge, the path into the Zone maps rather the limits of the “Logos”. As long as the ultimate synthesis of Idea and phenomena or perception becomes, after all, the ultimate ghost, what remains is the unceasing search of the truth, the endless wandering inside the borders of the Zone.
Because the Zone is, above all, a phantom - image that neither refers to a main template nor reveals a certain structural content. Within the Zone, thought is being produced along its limits. Notions reveal their dubious borders, as the two men encounter phenomena they can no longer conceptualize on the basis of the traditional logocentric formations. Inside the Zone, thought is forced to re-construct new forms in order to capture what is “still-un-thinkable” and eventual. For this reason, Stalker is the tarkovksian invention of the human, the cinematic incarnation of the real world, which has been stigmatized by the modern drama, caused by the ultimate loss of faith in every sense of utopia. Thus, Stalker becomes the embodiment of this imaginary and utopian world, in order the imaginary to penetrate the horizons of reality. For this reason, he creates the Zone, as an utopia that resists the forgetfulness of memory and time. Cinema becomes then a new way of initiation into the world, because it proposes and emerges new forms of re-building the world. In Stalker film, only creation can liberate the world from the decadency. Therefore, if Tarkovsky chases the authentic meaning of the world, its destiny and its destination, Stalker clarifies that this meaning does not fit into the divine intentions of a supreme creator, but it is rather shaped by a constant overrun of the dried and decayed human spirit.
Keywords:
Tarkovsky, Stalker, Zone, 1979, cinema, truth, metaphysics of the present, Logos, memory, perception, image - time, deconstruction, logocentrism, in search of a new image of thought
