The filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky came to mind at the last meeting. “Solaris” is a strange psychological journey through space and “Stalker” has a distinctly dystopian, post-apocalyptic feel. Both films examine the metaphysical layers beneath science, technology, junk, waste, etc. We may want to check one of these out as a group or individually.
Chris
Tarkovsky’s movies are brilliant. I use Stalker as an example when I teach sound for multimedia. The train ride scene blurs the lines between diegetic/non-diegetic uses of sound in so many fascinating ways as they move into the liminal space of The Zone. The movie is based off a very popular soviet era science fiction story by the brothers strugatsky called “A roadside picnic” which is available in (honestly not very good) english translation . An expanded version was released a couple years ago with a better translation that restored the previously censored sections (though I don’t think tarkovsky read the uncensored version or would have assumed his audience would have either). The movie inspired a series of ukrainian video games(S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – shadows of cherynoby and ‘call of pripriyat” that blended the mythology of the original story with the historic events surrounding the chernobyl disaster. When I played the games I never really got very far with their plot as I was having too much fun running around in a simulated pripriyat/zone, the environment and mise en scene were worth the price of admission alone.
As Christopher pointed out there are numerous overlaps between these movies and themes we are examining, almost too many to be able to tie them to specific session’s readings. Perhaps we can use the movies (and hopefully other cultural products like plays, games, stories, art, etc) as a general series of references/inspirations that can come back to in our discussions instead of doing the ‘and now we will explain this data using our Theory!’ approach?(Also I doubt that many people want to watch 2 hours and a half hours of subtitled russian film …though I’m certainly up for it! )
Tarkovsky is new to me. Looked him up and it seems that many of his films might be relevant to our science and technology themes. Do you think that the Chernobyl parts of Stalker would work in a physics class?
Hi Geoff — The film was made before the Chernobyl disaster — the video game apparently incorporates themes from the film while setting the game at Chernobyl. I would like to take a look at both the video game and the film if possible. I haven’t seen the film in many years. Do you have the video game, Damon?
Yes, the games are a later conflation of the events of the chernobyl disaster with the events of the movie/book. These sorts of comparisons cropped up almost immediately after the disaster, given the popularity of the movie/story in the area where it happened they formed a natural framework for understanding and describing it. This might be a good tie in for our discussion of vernacular responses to technology.
I have all three of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series games in my steam account, they are windows only but I think my old windows laptop is still recent enough to run them at reasonable frame rates. The first one is probably the most interesting and has more direct connections with the strugatsky story/tarkovsky movie (though all of them take strong visual cues from the movie). The studio that made the series closed a few years ago, but several developers from it formed a new company that has developed a free to play game multiplayer online game that is clearly “as close as we can get to a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel without having to pay licensing fees to Tarkovsky or the Brothers Strugatsky’s estate” currently it is in a closed beta test in russian speaking countries, supposedly launching late this year. They have a basic (weirdly translated) english site up at http://survarium.com/en