The Poetry of the Archipelago- Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

Abstract

This presentation will construct an intertextual analysis of Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker with a reading of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Looking to Tarkovsky's diaries and other writings, we can unpack how Tarkovsky's theory of art, fit into the life world of Stalker. Pressing on the joints of his form content relationship, we see that Tarkovsky’s poetic concern with image, sound, texture and space- is able to embody arts very ability to create meaning. Stalker was Tarkovsky's last creation in the Soviet Union, and the film complicates matters of spiritual conscience, in connection to the violence of the Twentieth-Century. In trying to express the psyche of Russia's historical memory, Stalker's poetic fiction speaks to the nature of not only traumatic experience. But experience itself. This perceptual grid of cultural identity in artistic identity is intimately shared by Solzhenitsyn in the Archipelago. Winning the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature, Solzhenitsyn spent 8 years in Soviet prison for criticizing Stalin.The collection of the Archipelagos, written between 1958 and 1968, outlines Solzenitzen experience in forced labor camp, as well as bringing together hundreds of stories of Soviet trauma. Using the Archipelago to describe the story of Stalker, connects Tarkovsky's ideological concern to the nature of trauma experienced within the Soviet Union. Pulling at the thread of this proliferation of voices, Tarkovsky's characters speak to a historic archetype by way of a poetic awareness. What Tarkovsky teaches us, not about only in his theory, but in his practice, is arts unique capacity to heal a lost sense of freedom.

Discipline: Philosophy

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Alain Beauclair