Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Jon HoelStalker

2021; Volume: 48; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sfs.2021.0077

2327-6207

Troy Michael Bordun,

Cinema and Media Studies

587 BOOKS IN REVIEW scholars who are willing to look past the unrecognized ableism in some of the essays. Perhaps the most touching moment of the text is found on the inside of the title page, in the dedication to Dr. Gregory Jerome Hampton, who passed away shortly after the collection was completed: “All that he touched, he changed.”—Brenda Tyrrell, Miami University, Ohio Out of the Zone. Jon Hoel. Stalker. Liverpool UP (Auteur), CONSTELLATIONS: STUDIES IN SCIENCE FICTION FILM AND TV, 2021. 120 pp. £19.99/$24.95 pbk and ebk. Andrei Tarkovsky stands among the masters of post-war art cinema. In a short book for Auteur’s CONSTELLATIONS series (an imprint of Liverpool UP), Jon Hoel praises the Soviet filmmaker’s Stalker (1979). Hoel dissects a few fundamental features of the film: its production, characters, setting, aesthetics, and status as a work of “poetic cinema.” He has no central thesis, argument, or theme, however, but rather accumulates pithy observations that range from diegetic nuances in Stalker to the film’s resonances in twenty-first-century sf cinema and popular culture. Hoel’s Stalker is not an academic publication; rather, according to the CONSTELLATIONS mandate, the author pursues his “passion for science fiction cinema ... in a book-length format.” Without a clear through-line, however, it is tough for me to situate this passion. The chapters meander through trivia and occasional close readings, while the author’s commentary is fleeting and lacks deep, meaningful investigations of his various topics. For SFS readers unfamiliar with Stalker, I open with a summary of the film. In Tarkovsky’s final Soviet film, Professor (Nikolai Grinko), Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn), and Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) sneak into the Zone, an area cordoned off by military and government personnel. Within the Zone is the Room, a place that can grant one’s innermost desires. An opening crawl informs spectators that a meteorite or alien visitors may have created this magical area. Once our protagonists reach the Zone, they must take an indirect path to the Room to stay out of danger and avoid the traps. The expanded route provides the characters time to explore their desires, fears, and existential angst in sustained dialogues and soliloquies. Once they reach the innermost part of the Zone, Professor threatens to blow up the Room but, after a brief skirmish with Stalker (who makes his living sneaking people into the Zone) and more dialogue, he decides against the act. The characters return to the real world and, in the final scene, Stalker’s young daughter Monkey (Natasha Abramova) appears to use telekinesis to move two glasses and one jar. It is likely the case that her father and the Zone are responsible for these powers. In “Roadside Picnic: Introduction,” the author describes the context and background of the film, including Stalker’s shooting conditions and reshoots, the film’s premieres, and its “lasting impact” (18). In short strokes, Hoel notes that Stalker is an adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s well-received sf novel Roadside Picnic (1972, Eng. trans. 1977). For Hoel, the film is 588 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) “partially akin to the plot of the novel though it differs largely in tone and specificity” and, later, the film “differs heavily from both the plot and characters” of the novel (13, 15). As a scholar interested in adaptation, I would have liked to read about these differences and how Tarkovsky’s “philosophical and spiritual direction” compares to the Strugatsky Brothers’ “ambiguous mystery” (15). Because I am unfamiliar with the novel and Hoel does not examine it in any detail, the mystery is additionally ambiguous. By the end of this first chapter, Hoel’s approach is that of a film critic rather than an academic, and his opening chapter is on par with critical essays published, for instance, in the Criterion Collection’s home video releases. The next chapter focuses on the characters in the film. Hoel examines what we know about the three main characters and muses on their respective states of disenchantment with the world. At his most argumentative moment, Hoel considers the parallels between Myshkin, from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1868-1869...