the make-believe zone

[bluedevi]

We came to the Ultimate Picture Palace to see Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker through the sort of soaking wet, freezing cold night where the air is thick with damp that seems to wind its way in among your clothes, defying gravity. We found a surprisingly large number of people queueing in the rain. Students and film buffs, one guy just behind me

Comments

[amuchmoreexotic]

I recently stayed in a hotel in Tallinn which was right near where they filmed some of Stalker. The "Rotermann salt store" mentioned on Wikipedia is a design museum now, but the factories they go through before entering the zone seem to have been pulled down.

It's right near the harbour. The area is regenerating now, but even today there's a big patch of wasteland separating the harbour from the rest of town which you would think would be prime real estate. I wonder if it's full of industrial toxins and that's why it can't be developed.

I think the reason the landscape shown in Stalker is so dilapidated is that it's mainly in Estonia, not Russia and Estonia was an occupied state, with the use of people and natural resources directed from Moscow.

The last of the Estonian Forest Brothers (resistance fighters who hid in the woods to fight the Nazis and then the Soviets) was only killed in 1978. Stalker came out in 79, so maybe that happened even as Tarkovsky was filming.

When they're clambering through the devastation of alien contact in the film, they're really clambering through the devastation caused by a distant command economy which didn't care much about the local people. A real "meat grinder".

[bluedevi]

I didn't know that about the resistance fighters - that's very interesting. As is the whole comment.

And yeah, there were old industrial buildings that were deserted and falling to pieces all over Siberia, for the same reason I imagine.