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Film is a visual medium. Images convey the story and words are subsidiary to these moving images, but in a lot of contemporary films, it is dialogue that pushes the story forward. Scripted speech has more sentiment than pictures and cinematography becomes secondary, frightened to take our attention from the A list actors or an important plot point. Nevertheless, there is an abundance of material from filmmakers whose visual work translates their consciousness: Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Stan Brackage, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, and without question Andrei Tarkvosky. To write about Tarkovsky or other influential visionaries is a formidable task. Jonathan Rosenbaum has gone on record to state that Chris Marker’s A Day in the Life of Andre Arsenevich (a patchwork of Tarkovsky’s work with archive material of him filming his final feature The Sacrifice and on his deathbed) “is the single best piece of Tarkovsky criticism I know of.”
Geoff Dyer’s Zona (also the Russian title of Tarkovsky’s 1979 film depicting a trio of men—the Stalker/guide, the Writer and the Professor—who travel to the mystical Zona [Zone—a place enclosed by the militia], to discover The Room—a space where every wish comes true) is a book both undistinguished and dissatisfying, including an overwhelming twenty-page section—possibly “The Room” of the book—but encompassed by a blatant solipsistic tone more akin to a juvenile blogger’s smug, critically diminutive intonation.
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