Image: Tarkovsky’s Stalker, 1979, (still)
In the context of Earth Spells: Witches of the Anthropocene showing at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery (RAMM), filmmaker and activist, Ashish Ghadiali, from Radical Ecology has selected Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker which he will introduce to explore themes of landscape, environmental degradation and the uncanny.
The presentation, curated by Ghadiali/Radical Ecology is delivered in partnership with RAMM, Exeter Phoenix, University of Exeter Arts & Culture, the University of Exeter Global Systems Institute and KARST.
The screening will be introduced with a short performance, Ritual for Belonging, by Plymouth-based artist and KARST resident, Ashanti Hare.
Following the screening, there will be a free presentation in the café bar of Exeter Phoenix, from 5-7pm, of Plant Music by sound artist Jason Singh, whose work is an ongoing exploration of the interconnections between the natural word, voice and music technology.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic post-apocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide — the Stalker — leads a writer and a professor into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumoured to fulfil one’s most deeply held desires.
Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky created an immersive world with a wealth of material detail and a sense of organic atmosphere. A religious allegory, a reflection of contemporaneous political anxieties, a meditation on film itself—Stalker envelops the viewer by opening up a multitude of possible meanings.