Seite - 41 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 06/01

Genre, Form, and Style The film is rightly identified as science fiction, yet Tarkovsky resists many prominent tropes of the genre. Although the film is set in the future, there is nothing in its cosmetic presentation that suggests this. The mise-en-scène resembles the Soviet Union of the 1970s; everything from the interior design of buildings to the depiction of the military’s weapons resists the fantastical reimagining which usually accom- panies a futurist setting. The resultant grungy aesthetic (enhanced by the decision to treat most scenes outside the Zone with sepia tone) could well be the choice for a realist drama like Tarkovsky’s first film, Ива́ново де́тство (Ivan’s Childhood, An- drei Tarkovsky, USSR 1962). There is no attempt to indulge in the standard conven- tions of science fiction, and Tarkovsky relies on an opening crawl text to establish some rudiments of the genre: an indistinct future, an ambiguous disaster-event. In the end, the aesthetic resembles post-apocalyptic dystopia, but even that descrip- tion seems to fall short of the world that Tarkovsky has built. The result of all this is an eerie familiarity. Whereas Tarkovsky’s other work of science fiction, Солярис (Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR 1972), embraced its otherworldly setting on a spaceship orbiting a distant planet, Stalker belies the otherworldliness of its setting by opting for a familiar “real-world” aesthetic. As Turovskaya observes, “far from being the world of tomorrow, this looks more like today, or rather the day before yesterday”.3 Indeed, Tarkovsky conspicuously abandons the use of special ef- fects in pursuit of such familiarity. Yet this is not an attempt to reject fantasy for re- alism in any codified sense. Tarkovsky pursues the supernatural through something altogether more unnerving: the uncanny. For him, it is the “infinitesimal dislocation of the everyday” which primes the affective power of science fiction.4 For example, in one scene the Stalker and the Writer leave the Professor behind, only for the Professor to somehow overtake them in a seemingly impossible manipulation of geography. In a similarly eerie episode, inside a ruined building deep in the Zone, a telephone suddenly rings with no explanation as to how it still functions, given the derelict and abandoned state of the building. The power of such moments rests in their nearness to the “real”, rather than in any sense of the fantastical; “not the inexplicable, but the unexplained”, as Turovskaya describes it.5 This sense of the uncanny, accomplished through a kind of gritty but – crucially – estranged realism, makes Stalker so unorthodox for its genre. However, it remains vital to recognise that the film is a work of science fiction. The film’s genre is integral to how we understand its form and style. One great 3 Turovskaya 1989, 111. 4 Turovskaya 1989, 111. 5 Turovskaya 1989, 111. 40 | James Lorenz www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 37–52