ABSTRACT
Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic landscapes are generated by and at the same time become projections of an inner, emotional geography, whose coordinates integrate, alter, adjust, and reflect the spaces that contain them. This chapter focuses on Stalker, a 1979 science-fiction movie, loosely based on Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, and the mystical Zone in particular, a post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland, in order to examine the way cinematic narrations inform poietic processes of space and place. In Stalker, Tarkovsky gradually introduces us to the whimsical landscapes of the Zone through the stalker, played by Alexander Kaidanovsky, the threshold figure of the guide, the scouter, but also the looter in the original novel. Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos has been described as par excellence the cinematic landscape artist of the Greek hinterland. The Zone is a spatial pli, a folding space or a temporal whirlpool, whose centripetal forces trigger perpetually renewable, fractal-like reconstructions of its landscapes.
