Few weeks ago I watched a Soviet movie called Stalker. I had heard about it before, it was praised as a classic SF movie.
View: https://youtu.be/TGRDYpCmMcM
It's a bit of a dry watch, but it's still pleasant to watch, because it's well directed and aesthetically pleasing.
Yet after I was done watching, I wasn't sure I understood what it was about. Was it just too metaphysical for me? Was I just too low-IQ for that kind of stuff? I felt like there was something in this story but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
So, I looked at the comments, trying to find a high-IQ explanation about what I had just watched. I found one quite quickly : it was, wrote the poster, a metaphor for the iron-wall. I felt stupid because the idea did not cross my mind at any moment. I stopped reading immediately as I wanted to figure out the rest by myself.
"Of course it is about that", I thought. Like West-Berlin these days was literally an enclave, aka a "zone" where people were not allowed to go, but where many people wanted to go, just like the zone in the movie. I mean, probably for a soviet citizen the aura of mystery regarding the "free world" must have been exactly like in the movie. Then the more I thought about it, the more some of the dialogs suddenly made sense.
Yet there is one aspect of the plot in particular that I then understood on my own, and it's the one metaphor I like the most in the movie because it's not exactly political. It's about censorship. You see, in the story the characters are very cautious when they walk into the zone. They have rules and one of them is to never walk straight towards where they want to go :
- Yes, climb up, enter and ... immediately to the left. All the same, we are not going that way. We’ll go round.
- Why?
- One does not go that way. In the Zone on the whole the straight way is not the ... shortest. The longer the way is, the lesser the risk.
And later in an other scene :
- Straight – about two hundred meters. In a straight line, but straight lines do not exist here, that’s the problem... Let’s go.
And so I thought that the zone was also a metaphor not about the Western world, but about the Western world as a narrative subject itself. An author must tackle this subject very carefully, as it's forbidden. Sometimes when we address a topic, we say that we "go there". So the zone is that forbidden subject Soviet cineasts were not allowed to discuss, where they couldn't go, if you will. So they had to be smart and use allegories. They cannot not go straight to the point. I may be wrong, but if that's really what this means, I think it's pretty cool.
Later on, I looked up the Wikipedia article about allegories, and I realized that allegories have been used to escape censorship for ever. We often whine about censorship even these days, in Western countries where it's definitely coming back. Yet it's nothing compared to what it was in the past, and it turns out that it often pushed artistic creativity and forced us to express ourselves in subtle ways, possibly making us think about what we want to say more deeply in the process.
I'm not saying censorship is a good thing, but it clearly has always existed and it's futile to complain about it. Especially since there are such smart ways to bypass it.
View: https://youtu.be/TGRDYpCmMcM
It's a bit of a dry watch, but it's still pleasant to watch, because it's well directed and aesthetically pleasing.
Yet after I was done watching, I wasn't sure I understood what it was about. Was it just too metaphysical for me? Was I just too low-IQ for that kind of stuff? I felt like there was something in this story but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
So, I looked at the comments, trying to find a high-IQ explanation about what I had just watched. I found one quite quickly : it was, wrote the poster, a metaphor for the iron-wall. I felt stupid because the idea did not cross my mind at any moment. I stopped reading immediately as I wanted to figure out the rest by myself.
"Of course it is about that", I thought. Like West-Berlin these days was literally an enclave, aka a "zone" where people were not allowed to go, but where many people wanted to go, just like the zone in the movie. I mean, probably for a soviet citizen the aura of mystery regarding the "free world" must have been exactly like in the movie. Then the more I thought about it, the more some of the dialogs suddenly made sense.
Yet there is one aspect of the plot in particular that I then understood on my own, and it's the one metaphor I like the most in the movie because it's not exactly political. It's about censorship. You see, in the story the characters are very cautious when they walk into the zone. They have rules and one of them is to never walk straight towards where they want to go :
- Yes, climb up, enter and ... immediately to the left. All the same, we are not going that way. We’ll go round.
- Why?
- One does not go that way. In the Zone on the whole the straight way is not the ... shortest. The longer the way is, the lesser the risk.
And later in an other scene :
- Straight – about two hundred meters. In a straight line, but straight lines do not exist here, that’s the problem... Let’s go.
And so I thought that the zone was also a metaphor not about the Western world, but about the Western world as a narrative subject itself. An author must tackle this subject very carefully, as it's forbidden. Sometimes when we address a topic, we say that we "go there". So the zone is that forbidden subject Soviet cineasts were not allowed to discuss, where they couldn't go, if you will. So they had to be smart and use allegories. They cannot not go straight to the point. I may be wrong, but if that's really what this means, I think it's pretty cool.
Later on, I looked up the Wikipedia article about allegories, and I realized that allegories have been used to escape censorship for ever. We often whine about censorship even these days, in Western countries where it's definitely coming back. Yet it's nothing compared to what it was in the past, and it turns out that it often pushed artistic creativity and forced us to express ourselves in subtle ways, possibly making us think about what we want to say more deeply in the process.
I'm not saying censorship is a good thing, but it clearly has always existed and it's futile to complain about it. Especially since there are such smart ways to bypass it.
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although since information is more accessible now than Ever, it makes more sense to rail against laws and thing like that that restrict information. I don’t really think it makes sense to stop wining about it tbh
