Read Online Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West by Agata Pyzik - Free Book Online
Authors: Agata Pyzik
Ads: Link
becomes obvious: Zona is USSR, Stalker is a victim of the regime, the regime is eternal, there’s no escape.
And yet, the Zona fascinates: fascinates the characters in the film and now the scavengers, who want nothing more than be in it. Why? Slavoj Žižek suggests that its popularity is prompted exactlyby its prohibition: its properties are augmented by the fact they are somehow wrong, bad for us. Lacanian interpretations of the Real as an area of exclusion prompting its power aside, the ex-communist area, as possessive of dark forces is for that reason precisely popular among the Westerners. The bad thing is that what they do, the money they leave in the former East is based on this place staying toxic: remaining forbidden, radioactive, sick. And the guarantee this world can remain sick is that where we come from remains safe and healthy. This has an additional touch of the macabre, in that this film had a number of “victims”, a true chain of corpses behind it. It was not shot in Russia, but in Estonia, near Tallinn, at two deserted power plants on the Jagala River and several other toxic locations, like a chemical factory, which was pouring toxic liquids. At least three people involved in the production, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Larissa Tarkovska and Tarkovsky himself, died of cancer in the aftermath.
This perception of the former East as a constantly sick place, needing our help/advice/political intervention is enduring. It also prompts the specific kind of nostalgia after communism, Ostalgia. The neoliberal governments of the ex-communist countries, like Estonia or Ukraine, are only too happy to exploit this for their perhaps irrational yet profitable interest. Estonia based even its cultural offer for the film-makers and other creative industries as a “land of
Stalker”.
Toxic ruins keep influencing the imagery of the natural catastrophe in new generations of films, like Hollywoodian blockbusters
Chernobyl Diaries
or
The Darkest Hour.
Another example of this mutual misunderstanding is Baikonur, formerly Leninsk, in Kazakhstan, the city of the Soviet space programme still launching Russian satellites, which people usually think is a dead, abandoned area. The deserted post-nuclear landscapes of
Stalker
were recalled even during the recent tragedy of Fukushima by a
Guardian
journalist. Yet there is little Western interest in contemporary cultural and political issues in these places, not only because in the situation of civilisational and economicalweakening, the ex-Bloc was left with the choice between the manipulation of oligarch-driven economy or death, abandoned by the state support. The recent Euro 2012 tournament in Poland and Ukraine saw the England team and its fans visiting the reactor, alongside Auschwitz in Poland.
The wisdom of Tarkovsky’s films was that they offered a kind of post-religious, post-spiritual consolation in the empty world “after God”, in a way that was neither simplistically existential nor devoid of a kind of higher moral stance. It’s the mystery of Tarkovsky how he understood so well the awkward spiritual side of the seemingly mechanical process of industrialization, a legacy of the Bolshevik regime he no doubt hated. Like Kafka, who worked in a gigantic insurance company and got an insight to bureaucracy as a universal model of the modern world, Tarkovsky saw through the USSR and the strange ambiguity between the system and the modernization, the tension between Western capitalism and supposed socialism; as a director and visionary, he understood their strange interdependence in the world pushed by mechanisms of history, man’s striving for perfection and cynicism of politics, creating a world balancing between utopia and hell on earth. Yet as Putin’s Russia recently strives towards a nationalistic orthodoxy, tourism based on seeing the former USSR as a toxic Disneyland ceases to be as innocent as it may initially seem.
You can scream here
Situated 450 kilometres from the
And yet, the Zona fascinates: fascinates the characters in the film and now the scavengers, who want nothing more than be in it. Why? Slavoj Žižek suggests that its popularity is prompted exactlyby its prohibition: its properties are augmented by the fact they are somehow wrong, bad for us. Lacanian interpretations of the Real as an area of exclusion prompting its power aside, the ex-communist area, as possessive of dark forces is for that reason precisely popular among the Westerners. The bad thing is that what they do, the money they leave in the former East is based on this place staying toxic: remaining forbidden, radioactive, sick. And the guarantee this world can remain sick is that where we come from remains safe and healthy. This has an additional touch of the macabre, in that this film had a number of “victims”, a true chain of corpses behind it. It was not shot in Russia, but in Estonia, near Tallinn, at two deserted power plants on the Jagala River and several other toxic locations, like a chemical factory, which was pouring toxic liquids. At least three people involved in the production, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Larissa Tarkovska and Tarkovsky himself, died of cancer in the aftermath.
This perception of the former East as a constantly sick place, needing our help/advice/political intervention is enduring. It also prompts the specific kind of nostalgia after communism, Ostalgia. The neoliberal governments of the ex-communist countries, like Estonia or Ukraine, are only too happy to exploit this for their perhaps irrational yet profitable interest. Estonia based even its cultural offer for the film-makers and other creative industries as a “land of
Stalker”.
Toxic ruins keep influencing the imagery of the natural catastrophe in new generations of films, like Hollywoodian blockbusters
Chernobyl Diaries
or
The Darkest Hour.
Another example of this mutual misunderstanding is Baikonur, formerly Leninsk, in Kazakhstan, the city of the Soviet space programme still launching Russian satellites, which people usually think is a dead, abandoned area. The deserted post-nuclear landscapes of
Stalker
were recalled even during the recent tragedy of Fukushima by a
Guardian
journalist. Yet there is little Western interest in contemporary cultural and political issues in these places, not only because in the situation of civilisational and economicalweakening, the ex-Bloc was left with the choice between the manipulation of oligarch-driven economy or death, abandoned by the state support. The recent Euro 2012 tournament in Poland and Ukraine saw the England team and its fans visiting the reactor, alongside Auschwitz in Poland.
The wisdom of Tarkovsky’s films was that they offered a kind of post-religious, post-spiritual consolation in the empty world “after God”, in a way that was neither simplistically existential nor devoid of a kind of higher moral stance. It’s the mystery of Tarkovsky how he understood so well the awkward spiritual side of the seemingly mechanical process of industrialization, a legacy of the Bolshevik regime he no doubt hated. Like Kafka, who worked in a gigantic insurance company and got an insight to bureaucracy as a universal model of the modern world, Tarkovsky saw through the USSR and the strange ambiguity between the system and the modernization, the tension between Western capitalism and supposed socialism; as a director and visionary, he understood their strange interdependence in the world pushed by mechanisms of history, man’s striving for perfection and cynicism of politics, creating a world balancing between utopia and hell on earth. Yet as Putin’s Russia recently strives towards a nationalistic orthodoxy, tourism based on seeing the former USSR as a toxic Disneyland ceases to be as innocent as it may initially seem.
You can scream here
Situated 450 kilometres from the
Similar Books
