If you’ve seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and you like to ponder the subjective experience of watching films, you should check this book out.
Geoff Dyer gives a shot-by-shot synopsis of Stalker (a very long movie with relatively few shots, thereby making this a relatively short book), going off on all sorts of personal tangents about moments from his own life that he’s reminded of by the film. It’s like half film criticism, half memoir.
It’s pretty rare to see an entire book devoted to a single film, especially one that relatively few people have seen, but they don’t make em much better than Stalker (I’d say it’s one of the greatest films of all time, but truthfully I’ve only seen a small fraction of all films). If you haven’t seen Stalker, it’d be ridiculous for me to recommend you see it just so you can read this book, but for your own sake set aside three hours and make yourself sit through it. And then at a later date maybe check this book out of the library, OK? OK.
