Image: Pushkin House, London
Pushkin House and Klassiki present ‘After Utopia’, a film programme inspired by the fiction of the Strugatsky Brothers, running from 6 to 13 November.
The programme includes Grigori Kromanov’s ‘Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel’, Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’, Aleksandr Sokurov’s ‘Days of Eclipse’ and Aleksei German’s ‘Hard to Be a God’.
The programme also includes a talk by science-fiction experts Mark Bould and Adam Roberts, who will explore what the Strugatsky Brothers meant for readers and cinema audiences in their time and what their work tells us today. They will discuss the political, environmental and artistic implications of the brothers’ speculative thinking and its afterlives on screen, asking whether we now live in the post-utopian world they described.
Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ adapts the Strugatskys’ 1972 novel ‘Roadside Picnic’, transforming its narrative of alien visitation into a metaphysical journey into the human soul. The film follows an expedition led by a Stalker into the hazardous wasteland of the Zone in search of a room said to grant one’s deepest desires, and is both visceral and conceptual, with languorous cinematography and philosophical depth.
In Sokurov’s ‘Days of Eclipse’, a young doctor posted to a remote Turkmen town researches the relationship between religious faith and medicine, but mysterious encounters and ill omens confound his efforts. Switching between sepia and colour, documentary footage and flights of invention, the film offers an oblique portrait of the end of the Soviet empire while reckoning with Russian colonialism and the limits of rational enquiry.
