Tarkovsky's unkept time

A while ago I was feeling challenged by the title Unkept, so I made a list of words that related:

Last night I watched the 1979 Tarkovsky movie Stalker (available to watch online here) and thought it was really appropriate in regard to this list of words, which I had forgotten about until now. Visually there are many obvious connections: the film was shot in an abandoned hydro station in Estonia, and the deserted landscape, overgrown fields, derelict buildings, subterranean tunnels filled with moss and mud, flooded warehouses, abandoned detritus, floating bits of dust and fluff etc etc etc really is the epitome of 'unkept'. And in true Tarkovsky style everything is just beautiful, and the experience of watching feels like peeling back layers in time and space.

Something else though, is how it stayed with me - still thinking about it today I realised there's something unkept about the time of it too. First its film-time - as in, the 3 hours or whatever it took to watch it - but then more interestingly, the time it expands out to in the sustained memory or thought of it. The slow-burn effect. This is immeasurable, unregulated time... it strays beyond the confines of the film-time into other less calculable sorts.

The idea of a disobedient, but all the more electrified, landscape is pretty interesting too. In the movie the Zone that the characters travel to disobeys the laws of physics that society has come to rely on. Its time and space is unpredictable, untamed, unknown. To navigate through it they must move slowly, cautiously, in a kind of lateral or indirect movement. I like this idea a lot, the experience of coming around space, getting to know it obliquely (and here the space itself is so potent).

The thing that strikes me about Tarkovsky's films, besides all the metaphor and striking imagery, is that they open out a space (in film, and in time) to observe the periphery of the scene. They offer an expanded view, within which exists an ecosystem of (very) slight activity - a bird call, a bug crawling over a finger, bits of fluff wavering in the breeze - and most of the time it's all allowed to occur simultaneously, without hierarchy. 

Unguarded, unobserved phenomena are given their breathing space.