Stalker
The professor, the stalker, and the writer are all standing around weighing their options before entering the building. There are these 4 or 5 concrete stubs bolted to the ground, overgrown with moss and sedge. Thats when I tuned into the imagination of 'the zone'.
The industrial landscape of the post-war never got the same mythologizing treatment as, say, medieval castles or pyramids. No creature springs to mind as the dragon does for a Chinese temple. No gods or myths like the Greeks. We have grunge and Ziggy Stardust perhaps. We have various apocalypses—zombies smashing glass windows in dilapidated factories, the bleak and rank midden of The Road, Wall-E, Fight Club ? ...The point being, when as a kid I inspected electrical boxes and stippled concrete I could not imagine past their form. They were imponderable. I was reminded only of other electrical boxes I had known.
How lucky we are then to have Tarkovsky to do the myth-making for us. This is not another apocalypse yarn which further associates the industrial aesthetic as 'background crap'. Instead, the grout assemblages are the play-dough of some consciousness; a consciousness which guards a fitting treasure. 'The Room,'—a genie's lamp which does not take suggestions. This grail, an expression of the desperate junkie dreams which litter the brutalist landscape. Vagrants escaping into their veins for a moment of reprieve are familiar with the allure of the elusive 'cure-all'. How elegant then for this to just be a room. A utopia for Utilitaria.
And so with all these creations I can look at those 4 or 5 concrete stubs and imagine fantasy, they are the whims of that conscious fabric that toys with us. The rail car looping on and on again drawing you into this paling scabland. Backrooms and fear of de-spawning should you wander out of view. Tarkovsky has sown a mysticism into an architecture which had only known function.