Andrei Tarkovsky, Or the Thing from Inner Space

This chapter offers a Lacanian reading of Tarkovsky’s films in terms of an encounter with the radical otherness of the Kantian thing-in-itself, illustrated by the planet Solaris or Stalker’s Zone. This motif, the author maintains, is structurally quite similar to more commercial horror movies dramatizing an encounter with the unknown. The chapter emphasizes the importance of a materialist interpretation of Tarkovsky’s films in which an encounter with the impossible and traumatic Thing is thoroughly devoid of religious and mystical connotations that often accompany commentators’ discussions.