Perfect in Weakness: Faith in Tarkovsky’s Stalker

Three men go on a risky journey through a forbidden Zone in search of fulfillment. They fail. They come home. The end.

The plot of Tarkovsky's Stalker is a joke.

Taking its title from 2 Corinthians, Perfect in Weakness explores Stalker as a ludic parable. And the subject of this parable is faith. Faith as folly, faith as a dangerous, last-ditch attempt to attain the unattainable. To fail, to fail again, and to carry on regardless.

Stalker is about crossing borders, boundaries, conventions. To transgress, to disrupt, to deconstruct is the dark impulse behind Tarkovsky's personal vision. It is also the illicit, revolutionary message at the heart of the gospel: tear down this temple, and have faith.

Like one of Deleuze's rhizomes, or David Tracy's fragments, Perfect in Weakness aims to throw out thoughts, ideas, and connections in unexpected (even unintended) directions, drawing new and unlikely texts into the field of film theology--Patristic thought, Christian Neoplatonism, and Renaissance literature.

Perfect in Weakness suggests we see cinema itself as the ultimate apocalyptic art form--letting light into the darkness, and then throwing it on a screen.

© 2019 Cascade Books (Rafbók): 9781532663260

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Rafbók: 16 april 2019