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THIS ARTICLE PROPOSES THAT A HAUNTOLOGICAL APPROACH to the study of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) can deepen our understanding of the issues that the film raises. My broader contention is that each of Tarkovsky's films invites a thorough hauntological consideration. Here, however, I will use Stalker as a case study. I will explain how the film, traditionally understood as an allegory about faith, is not only a cinematic representation of the failure of the promised Soviet future to arrive but also a still-pertinent guide to our present moment.1
In Tarkovsky's cinema, there are near-literal ghosts, such as the inexplicably resurrected Theophanes in Andrei Rublev (1968) and the revenant version of Hari in Solaris (1972). A full hauntological interpretation of Tarkovsky's cinema would give due consideration to these specters. Here, though, I will prioritize the kind of cinematic ghost that, as proposed by Alexander Etkind, "lives" within texts (Etkind, "Post Soviet Hauntology" 182-200).
A hauntological critique of Tarkovsky's cinema is necessary at this juncture because criticism and interpretation of Tarkovsky's work has been guided, overshadowed, and often limited by Tarkovsky's own words and the traditional aesthetic values he upheld, especially as outlined in his book Sculpting in Time. Since this paradigm has become entrenched, it has occasionally been criticized: Tarkovsky scholar Robert Bird dealt with this overreliance on "the intentional fallacy," arguing that scholars should focus on the "manifest discontinuities" in Tarkovsky's work instead of "incorporating them within the hermetic continuities of an allegorical narrative" (Bird, "Gazing into Time"). However, since Bird's work in 2003, scholars have done little to attend to these discontinuities and ambiguities, which permeate Tarkovsky's cinema. Hauntology, with its focus on spectral traces and uncanny discontinuities, can fix our attention on these moments and help us to determine how they are relevant to our ongoing sociopolitical moment. In order to demonstrate this, I will first turn to the theoretical construct of hauntology to provide the necessary contextual information.
Jacques Derrida coined the wry neologism "hauntology" in Spectres of Marx, a work that aimed to rekindle the spirit of the Marxist international against the triumphalist rhetoric of the early 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. This triumphalism was encapsulated by the neoliberal theorist Francis Fukuyama's notion of the "end of history."...