Location Location Location...

A supplement to yesterday's post about Chernobyl, I wanted to mention Jacob Kirkegaard's 2008 album 4 Rooms, which provided the soundtrack (among others) to my reading of Serhii Plokhy's book Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. The Lustmord/Robert Rich album Stalker was also pressed into service over the course of the book, but Kirkegaard's album offered a more profound resonance by the fact that it was recorded within the Zone of Exclusion. Taking inspiration from Alvin Lucier's 1970 sound work I Am Sitting In a Room, Kirkegaard traveled to Ukraine in October 2005 and selected four spaces within the Zone - four abandoned rooms that were once busy meeting places for the people of Pripyat before the nuclear disaster. In each of the 4 rooms - a church, an auditorium, a swimming pool, and a gymnasium, Kirkegaard set up his recording equipment to capture 10 minutes of silence. Upon returning to each of the rooms, Kirkegaard played the recordings back within the space, repeating the procedure a further 10 times to produce a set of dense, layered drones. Using some subtle post-production effects Kirkegaard has given each of the four lonely places a remarkable sonic personality, the overtones infused with spectral echoes and reverberations, and in the case of the recording captured at the gymnasium, a shrill metallic timbre which seems entirely keeping with the curious phenomena of visitors to the Zone experiencing a metallic taste when breathing the air of the radioactive environment. The following pictures were taken by Jacob Kirkegaard during the recording sessions.

Church

Auditorium

Swimming Pool

Gymnasium

Catastrophe / катастрофа

I've just finished reading Serhii Plokhy's excellent 2018 book Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe, and watching some remarkable footage this morning of the liquidators - the brave civil and military personnel tasked with cleaning up the radioactive debris ejected from the stricken reactor 4. Looking at pictures of taken from within Chernobyl’s Zone of Exclusion, the discarded, disintegrating military vehicles; abandoned residential blocks being slowly reclaimed by the wilderness, my thoughts are inevitably drawn to Tarkovsky’s film Stalker and the eerie way the film anticipates life after the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. As per the film, the photographers who took these pictures may well have sneaked into the Zone (strict permission is required to pass thru the military checkpoints), and perhaps a guide or a stalker was required to lead them around pockets of radiation - apparently the poisonous radioactive dust that coats the Zone is more prevalent on foliage than asphalt roads. Something else to reflect on was the high number of crew members, including Tarkovsky, who developed cancer in the ensuing years – most probably from working in the poisonous ruins of the Estonian power station where Stalker was filmed. Seeing the film nowadays I can’t help but wince when I see the actors wading thru pools of dirty water (think of the famous shot of Alexander Kaidanovsky dozing in the stream), or negotiating their way thru spaces filthy with toxic dust. Perhaps one can draw a parallel between the Chernobyl liquidators and the Stalker crew - both groups heroically struggling in the face of adversity to complete their missions; the liquidators working to limit the environmental damage, and the Stalker crew battling to get Tarkovsky's film made after the catastrophic loss of the first draft of the film...

The World that summer....

Spotted over at the Internet Archive, Dark Side #20 - May 1992, or more specifically, the Video Nasties issue. I've mentioned this hallowed issue a few times on this blog, and yet I cannot stress enough the importance of this sacred text in this 15-yr old's film-watching life - before it came out, I had scarcely heard of Cannibal Holocaust or Last House on the Left, and then suddenly it was as if a wall had come down to reveal a completely different view. I remember well that glorious summer of '92, spending countless afternoons in darkened video shops hunting down the more tantalizing titles. As primers go, the Nasties feature is strictly entry level stuff - if you've landed on this page with little or no clue about the United Kingdom's Video Nasty phenomena, it's a decent enough whistle stop tour thru the Director of Public Prosecutions' hit list, but there are better studies out there - Davids Kerekes and Slater's 2000 book See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy remains the definitive word on the subject. For more seasoned viewers, the Dark Side's roundup is worth reading as a vintage piece. Perhaps the prickly tone of many of the reviews was down to the reviewers having to contend with aging, fuzzy VHS copies (and fuzzy memories no doubt) - some 25 years later, with the advent of DVD and Blu-Ray, we've come to better appreciate the charms of Don't Go Near the Park and Snuff Worth noting too the idiosyncratic selection process - minor list entries like The Funhouse and Dead & Buried are awarded full-length reviews while more significant titles like Blood Feast and Fight For Your Life and relegated to a few remarks in an addendum section.

But that's not all. Elsewhere in this issue of The Dark Side is a terrific David Cronenberg interview, discussing his latest film Naked Lunch (which was lambasted in a later issue when it premiered on video), and it's followed by a Cronenberg filmography with some typically fascinating commentary by the director - mostly culled from Faber's Cronenberg on Cronenberg book it must be said: (On Scanners: "I was exploding heads like any other young, normal North American boy") Before I close, be sure to check out the excellent selection of books and fanzines the uploader has generously shared