The jacket of Geoff Dyer’s “Zona” describes it as “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.” It is also a hall of mirrors in which the author watches himself watching (and remembers himself remembering) a movie that, according to his impressively detailed description, ends with a character looking at us, looking at her. At once audacious post-postmodernist memoir and après-DVD monograph, “Zona” considers Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” (1979), the last movie the great Russian director would make in his native land. Dyer, a novelist, critical polymath and regular contributor to the Book Review whose oeuvre includes book-length essays on jazz, photography and D. H. Lawrence, isn’t the first literary author to write a book about a single movie. Some years ago, Salman Rushdie initiated the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series with a slim volume on “The Wizard of Oz”; more recently, Jonathan Lethem wrote a book-length essay on John Carpenter’s sci-fi thriller “They Live.” But “The Wizard of Oz” is more culture myth than movie, and “They Live” is a disreputable genre flick that pokes fun at the Reagan era. “Stalker,” by contrast, is a doggedly ambitious masterpiece by a major filmmaker.
more from J. Hoberman at the NY Times here.