Arts & Entertainment

British Writer Draws 100-plus to Cerrito Theater

A sizable crowd showed up at Cerrito Theater in El Cerrito Thursday night to hear prize-winning author Geoff Dyer talk about his new book, "Zona," a kind of literary tribute to a 33-year-old Russian film.

More than 100 people came to the Thursday night to hear a British author talk about his new book – a non-fiction work about a slow-paced, brooding Russian film made in 1979.

Some of them may have been attracted also by the refreshments provided by Alice Waters and Chez Panisse restaurant, but the audience response made it clear that the main attraction was the chance to see and hear writer Geoff Dyer, who last week was announced as the winner of the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Criticism for his collection of essays and reviews, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.

Dyer – who's won acclaim for his dry wit, literary versatility and thought-provoking philosophical meditations – has written a number of works, including his most recent novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.

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The free special event at the Cerrito Theater featured Dyer reading from his latest book, Zona, and being interviewed on stage by Tom Luddy, co-director of the Telluride Film Festival and former director of the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

Zona contains Dyer's response to and assessment of a film that has long fascinated him, Stalker, made in 1979 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and regarded by serious film buffs as a masterpiece by one of cinema's true artists. 

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As the tall, thin author with a short crop of seemingly unruly hair read passages from his book on stage Thursday night, scenes from Stalker were shown on the theater's large screen behind him.

Dyer, an Oxford graduate born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958, was enjoying the supportive audience reception.

"I regard my continuing to live in London and my not living in the Bay Area one of the great failures in my life," he said to appreciative laughter. "Clearly a night like tonight just makes me feel even worse."

The event was sponsored by the prestigious Telluride Film Festival, which is held over Labor Day weekend each year in Telluride, CO, and which has its year-round headquarters in Berkeley.

"So what is the Telluride Film Festival doing presenting a book reading?" Luddy asked rhetorically, adding that Dyer's appearance was "the first kind of event we've ever done like this."

Part of the reason, Luddy said, is that the director Tarkovsky, whose film inspired Dyer's book, was "a touchtone figure in the history of Telluride Film Festival" whom Luddy and festival co-founder Bill Pence regarded as their favorite living director when they started the festival in 1974.

Tarkovsky's film Stalker is far from standard Hollywood fare. It has three characters, the main one bearing the same name as the film title, "the Stalker."

Dyer described the plot, such as it is, this way: "The Stalker takes these two people, Writer and Professor, into the 'Zone,' at the heart of which it's claimed there's a room where your deepest wish will come true. That's all it is."

A New York Times review of Dyer's book said of the film, "Most of the action takes place amid voluptuously overgrown industrial ruins. Tarkovsky characterized cinema as 'sculpting in time,' and the characteristic camera movement in 'Stalker' is a high-angle tortoise crawl over some waterlogged stretch of detritus."

"When I first saw it, I thought of Waiting for Godot," Luddy said, alluding to the allegorical, minimal-plot play by Samuel Beckett.

Dyer said the Zona book project had begun with a commission to write a book on tennis and that when it became transformed into a work on the film Stalker, he did not have high expectations of commercial success.

"I defined success as just getting it published," he said. "Because really it seemed to me when I writing it, this was such a lunatic thing to be doing. It was a book with zero commercial appeal, and it was just so exactly the kind of book which you can't publish anymore for all sorts of reasons. There's a line in the book where I say if I do get it published, then that'll constitute greater success than John Grisham could ever have dreamed of."

In what may be a world scoop for El Cerrito Patch, Luddy confided to the audience that Dyer will be the guest director this year for the 39th Telluride festival. Luddy's revelation elicited audience applause. "We haven't officially announced that because we'd like to have a press release to announce the fact a little bit later in the year," Luddy said. The guest director selects six of the films.

At the end of the formal program, before Dyer moved to a table to autograph copies of Zona, Luddy thanked his Telluride co-director, Julie Huntsinger, for organizing the event.


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