[...] My reactions to films such as Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981) and Hans Wilmots' Die Stadt, La Ville, The City (1985) were, initially at least, based on their spaces. All, in different ways, show a crumbling post-industrial Europe. Stalker's post-nnuclear lost space. Possession's dead-ends, where the Berlin Wall has truncated city streets and tracks, creating a dead zone. Die Stadt's layered city levels that go on and go, like Borges' library of Babel, with balconies you could fall from and continue falling forever. These are all ambivalent areas: not simply barren, or violent, or impossible. All seem familiar somehow, as if a wrong turn in any city could lead you right into them. They are quietly uncanny, not specifically Gothic or distant. They are worlds that contain possibility, that do not seem hemmed in; they exist beyond the frame, and before and after the time-frame of the film. These zones, to borrow Stalker's terminology, are so affecting, I think, because, like Walter Barch's eerily calm civil war canvasses, or the deceptively benign blue planet in Joel Scott's New Hebredaeia film cycle, they appear so ordinary. They are seen in grey daylight. Their otherness is established without the fantastical tropes we recognise from other films. They are like a part of the world where two edges meet, and the volume drops, and nobody quite notices.