We were students of literature but we didn’t read in order to become clever and pass our exams with the highest commendations – we read in order to come to life. We were supremely adept at detecting metaphors, signs, analogies, portents – in books, and in our immediate realities. We confused life with literature and made the mistake of believing that everything going on around us was telling us something, something about our own little existences, our own undeveloped hearts, and, most crucially of all, about what was to come. What was to come? What was to come? We wanted to know, we wanted to know what lay ahead of us very very much, it was all we could think about and it was so unclear – yet at the same time it was all too clear. He was from the valley. I was from the fastest growing town in Europe. Where we came from people left school and found a job, often in the same trade or firm where at least one close relative worked already, and then, soon after, you got married and moved into a starter home and had two or three children, and you’d work all the overtime going and after a while you’d have the house extended or you’d move into a bigger one, and there would be nice things, TVs and barbeques, and a fortnight’s holiday abroad once a year, and it’s not bad, it’s not a bad lot, yet we couldn’t say why exactly but neither me nor Dale were cut out for that. We could tell, had always known it – the encroaching inevitability of that life path had been a source of anxiety to us both since we were approximately eleven years old. We tried to keep that anxiety at bay with reading, with writing, with alcohol, with fantasies, with all the strength and imagination that those things gave us, and were on the lookout, always, for signs, proofs, indications, merest hints that we had promise, that we were special, that our lives would take a different turn. [...]

[...] 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.