The Stone

Susan Sontag chose Stone as one of the ten best films of the nineties. Employing the flow and fugitive feeling of a half-remembered reverie—full of mysteries, portents, inexplicable happenings, and chimerical objects—the film, set in the Chekhov Museum, centers on the relationship between a young museum guard and an older visitor who seems at different times to be a lover, a doctor, or a surrogate father. Shot in evanescent black and white with a sound track of silences, breathing, natural sounds, and fragments of classical music, this rarely screened work is a haunting and enigmatic evocation of the dream state.