Stalker (1979 film) of the "Time Out Film Guide" has compared "Stalker" to Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", also released in 1979, and argued that "as a journey to the heart of darkness" "Stalker" looks "a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's." As well, "Slant Magazine" reviewer Nick Schager has praised the film as an "endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness". In Schager's view "Stalker" shows "something akin to the essence of what man is made of: a tangled knot of memories, fears, fantasies, nightmares, paradoxical impulses, and a yearning for something that's simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one
Heart of Darkness "The Engineer of Human Souls", Kurtz is seen as the epitome of exterminatory colonialism, and here and elsewhere Škvorecký emphasises the importance of Conrad's concern with Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe. T. S. Eliot wrote "Mistah Kurtz—he dead" at the beginning of the poem "The Hollow Men", quoting the "manager's boy" when he announced the death of Kurtz to the crew. Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad about a narrated voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the so-called "heart of Africa". Charles Marlow, the narrator, tells