Stalker / Сталкер (1979 ) (Artificial Eye - #215) [REPOST]

Based on the novel The Roadside Picnic (1972) by Arkadi & Boris Strugatsky.

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Cast: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Alisa Frejndlikh, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, Natasha Abramova, Faime Jurno, Ye. Kostin, R. Rendi, Vladimir Zamansky

Near a gray and unnamed city is The Zone, an alien place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers. Over his wife's strenuous objections, a man rises in the dead of night: he's a stalker, one of a handful who have the mental gifts (and who risk imprisonment) to lead people into The Zone to The Room, a place where one's secret hopes come true. That night, he takes two people into The Zone: a popular writer who is burned out, cynical, and questioning his genius; and, a quiet scientist more concerned about his knapsack than the journey. In the deserted Zone, the approach to The Room must be indirect. As they draw near, the rules seem to change and the stalker faces a crisis.

Extra's:
- Interviews
- Filmographies
- Photoalbum
- Andrei Tarkovsky: Biography, fragment from his schoolproject: "The Steamroller and the Violin" and his house.

IMDb

The Region 2 Artificial Eye DVD includes interesting interviews with the cameraman and production designer. The production designer reveals that the film was completed only to be destroyed because it had been shot on experimental Kodak and couldn't be developed - a whole year's work was ruined. He proposes the possibility that the authorities of the time didn't want it to be developed. The incident nearly destroyed Tarkovsky. He was finally persuaded to go back and film a new Stalker, this time on a shoestring budget.

What does the film mean? Ask me again when I've watched it maybe ten times.

Certainly the Zone means more to Stalker than the Room. The Room is his living, but the Zone is an escape, a sanctuary from the noisy, industrial rusting slum where he lives (captured brilliantly in metallic sepia). In the Zone everything eventually returns to nature - like a pastoral coral reef growing on a battleship lichen and mosses engulf factory buildings and tanks. His first action on arriving there is to leave the other two occupied while he communes with the natural things growing in the zone, the grasses, the dew, the soil, the tiny worm that dances head-over-tail down his hand.

A beautiful, great and puzzling film. But then if it revealed all its secrets straight off then, apart from the beautiful visuals and the soundtrack it would be pointless watching it again. Great art only leaches out its secrets gradually and only to those with the desire to learn them.
~ Kenny J

DVDBeaver

The first screenplay of Stalker was closer to the novel and the film had a curious history. Half of it was already shot in fact when the exposed film was destroyed in the "Mosfilm" lab. Nobody would have allowed me to shot the film again had it not been the fault of a "Mosfilm" technician. One cannot repeat the same thing for the second time, that would have been beyond my stamina. Thus together with the authors we returned to our work on the screenplay…

In this case some kind of law of equilibrium must have been at work, perhaps the "Mosfilm" disaster was not accidental. It was as if fate intervened in the sense the accident occurred precisely at the instant the film could have become insufficiently deep.

As already mentioned, this film is slow-paced and lacks amazing special effects, but give it your full attention and you will be rewarded by a technically brilliant shot film that cuts deep into the human psyche in a manner few hollywood films have ever managed to do. Images from the film linger on in the mind and stay with you for a life time. Shot using what must have been a very low budget, the film manages successfully to create an incredibly strange, alien/haunting sci-fi environment. It is very well acted and profound in ways I can't even begin to describe.On the other hand my wife thought it was boring, hated reading the sub-titles and didn't think there was a great deal of plot complaining that nothing really happens in the film and gave up half way through, citing Stalker as another of my 'weird choice of films'.If only I could get her to persevere I'm sure she'd see why I like the film so much…but alas. The funny thing is, I can easily identify and see where she is coming from but for me I found the film one of the most haunting, sub-concious penetrating, unforgettable films I have ever seen. Sorry to sound pretentious but this film is worth seeing and truly memorable - and whether in the end you like the film or not the film's tone and images will stay with you forever.

A Stalker leads two men, a professor and a writer, into The Zone - A decayed landscape where a meteor may once have crashed. Slowly they make their way to a room where your innermost wish will be granted, all the time haunted by an unseen and unknown threat.
This is not your average SF film. The pace is extremely slow, and there are very few SFX. Centering around a more philosophical core than a scientific one, the film is poetic and filled with atmospheric imagary. There's a genuine sense of otherworldlyness here, partly due to the clever imagary, but also due to the superb unnatural use of natural sound. Everyday noises start to become hints of a threat, and mechanised noises the norm.

The disks are superb. As with previous Tarkovsky releases, these seem to be identical to the excellent Ruscico disks, and present the film in a crisp print - also in it's original (full screen) ratio. Extras include a short extract of Tarkovsky's diploma film, interviews with people who worked on the (troubled) production, a tour around Tarkovsky's house in the style of the film and biographies. Not huge amounts, but what is provided is of extremely high quality. Even the menus are superb.

Highly recommended.
~ Mr. Paul S. Bird