Stalker (film)

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Stalker
Directed by	Andrei Tarkovsky
Produced by	Aleksandra Demidova
Written by	Arkadi Strugatsky Boris Strugatsky
Starring	Alexander Kaidanovsky Anatoli Solonitsyn Nikolai Grinko
Music by	Eduard Artemyev
Distributed by	Mosfilm
Release date(s)	August 1979 (Soviet Union)
Running time	163 min
Language	Russian
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Stalker (Russian: Сталкер) is a 1979 film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It describes the journey of three men travelling through a post-apocalyptic wilderness called the Zone to find a room that can grant wishes. The title role is played by Alexander Kaidanovsky, who guides two others through the area, the Writer, played by Anatoly Solonitsyn, and the Professor, played by Nikolai Grinko. Alisa Freindlich played the Stalker's wife.

The film is loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. An early draft of the screenplay was also published as a novel Stalker that differs much from the finished movie. In Roadside Picnic, the Zone is full of strange artifacts and phenomena that defy known science. A vestige of this idea carries over to the film, in the form of Stalker's habit of throwing metal nuts down a path before walking along it. The characters in Roadside Picnic do something similar when they suspect they are near gravitational anomalies that could crush them.

In the story, stalkers are people who make illicit trips to the Zone to gather alien artifacts for sale. "Stalker" is an English word (while the film gives no clues as to location or time, the original story is set in Canada) but should not be understood in the contemporary, sinister sense but rather in the older sense of a tracker of game.

Contents 1 About the production 2 The crew 2.1 Cast 3 The making of Stalker 4 See Also 5 External links

[edit] About the production

This was Tarkovsky's second science fiction film (after Solaris). Like that film, Tarkovsky downplayed the science fiction aspects of the novel, making the film more about his philosophical and spiritual concerns.

The central part of the film was shot in a few days at a deserted hydro power plant on the Jägala river near Tallinn, Estonia. When the team got back to Moscow, they found that all the film had been improperly developed. The film was shot on experimental Kodak stock, and Soviet laboratories were not familiar with it. There was also speculation that the Soviet authorities deliberately mishandled the stock of the film. Tarkovsky was officially frowned upon by the Soviet authorities, not because of his political stances (Tarkovsky rarely talked about politics), but because his films dealt with issues of spirituality and the quest for God. The USSR was an officially atheistic state, and Tarkovsky's films digressed from this official line, making him suspect. However, his films were relatively popular in the USSR, and he was considered by many in Western Europe as the "Soviet Union's greatest filmmaker"^{[citation needed]}, so he was allowed to continue making films.

During the shooting before the film stock problem was discovered, relations with the first cinematographer, Georgi Rerberg, were in serious deterioration. After screening the material, Rerberg left the first screening session and never came back. By the time this film stock defect was found out, Tarkovsky had shot all the outdoor scenes. Some say that Tarkovsky was actually happy about this occurring^{[citation needed]}, as he was unhappy about what had been shot so far. Others dispute this view. Set designer Rashit Safiullin was interviewed for the 2000 Rusico DVD, and he contends that Tarkovsky was so despondent that he wanted to abandon further production of the film.

After the loss of the film stock the Soviet film boards wanted to shut the film down, officially writing it off. But Tarkovsky came up with a solution - he asked to make a two part film, which meant additional deadlines and more funds. Tarkovsky ended up reshooting almost all of the film with a new cinematographer, Aleksandr Knyazhinsky. Tarkovsky made the film more of a philosophical metaphor than a straightforward science fiction film (similar to what he did in Solaris). He was constantly rewriting the script during the actual shooting and during the dubbing and editing (the film was post-dubbed, like many Soviet films were).

Many people involved in the film production had untimely deaths. Many attribute the long and arduous shooting schedule of the film, and the physical conditions of the terrain where it was made. Vladimir Sharun recalls:

“

We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Pirita with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larissa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris.

”

Many cineasts say the film is prophetic, foretelling Chernobyl. It is suspected that the 1957 accident in the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, which resulted in a several thousand square kilometer deserted "zone" outside the reactor [1], may have influenced this film. Seven years after the making of the film, the Chernobyl accident completed the circle. In fact, those employed to take care of the abandoned nuclear power plant refer to themselves as "stalkers", and to the area around the damaged reactor as the "Zone."[2]

[edit] The crew

• Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
• Second director: Tarkovsky's wife Larissa Tarkovskaya
• Screenplay: Boris Strugatsky, Arkady Strugatsky & Andrei Tarkovsky (uncredited)
• Editor: Lyudmila Feiginova
• Music: Eduard Artemyev
• First camera: Georgi Rerberg (none of his footage was used, see above)
• Second camera: Aleksandr Knyazhinsky (the footage used in the movie)
• Sound designer: Vladimir Ivanovich Sharun
• Set designer: Rashit Safiullin

[edit] Cast

• Stalker - Alexander Kaidonovsky
• Stalker's Wife - Alisa Freindlich
• Writer - Anatoly Solonitsyn
• Professor - Nikolai Grinko

[edit] The making of Stalker

Andrei Tarkovsky (director), Anatoli Solonitsyn (actor) and Nikolai Grinko (actor).	Andrei Tarkovsky (director), Anatoli Solonitsyn (actor), Nikolai Grinko (actor) and Alexander Kaidanovsky (actor).	Anatoli Solonitsyn (actor), Alexander Kaidanovsky (actor), Andrei Tarkovsky (director).	Alexander Kaidanovsky (actor) and Andrei Tarkovsky (director).
Andrei Tarkovsky (director), Alexander Kaidanovsky (actor), Anatoli Solonitsyn (actor) and Nikolai Grinko (actor).

[edit] See Also

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, a 2007 video game based on elements of Stalker and Roadside Picnic.

[edit] External links

• Stalker at the Internet Movie Database
• Interview with Tarkovsky on Stalker
• Stalker section at Nostalghia.com
• Stalker on Juan Asensio weblog
• How Stalker Foretold Chernobyl
• International promotion posters
• Stills from Stalker, (Russian text)
• Stalker at the Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films list
• Geopeitus.ee - Information concerning Stalker Location Filming
• Discussion of making the film, part 1. ("Искусство кино," in Russian, Georgii Rerberg, Marianna Chugunova, Evgenii Tsymbal)
• Discussion of making the film, part 2. ("Искусство кино," in Russian, Georgii Rerberg, Marianna Chugunova, Evgenii Tsymbal)
• Not enough ("Только этого мало"), a poem of Arseny Tarkovsky (in Russian)

v • d • e Works of Andrei Tarkovsky
Feature films	Ivan's Childhood • Andrei Rublev • Solaris • Mirror • Stalker • Nostalghia • Voyage in Time (with Tonino Guerra) • The Sacrifice
Student films	The Killers • Concentrate • There Will Be No Leave Today • The Steamroller and the Violin
Books	Sculpting In Time • Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986