Stalker (film)

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
Running time 163 min.
Country Soviet Union
Language Russian

Stalker (Russian: Сталкер) is a 1979 science fiction film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, and loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. It depicts an expedition led by the Stalker (guide) Alexander Kaidanovsky to bring his two clients to the site, called The Zone, with the potential to fulfill a person's innermost desires. The Writer is played by Anatoli Solonitsyn; the Professor, by Nikolai Grinko. Alisa Freindlich plays the Stalker's wife.

The English word "stalker" is used in the original novel Roadside Picnic, on which the movie was based. It is meant as the practice of an experienced hunter using woodcraft skills to approach his quarry, i.e. stalks. In the film, the Stalker has the additional role of guide to other hunters, as on a hunting trip. The date of the film is not contemporaneous with the rise in popularity of the use of 'stalking' to mean, the harassment of other people due to following them.

The sparseness of exposition leads to ambiguity as to the nature of The Zone. The film suggests that the Zone was the site of an alien spaceship landing, or meteor strike. Due to the movie's ambiguity, the Zone could suggest a Freudian, spiritual or edenistic trope.

Contents

Synopsis

Anatoli Solonitsyn (actor), Alexander Kaidanovsky (actor), Andrei Tarkovsky (director)

The setting of the film is a tiny town on the outskirts of "The Zone", a wilderness area which has been cordoned off by the government. The film's main character, the Stalker, works as a guide to bring people in and out of the Zone, to a room which is said to grant "the deepest, innermost" wishes. Residual effects of an unnamed previous occurrence have transformed an otherwise mundane rural area scattered with ruined buildings into an area where the normal laws of physics no longer apply.

The film begins with the Stalker in his home with his wife and daughter. His wife emotionally urges him not to leave her again to go into the Zone due to the legal consequences, but he ignores her pleas. The Stalker goes to a bar, where he meets the Writer and the Professor, who will be his clients on his next trip into the Zone. Writer and Professor are not identified by name—the Stalker prefers to refer to them in this way. The three of them evade the military blockade that guards the Zone using a jeep—attracting gunfire from the guards as they go—and then ride into the heart of the Zone on a small trolley car - a hypnotic, uninterrupted single take of approximately five minutes. The trolley car moves from urban setting to rural, and from the darkness required for their infiltration of the zone, to light. The three protagonists face away from each other, the orientations of their inner worlds separate.

Once in the Zone, the Stalker tells the others that they must do exactly as he says to survive the dangers that are all around them. Although the Stalker describes extreme danger at all times, no harm comes to any of the three men; there is a tension between disbelief of the need for his elaborate precautions, and the possibility that they are necessary. The Stalker tests various routes by throwing metal nuts tied with strips of cloth ahead of him before walking into a new area. The Zone usually appears peaceful and harmless, with no visible dangers anywhere—Writer is skeptical that there is any real danger, while Professor generally follows the Stalker's advice.

Much of the film focuses on the trip through the dangerous Zone, and the philosophical discussions which the characters share about their reasons for wanting to visit the room. Writer appears concerned that he is losing his inspiration, Professor apparently hopes to win a Nobel prize, the Stalker—who explains that he never visits the room himself—quotes from the New Testament and bemoans the loss of faith in society. They first walk through meadows, and then into a tunnel which the Stalker calls "the meat grinder". Throughout the film, the Stalker refers to a previous Stalker, named "Porcupine," who led his poet brother to death in the Zone, won the lottery, and then hung himself. The implication is that our "deepest, innermost desires" are opaque even to ourselves, and the overt desire to win the lottery was coupled with the covert & unexpressed - perhaps unconscious - desire that his brother die - & when Porcupine realized this, he killed himself to expiate his guilt (cf. the Oedipus Myth - where Oedipus blinds himself as penance for a "crime" that he was unaware of, in the commission.) When the Writer confronts the Stalker about his knowledge of the Zone and the room, he says that it all comes from Porcupine.

In one of the decayed buildings, a phone inexplicably begins to ring. On the line is one of the Professor's colleagues; in the resultant conversation he reveals some of his true motives for having come to the room. He has brought a bomb with him, and intends to destroy the room out of fear that it could be used for personal gain by evil men. The three men fight verbally and physically; the Professor backs down from his plan to destroy the room. Their journey ends when they arrive at the entrance of the room. A long take, with the camera in the room, leaves the men sitting outside the room, and does not clarify whether they ever enter. Rain begins to fall, into the building where the ceiling has collapsed, and the rainstorm gradually fades away, all in one shot.

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

The next scene shows the Stalker, Writer, and Professor back in the bar. Stalker's wife and child arrive. A mysterious black dog that followed the three men through the Zone is now in the bar with them. It follows Stalker, and his wife protests against; but Stalker says that it followed them around and that he has got attached to it. As the Stalker leaves the bar with his family and the dog, we see that his child, nick-named "Monkey" (who earlier dialogue has suggested is affected by some form of genetic mutation as a "child of the Zone") is crippled, and cannot walk unaided. The film ends with a long shot of Monkey alone in the kitchen. She recites a poem (written by Fyodor Tyutchev), and then lays her head on the table and appears to telekinetically push three drinking glasses across the table, with one falling to the floor. As the third glass begins to move, a train passes by (as in the beginning of the film), causing the entire apartment to shake, leaving the audience to wonder whether it was Monkey or the vibrations from the train that moved the glasses.[1]

Adaptation and themes

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 film. In Roadside Picnic, the site was specifically described as the site of alien visitation; the name of the novel deriving from a metaphor proposed by a character who compares the visit to a roadside picnic. After the picnickers depart, nervous animals venture forth from the adjacent forest and discover the picnic garbage: spilled motor oil, faded unknown flowers, a box of matches, a clockwork teddy bear, balloons, candy wrappers. He concludes that humankind is to the forest animals as the Zone is to the aliens' leftovers; what to the aliens carelessly toss aside, is beyond our understanding and a source of power and danger.

In an interview on the MK2 DVD, production designer Rashit Safiullin, describes the Zone as a space in which humans can live without the trappings of society, and can speak about the most important things freely.

Some elements of the original novel remain. 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.

Style

Alexander Kaidanovsky (actor) and Andrei Tarkovsky (director)

Like Tarkovsky's other films, Stalker relies on long takes with slow, subtle movement of camera, rejecting the conventional use of rapid montage. Many of the shots are several minutes long.

Production

In an interview on the MK2 DVD, the production designer, Rashit Safiullin, recalls that Tarkovsky spent a year shooting a version of the outdoor scenes of Stalker. However, when the crew got back to Moscow, they found that all of the film had been improperly developed and their footage was unusable. The film had been shot on experimental Kodak stock with which Soviet laboratories were unfamiliar.

Even before the film stock problem was discovered, relations between Tarkovsky and the first cinematographer, Georgy Rerberg, had been in serious deterioration. After seeing the poorly-developed material, Rerberg left the first screening session and never came back. By the time the film stock defect was found out, Tarkovsky had shot all the outdoor scenes, and had to burn them. Safiullin 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 re-shooting almost all of the film with a new cinematographer, Aleksandr Knyazhinsky. According to Safiullin, the finished version of Stalker is completely different to the one Tarkovsky originally shot.

The film mixes black and white and color footage; within the Zone, in the countryside, all is colorful, while the outside, urban world is tinted black and white.

The central part of the film, in which the characters move around the Zone, was shot in a few days at a deserted hydro power plant on the Jägala river near Tallinn, Estonia. The shot before they enter the Zone is an old Flora chemical factory in the center of Tallinn, next to the old Rotermann salt store and the electric plant—now a culture factory where a memorial plate of the film has been set up in 2008. Some shots from the Zone were filmed in Maardu, next to the Iru powerplant and the shot with the gates to the Zone was filmed in Lasnamäe, next to Punane Street behind the Idakeskus.

Many people involved in the film production had untimely deaths. Many attribute this to the long and arduous shooting schedule of the film as well as toxins present at the shooting locations.

Distribution and responses

Stalker sold 4.3 million tickets in the Soviet Union.[2]

Influence

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

Seven years after the making of the film, the Chernobyl accident led to the depopulation of an area rather like that in the film. Some of 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."[3]

The Anomalies and Artifacts in the 2007 PC game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl are analogous to the enhanced gravity fields in Stalker and the golden globe that grants desires in Roadside Picnic; the cause is the Chernobyl disaster, not alien contact. "The Zone" is used to describe the area affected by Chernobyl; ironically, the use of the title term "Stalker" is used in a manner quite distinct from the film and book.

Cast and crew

Homage

References

  1. ↑ Nostalghia.com article
  2. ↑ Segida, Miroslava; Sergei Zemlianukhin (1996) (in Russian). Domashniaia sinemateka: Otechestvennoe kino 1918-1996. Dubl-D. 
  3. ↑ Johncoulhart.com article

External links

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 • There Will Be No Leave Today • The Steamroller and the Violin
Screenplays
Concentrate  • Hoffmanniana
Books
Sculpting In Time • Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986