Stalker: A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky
by Andrei Tarkovsky
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Aleksandr Kajdanovsky, Alisa Frejndlikh, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Natasha Abramova, Nikolai GrinkoDirector: Andrei Tarkovsky
Audio: Russian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Dubbed), Unknown; French (Dubbed), Unknown
Format: AC-3, Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 163 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-11-07
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Kino Video
Movie Reviews of Stalker: A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky
Movie Review: and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time
Summary: 3 Stars
Watching Tarkovsky's Stalker was not an enjoyable experience, but it did make something about his achievement much clearer to me. In this film, and in most of his work that I have seen, Tarkovsky tells the viewer nothing: no plot, no characters, no resolution. He sets up an ambience through beautifully textured photography and lighting, stunning command of soundscapes, and a carefully undefined nexus of meaning. Then he allows the viewer to create a meaning. For some it is an overwhelming experience, for others a bore. This is not cinema as we normally know it but much closer to the effect of great poetry. It is sound and setting used as metaphor by means of which we can create what we can. Or not.
Forget the Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic (just as you had to forget Lem's Solaris when watching Tarkovsky's film of the same name). There is something called the Zone, but we don't know what it is, where or why it occurred. For the confused or troubled, something inside the Zone can provide a revelation. What it is or how it works we don't know. It's perimeter is guarded, but we don't know who guards it or why. Three men enter the Zone, we don't really know why, nor who they are. Viewers who claim to know more are reading information from the novel's plot, or quoting other viewers who are.
The Stalker (think of one of Fenimore Cooper's characters like the Deerstalker), the Writer, the Scientist are on a journey like Dante's. They seem confused and inarticulate, but they do know something is wrong, and they hope to remedy it, somehow, within the Zone. The Stalker is as driven as the other two. Tarkovsky suggests what the men are seeking by filming outside the Zone, a sterile no man's land of ruin, in a washed out sepia, and inside the Zone, a lush natural tangle of vegetation, in vibrant colour.
Stalker is about the search for redemption, filmed in such a way the viewer must conduct the search themselves. Unlike Solaris, whose themes of love and memory were presented in the form of a screenplay the viewer could engage with, Stalker is a much more extreme film which approaches the limit of what a film can do. It is a film which can have no clear climax, no rationale, no explanation. The journey is the important part.
I regret the fact my rational self would not let go while watching it, that I thought the lack of proper names risible and just like everybody's first novel, that the contrast between inside and outside the Zone was too obvious. I hated that the film was unnecessarily divided over two disks as it was for VHS release and that the subtitles were sometimes in such bad English they were hard to follow. This time around it wasn't for me. Maybe next time.
Summary of Stalker: A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky
Challenging, provocative, and ultimately rewarding, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker is a mind-bending experience that defies explanation. Like Tarkovsky's earlier and similarly enigmatic science fiction classic Solaris, this long, slow, meditative masterpiece demands patience and total attention; anyone accustomed to faster pacing is likely to abandon the nearly three-hour film before its first hour is over. On the other hand, those who approach Tarkovsky's work in a properly receptive (and wide awake) frame of mind are likely to appreciate the film's seductive depth of theme and hypnotic imagery. Set in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic future (although the time-frame is never specified), the eerie and unsettling story focuses on the title character, Stalker (Aleksandr Kajdanovsky), who leads characters known only as the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) and the Scientist (or Professor, played by Nikolai Grinko) into a mysterious region called The Zone. Tarkovsky films their journey as a long odyssey, or religious pilgrimage, and center of The Zone--said to be under an alien influence--is where each of these men hopes to find a kind of personal transcendence. Despite obvious parallels to The Wizard of Oz, Tarkovsky's film is devoid of special effects or any fantastical elements typically associated with science fiction or fantasy. Instead, Stalker makes astonishing use of sound and bleak-but-beautiful imagery to envelope the viewer into the eerie atmosphere of The Zone and the dank, colorless landscape that surrounds it. And while the film's glacial pacing may be off-putting to some viewers, there's no denying that Stalker has a mesmerizing power of its own, including a thought-provoking and highly debatable ending that propels the film to a higher level of meaning and significance. --Jeff ShannonArt House & International DVD Video
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