Stalker

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Stalker
Stalker is a 1979 film by Andrei Tarkovsky. The film is loosely based off the novel Roadside Picnic (1972). The science-fiction film is the fifth film in Tarkovsky's filmography and is filled with many psychological and philosophical themes as the Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) travels through the mysterious Zone--its mysterious ability allowing it to fulfill anyone's innermost desires. The film utilizes long shots and montage stylistically similar to Tarkovsky's other films.

Overview
Outside a bland city resides the Zone, a mysterious landscape that is heavily guarded and forbidden from entering. However, there is belief that deep within the Zone is the Room, a realm that can grant any person's innermost desires. Only certain people are able to navigate the mysterious Zone: Stalkers. When an unnamed Writer and Professor are interested in The Room, they enlist the help of the Stalker. The closer they get to the Room, the more the world around them, and the Stalker himself, begin to change.

Themes
Themes to consider for research:
 * The zone vs the gulag ; Stalker vs zeks
 * When reality and desolation enters the reality space
 * Faith in the unknown
 * Cinematic analysis of the long montage
 * Literary compare and contrast between Stalker and Roadside Picnic
 * Christ and Dostoevsky's Idiot seen in the Stalker

Film Criticism
"But the words in the end are just a handhold for the unsteady, something with a veneer of rationality to provide narrative comfort. The terror and pleasure of Stalker comes from the calm, penetrating stare it dares us to take, and meaning(s) it demands we construct for ourselves out of what we see."

- Brad Weismann's review of Stalker

"The practice of expressive doubling is inherently bound up with utopian and quasi-religious ideals that belong firmly to the early Romantic aesthetics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This kind of structural trope typically enacts a "progress from the actual to the ideal" and we can identify this progress in a particular work of art precisely because "the terms of an expressive doubling form a hierarchy; one term represents a freer, happier, or more enlightened condition than the other."

- Tobias Pontara's "Beethoven overcome: romantic and existentialist utopia in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker"

"Stalker pulls off a similar trick in that, unlike almost every other science-fiction film ever made, the sci-fi is in the script. Where, say, George LucasEv and Ridley Scott have seduced us with twinkling cities and thundering spacecraft, Stalker boasts no more high-tech sophistication than a Bakelite telephone and a faulty lightbulb. It's perhaps the clearest example in Tarkovsky's work of his suspicion of any surface sheen that might have titillated audiences - and might have earned him a lucrative, Hollywood-style career."

- Thomas Vinterberg's Filmmakers on film; Thomas Vinterberg on Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

"Tarkovsky always tried to steer clear of politics. Tarkovsky's policy had nothing to do with everyday affairs, or with hints and associations, but rather with metaphysics; and he had no intention of changing anything in his creative style. The Strugatskiis took responsibility for any political overtones, thus giving the director more space for manoeuvre."

- Evgenii Tsymbal's Tarkovsky and the Strugatskii brothers: The prehistory of Stalker

"The Stalker is a would-be shaman who denies himself full access to the potentialities of his talents by allowing his fear to prevent him from entering the Room himself. Because of the ZONE’s influence, however, by Stalker’s end we are witnesses to the evolution of a “new man” possessing powers capable of transcending the Stalker’s limitations."

-Brecht Andersch's Penetrating the ZONE: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker

Please watch the film on Mosfilm's official YouTube

 * Part I




 * Part II