The Stalker
Yet the images Tarkovsky provides - whether filming landscapes or wide-shots or simply peering into his actors' extraordinary faces - make this almost hypnotic. A film that makes you wonder more about yourself yet without making you anxious. Visit Prime Video to explore more titles. Find showtimes, watch trailers, browse photos, track your Watchlist and rate your favorite movies and TV shows on your phone or tablet! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends.
Full Cast and Crew. A guide leads two men through an area known as the Zone to find a room that grants wishes. Wait, Is Mary Poppins a Witch?
Stalker is a Soviet science fiction art film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky with a screenplay written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, loosely based on their. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. With Alisa Freyndlikh, Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Nikolay Grinko. A guide leads two men through an area.
Share this Rating Title: Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Best of Both Worlds: Learn more More Like This. The life, times and afflictions of the fifteenth-century Russian iconographer. The Seventh Seal Come and See The Steamroller and the Violin A harried movie director retreats into his memories and fantasies. Edit Cast Complete credited cast: Zhena Stalkera Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy Sobesednitsa Pisatelya as F.
Lyuger, khozyain kafe Raymo Rendi Patrulnyy politseyskiy as R. Edit Storyline In a small, unnamed country there is an area called the Zone. Edit Did You Know? In a interview, Tarkovsky further stated that "those who are looking for meaning while viewing will miss everything. My ideal viewer watches a movie like a traveler observes the country he is visiting". Quotes [ first lines ] Stalker's Wife: Frequently Asked Questions Q: What Biblical and other religious references are made in the film? What is the original aspect ratio for this film?
When did "Stalker" premiere? The Professor seems less anxious, though he insists on carrying along a small backpack. While the Professor's desires are not clear, he reluctantly gives in to repeated pleas from the Writer and admits he hopes to win a Nobel Prize for a scientific analysis of the Zone. The Stalker insists he has no motive beyond the altruistic aim of aiding the desperate. At times, he refers to a previous Stalker named "Porcupine", who had led his brother to his death in the Zone, visited the Room, come into possession of a large sum of money, and in shame committed suicide, as the Room only grants true desires.
While the Room appears to fulfill a visitor's wishes, these might not be consciously expressed wishes but unconscious desires.
On Dvd & Streaming
In addition it appears that the Zone itself has a kind of sentience. When the Writer later confronts the Stalker about his knowledge of the Zone and the Room, the Stalker replies that his information came from the now deceased Porcupine. After traveling through tunnels the three reach their destination. They determine that their goal lies inside a decayed and decrepit industrial building. In a small antechamber, a phone begins to ring. The Writer answers and cryptically speaks into the phone, stating "this is not the clinic", before hanging up.
The surprised Professor decides to use the phone to telephone a colleague. In the ensuing conversation, he reveals his true intentions in undertaking the journey. The Professor has brought a "20 kiloton" bomb with him, and he intends to destroy the Room to prevent its use by evil men. The three then wrestle verbally and physically in a larger antechamber just outside the Room.
It ends in a draw with all three of them exhausted.
As they catch their breath, the Writer experiences an epiphany about the Room's true nature. He argues that when Porcupine met his goal, despite his conscious motives, the room fulfilled Porcupine's secret desire for wealth, instead of bringing back his brother from death. This in turn prompted Porcupine to commit suicide. The Writer further reasons the Room is dangerous to those who seek it for negative reasons. With his earlier fears assuaged, the Professor gives up on his plan of destroying the Room.
Instead, he disassembles his bomb and scatters its pieces. The men rest before the doorway and never enter the Room. Rain begins to fall into the Room through its ruined ceiling, then gradually fades away. The Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor are shown back in the bar, and are met there by the Stalker's wife and daughter.
A black dog that was seen in the zone in front of a corpse, is in the bar with them. When his wife asks where he got the dog, Stalker declares that it just came to him, and he remarks that he felt unable to leave it behind. Later, when the Stalker's wife tells him that she would like to visit the Room herself, he expresses doubts about the Zone. He states that he fears her dreams will not be fulfilled.
As the Stalker sleeps, his wife contemplates their relationship in a monologue delivered directly to the camera. She declares that she knew perfectly well that life with him would be hard, since he would be unreliable and their children would face challenges, but she concludes that she is better off with him despite their many trials. She then appears to use psychokinesis to push three drinking glasses across it, one after the other moving across the table, the third one falling to the floor.
A train passes by where the Stalker's family lives, and the entire apartment shakes. As the noise of the train begins to subside, the film ends. After reading the novel, Tarkovsky initially recommended it to a friend, the film director Mikhail Kalatozov , thinking that Kalatozov might be interested in adapting it into a film.
Kalatozov abandoned the project when he could not obtain the rights to the novel. Tarkovsky then became increasingly interested in adapting the novel and expanding its concepts. He hoped that it would allow him to make a film that conforms to the classical Aristotelian unity , that is a single action on a single location within 24 hours single point in time. Tarkovsky viewed the idea of the Zone as a dramatic tool to draw out the personalities of the three protagonists, particularly the psychological damage from everything that happens to the idealistic views of the Stalker as he finds himself unable to make others happy.
According to an interview with Tarkovsky in , the film has basically nothing in common with the novel except for the two words "Stalker" and "Zone". Several similarities remain between the novel and the film. In both works, the Zone is guarded by a police or military guard, apparently authorized to use deadly force.
The Stalker in both works tests the safety of his path by tossing nuts and bolts tied with scraps of cloth, verifying that gravity is working as usual. In the novel, frequent visits to the Zone increase the likelihood of abnormalities in the visitor's offspring. In the book, the Stalker's daughter has light hair all over her body, while in the film she is crippled. Neither in the novel nor in the film do the women enter the Zone. Finally, the target of the expedition in both works is a wish-granting device.
In Roadside Picnic , the site was specifically described as the site of alien visitation; the name of the novel derives from a metaphor proposed by a character who compares the visit to a roadside picnic. The closing monologue by the Stalker's wife at the end of the film has no equivalent in the novel. An early draft of the screenplay was published as a novel Stalker that differs substantially from the finished film.
However, when the crew returned to Moscow , they found that all of the film had been improperly developed and their footage was unusable. The film had been shot on new Kodak stock with which Soviet laboratories were not very familiar. After seeing the poorly developed material, Tarkovsky fired Rerberg. By the time the film stock defect was discovered, Tarkovsky had shot all the outdoor scenes and had to abandon them. Safiullin contends that Tarkovsky was so despondent that he wanted to abandon further work on the film.
After the loss of the film stock, the Soviet film boards wanted to shut the film down, but Tarkovsky came up with a solution: Tarkovsky ended up reshooting almost all of the film with a new cinematographer, Aleksandr Knyazhinsky. According to Safiullin, the finished version of Stalker is completely different from the one Tarkovsky originally shot.
Movies in Theaters
The film uses sepia for the world outside the Zone and color footage within the Zone. Other shots were filmed near the Tallinn—Narva highway bridge on the Pirita River. The documentary film Rerberg and Tarkovsky: Rerberg felt that Tarkovsky was not ready for this script. He told Tarkovsky to rewrite the script in order to achieve a good result.
Tarkovsky ignored him and continued shooting. After several arguments, Tarkovsky sent Rerberg home. People who have seen both the first version shot by Rerberg as Director of Photography and the final theatrical release say that they are almost identical. Tarkovsky sent home other crew members in addition to Rerberg and excluded them from the credits as well. Several people involved in the film production, including Tarkovsky, died from causes that some crew members attributed to the film's long shooting schedule in toxic locations.
Sound designer Vladimir Sharun recalled: Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: In fact it was some horrible poison.
- Nature - Conduct of Life.
- The curse of the Swan Princess.
- Stalker: Meaning and Making | The Current | The Criterion Collection.
- .
- ;
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 Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris. Like Tarkovsky's other films, Stalker relies on long takes with slow, subtle camera movement, rejecting the use of rapid montage.
The film contains shots in minutes, with an average shot length of more than one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes. Almost all of the scenes not set in the Zone are in Sepia or a similar high-contrast brown monochrome. The Stalker film score was composed by Eduard Artemyev , who had also composed the scores for Tarkovsky's previous films Solaris and The Mirror. For Stalker Artemyev composed and recorded two different versions of the score.
The first score was done with an orchestra alone but was rejected by Tarkovsky. The second score that was used in the final film was created on a synthesizer along with traditional instruments that were manipulated using sound effects. In fact, many of the natural sounds were not production sounds but were created by Artemyev on his synthesizer.
He believed that music distorts and changes the emotional tone of a visual image while not changing the meaning. He also believed that in a film with complete theoretical consistency music will have no place and that instead music is replaced by sounds.
Danger! High-radiation arthouse!
According to Tarkovsky, he aimed at this consistency and moved into this direction in Stalker and Nostalghia. In addition to the original monophonic soundtrack, the Russian Cinema Council Ruscico created an alternative 5. Music was added to the scene where the three are traveling to the Zone on a motorized draisine. In the opening and the final scene Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was removed and in the opening scene in Stalker's house ambient sounds were added, changing the original soundtrack, in which this scene was completely silent except for the sound of a train.
Initially, Tarkovsky had no clear understanding of the musical atmosphere of the final film and only an approximate idea where in the film the music was to be. Even after he had shot all the material he continued his search for the ideal film score, wanting a combination of Oriental and Western music. In a conversation with Artemyev he explained that he needed music that reflects the idea that although the East and the West can coexist, they are not able to understand each other. Artemyev proposed to try this idea with the motet Pulcherrima Rosa by an anonymous 14th century Italian composer dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
Later, Tarkovsky proposed to invite musicians from Armenia and Azerbaijan and to let them improvise on the melody of the motet. A musician was invited from Azerbaijan who played the main melody on a tar based on mugham , accompanied by orchestral background music written by Artemyev. Rethinking their approach they finally found the solution in a theme that would create a state of inner calmness and inner satisfaction, or as Tarkovsky said "space frozen in a dynamic equilibrium.
As this gave Artemyev the impression of frozen space, he used this inspiration and created a background tone on his synthesizer similar to the background tone performed on the tambura. The tar then improvised on the background sound, together with a flute as a European, Western instrument. These effects included modulating the sound of the flute and lowering the speed of the tar, so that what Artemyev called "the life of one string" could be heard.
Tarkovsky was amazed by the result, especially liking the sound of the tar, and used the theme without any alterations in the film. The title sequence is accompanied by Artemyev's main theme. The opening sequence of the film showing Stalker's room is mostly silent. Periodically one hears what could be a train.
The sound becomes louder and clearer over time until the sound and the vibrations of objects in the room give a sense of a train's passing by without the train's being visible. This aural impression is quickly subverted by the muffled sound of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
What they find there turns out to be very different from what they expected, as they come to discover who they truly are. These effects included modulating the sound of the flute and lowering the speed of the tar, so that what Artemyev called "the life of one string" could be heard. A black dog that was seen in the zone in front of a corpse, is in the bar with them. I've seen Stalker more times than any film except The Great Escape. Inside already, the camera takes us deeper indoors.
The source of this music is unclear, thus setting the tone for the blurring of reality in the film. In an interview with Tonino Guerra in , Tarkovsky said that he wanted "music that is more or less popular, that expresses the movement of the masses, the theme of humanity's social destiny.