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| Courtesy of Mosfilm |
The last Soviet feature film for distinguished
and highly idiosyncratic réalisateur Andrei Tarkovsky, a loose adaptation of legendary Hard to Be a God novelists Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic penned
by the authors themselves under the title Stalker, may well have been
the film that helped capstone and eventually end the illustrious director’s career
and tragically his life as well.
A strikingly beautiful cursed/miraculous work of art, the film was mired
in problems before, during and after the shoot eventually leading to nearly all
of the cast and crew eventually falling ill due to shooting in abandoned
chemical plants which likely contributed to Tarkovsky’s death in 1986. Moreover, the film itself proved to be an
uncompromisingly difficult picture for both investors and spectators initially
but in the years since has been reassessed as Tarkovsky’s truest artistic
expression, a film that eventually killed but ultimately immortalized the man
as one of world cinema’s most important purveyors.
Inspired in part by the Chelyabinsk nuclear accident in 1957 and
predating the Chernobyl accident by five years, Stalker which can be
loosely described as post-apocalyptic science fiction involves a nameless
figure only known as a “stalker” (Alexander Kaidanovsky) who is tasked with
chaperoning a writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and a professor (Nikolai Grinko) to a
mysterious barricaded place only known as “the Zone”. Supposedly within the dangerous and
foreboding leaky and polluted tunnels of the Zone is a room which can grant any
person’s wishes they choose.
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| Courtesy of Mosfilm |
Moving the story away from its
extraterrestrial origins towards something more spiritual and metaphysical, the
film’s production history is now the stuff of urban legend. In a first attempt to shoot the film, nearly
a year was spent with cinematographer Georgy Rerberg shooting on a new Kodak
5247 filmstock which Soviet development labs were unfamiliar with and nearly
all the footage shot in the first attempt was unsalvageable, leading to Rerberg’s
termination and Alexander Knyazhinsky’s hiring.
When Mosfilm threatened to pull the plug, Tarkovsky devised splitting
the film into two parts which afforded him more time and money to shoot the
remaining portions.
Stylistically the film changed
dramatically, opening on a yellowish sepia tone for the first half before
making a startling jump into color in an astonishing series of tracking shots
following the three characters on their journey towards the Zone. Musically speaking, much like Solaris,
the film boasts an arrestingly avant-garde original electronic score by Eduard
Artemyev who, like John Corigliano after him, traverses uncharted musical
territories right and left from the moment the first opening cue unfolds.
Designed to augment the diegetic sounds of
the world of the movie through ever so subtle instrumentation, watching and
hearing Stalker in mono with the echoes of footsteps and water droplets
reverberating in the hallways and rooms of the zone becomes a place we feel
ourselves residing in with the characters rather than seeing the setting as a
plot device.
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| Courtesy of Mosfilm |
All three performers are excellent with
each performer from the emotional stalker Kaidanovsky to the disgruntled and
despondent writer Solonitsyn and professor Grinko each given equal time to
flesh out their individual personalities within the confines of the Zone
functioning to draw out their faces. Most
of the film consists of philosophical and psychological musings between the three
characters and as the journey proceeds we start to feel ourselves lose track of
time and space with the walls designing a beginning, middle and end off of the
table.
After the film opened to strong box office
returns against a 1 million Soviet rubles budget, Tarkovsky tried teaming up
with fellow Russian filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky before Stalker production
company Goskino pulled the plug fearing criticism of the Soviet Union. Not long after, Tarkovsky defected to Italy
and his last two films were made abroad before his death in 1986. Though the film itself is arguably radioactive
and claimed the lives of many who worked on it, Stalker for the spectator
able to watch and digest the film unharmed will come away feeling as though they’ve
had a religious or spiritual experience.
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| Courtesy of Mosfilm |
A film that defies conventional
interpretation and is as close to a Russian expression of pure cinema as the
world has ever seen, Stalker ultimately is a journey inward with a
belief that miracles can exist in a world where any and all traces of them have
been burned away. A film that challenges
our own understanding of the cinematic form and what you can really do with
movies, Stalker initially is as hard of a journey for the spectator as
it is for the characters in a film that seems to inspire restlessness in most
viewers. Ultimately there is a light at
the end of the tunnel that burns bright and brilliantly, but only you can
discover it for yourself firsthand.
--Andrew Kotwicki
