Stalker. La zona

It's been 5 years (already!) since I saw my last Tarkovsky. I had come to rest with Zerkalo, because here was a man, one of few, very few in the cinema, who can permeate so deeply into the essential mystery of how things move, and he only made a handful of movies really so I must make them last, and take them in when the time feels right. My next one might be in another 5 years time, but yesterday night the time felt right for this, one I've been heartily anticipating for years.

This is Tarkovsky entering the mind once more. He never does it in any obvious, Inception way, it's never actually the mind; but we arrive at a place, a source of the imagining, where wind blows from and rings each thing into being. In Rublev he was the artist looking to paint the face of god in a godless world that concealed it. In Solyaris he was the cosmonaut. In Zerkalo, a filmmaker who recalled a whole life, receiving visions at the doorstep. Here he's the Stalker who takes us into the Zone, obvious enough.

Each one is self-referential of course about the very process of stepping into the movie. The Zone as a Tarkovsky movie - full of desolate nature and a mysterious presence that bends logic. We first have to cross the iron border where censors (his illiterate Soviet patrons) prevent entry.

This is the border guarded by the irongated mechanisms of reason that has to be crossed before we can begin our guided meditation beyond logic. One way he does this is by splitting himself into characters. One is a scientist, which is Tarkovsky's critique of a mechanistic worldview that reduces a tree to what biological facts it can explain. Another is a writer, a surrogate for Tarkovsky's intellectual self who despairs about the possibility of words to communicate sense. The Stalker himself as who Tarkovsky feels himself to be most purely, the guide who knows the whims of this landscape and wants nothing other than to bring us to the doorstep of miracle.

It's his uncanny ability, as always, to pave the way for that miracle. We never enter "the room", as it were. But we are brought to the doorstep. He cultivates the space that leads up to that apperception, this is what people call elusive and dreamlike. Tarkovsky's real work is that he teaches, rewires, us how to see, effects this change in the whole of logic of space, so that we leave with Tarkovsky eyes to go back out. This is far more valuable, and insightful, than any of the imagery that blends industrial grime, fish and religious iconography (in one memorable instance, with voice-over from John's Apocalypse). It's that elements can swirl and reflect in this way.

He does several wonderful things, some of them completely breathtaking like the meditation on music that rings a chord in the listener who responds to it with what we have no other name to call but soul. He stretches space, seemingly with no effort, both in the industrial segment early and then across the Zone. He makes the geography elastic, shuffles boundaries of forward and back. It's not that this means something again, it's that the place in which you can receive _anything_ (which is perception itself) can bent thus. The result is a marvelous sense of heaving. Thunderous views of a train, or waterfalls, crash across the frame. Same thing. It's his most sculptural work so far.

The dilapidated Soviet locales provide ample opportunity for gnarly imagery, I simply shudder to think that it was actually filmed in places like we see. It's possible that we're seeing the place that killed him and several more from cast and crew.

But there's also another side that I want to draw my distance from. In Zerkalo he had reached a point of equanimity that lets go of questions and accepts what is, that for better or worse a life was lived. This is gone here and replaced with a sense of tiredness and cynicism that narrows down to the personal. Now it's not about what is let go of, it's about what is clung onto. None of it is sci-fi of course. But too much is an artist's stream-of-consciousness on what place his own art has. Too much is angsty here. What am I to make for example of Stalker being escorted to bed by his wife, now a pathetic figure who complains that no one wants what he has to show? This is a dangerous path to take because it substitutes the struggle to make sense of life, with the struggle to deliver art about doing it and complain that no one appreciates it. The latter Tarkovsky is far less interesting to me than the former. I fear he would get worse in this regard, compounded by his exile from home.

I've read about how Tarkovsy was possibly interested in Zen Buddhism and Tao while preparing for this and may have incorporated influence. There is the notion of spontaneous arising in the Zone as the Zen mind and the bit about how the soft endures while the hard breaks that comes from the Daodejing. It doesn't really venture into either, its preconceptions simply lie elsewhere. But Tarkovsky fails to make use of the Buddhist wisdom in his own predicaments. Instead of letting go, he clings to the burden of fixed views. He suffers their weight, for no reason I might add. The title of this post is a Taoist excerpt.

So there are two sides here. The journey to where perception is made fluid and mingles with its reflection and the intellectual burden of its creator. One soft, the other hard. Maybe in another 5 years I will get to see what gives way in Nostalghia.

This cult achievement of Andrei Tarkovsky is generally accepted as one of the masterpieces of Russian cinematography. When I had the opportunity to see it on the big screen, I couldn't miss it. Fortunately, the ticket was extremely cheap.

"Stalker" is based on the SF novel "Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatskiy brothers, who adapted it into the script themselves. Although its genre classification is the same as that of the novel, "Stalker" is a philosophical and psychological drama, whose SF premise is only mentioned, and I believe that it is no more than a mere illusion in the minds of the protagonists, so the SF determinant leads to completely wrong expectations.

The film opens with a very slow but mesmerizingly atmospheric and superbly shot scene, each frame of which is an art photograph. Already in those first moments, I saw myself rating it a ten, but from there on the film only goes downhill.

To be clear, the rest of the film doesn't visually lag behind that first scene, but too long shots that show totally uninteresting people who do more or less nothing, no matter how beautifully shot, are not enough to hold my attention for almost three hours. If I wanted to enjoy top photography, I would go to an exhibition and not to the cinema. Of those three hours, perhaps a third is filled with plot, which again is largely reduced to monologues, while nothing really happens. Essentially, this looks more like a monodrama than a movie.

In the center of events is an area called the Zone, in which there is a room that, for those who get it alive, fulfills the greatest wish. The basic message of the film is: "Be careful what you wish for it might come true", because the Room does not fulfill the wish that we consciously ask for, but the essential one, hidden in the depths of man.

This is an interesting premise from which you will not see anything in the film. We don't know for sure whether the Zone is special in any way at all, nor do any of the protagonists use the Room. The premise is only there to give us the background to study the personalities of the people who headed to the zone and their guide, Stalker.

The plot itself can be told in a few sentences, while the whole story is reduced to a philosophical monologue by the author through the mouths of three protagonists. There are no original philosophical ideas or interesting views on life. Just a bunch of true, but long-worn philosophical and psychological phrases, pretentiously packaged so that they seem more profound and significant than they really are.

General impression - beautifully filmed but pretentious and hard to watch, without the essential strength to justify the effort. Just because of the technical qualities and the atmosphere, I can't go below

7/10

"The photography, in this case, is like the wrapping of an empty present box." - trans_mauro.

Andrei Tarkovsky is a rarity among filmmakers in that he creates films that resemble elaborate (and always smartly written, beautifully shot and superbly acted) puzzles. The pieces are always scattered, and Tarkovsky relies on his viewer to bring the final element of the puzzle along with him. SOLARIS explores the boundaries of consciousness and the sense of grief (and it uses the titular planet as a metaphor for God). ANDREI ROUBLEV is a multi-layered voyage into religious belief. STALKER, however, is far more spiritual and existential than both of them.

A teacher and a scientist wish to go to a restricted patch of nature - the mythical conscious "Zone" - to make their wishes come true. To enter the area and survive its numerous danger, they hire a man sensible to the Zone's thoughts and actions, a Stalker. What they find there turns out to be very different from what they expected, as they come to discover who they truly are.

There's only so much you can say without getting drowned in details that would appear heavy-handed on paper but flow seamlessly on screen. Quite often, Tarkovsky reduces his characters to silence, letting their movements and eyes convey their thoughts and feelings and letting the viewer bring his own thoughts and beliefs to the film. One of STALKER's many treats is that it invites you to get carried away into your own thoughts, flowing with the images as it provides new questions to ponder... In that sense, the film is very much like a philosophical poem: a very simple surface covering innumerable layers of meaning. Yet the images Tarkovsky provides - whether filming landscapes or wide-shots or simply peering into his actors' extraordinary faces - make this almost hypnotic.

STALKER is a treasure: an invitation to go on a mental ride with a poet and philosopher. A film that makes you wonder more about yourself yet without making you anxious. The few existing films like STALKER are the reason why cinema is called "art"!

i want to say somethings about the most poetic,philosophical and intuitive director, tarkovsky and his movies ,especially Stalker.

first of all, we must all know that, tarkovsky is not for all. his poetic understanding of life and human and putting this understanding to his movies is unique in the world for my opinion. one of the most poetic and philosophical movies of him, Stalker is that kind of movie. it is like a poem written with objects. we must feel before we try to understand.

opening sequence of film contains some kind of expressionist objects with related the moral and inner conditions of the people living in the town . the "dirty" black and white take gives the viewers ,the mood of people having nothing to live, nothing to believe and nothing to give others.and the aggressive green take in the "zone" gives another vision of the life. the camera moves very slow to make us to go into to film and feel the film. tarkovsky's usage of objects and colours is very different and that is why i think he was a cinema poet. on the other hand, in addition to this "poem written with objects", the film also has very deep philosophical content. what is life,what is human, what is goodness, what is selfishness, what is devotion, what are the bases of our civilizations etc. and people are made to think all these things, not mostly with dialogs but with objects and colours and complete vision.

for example, the three objects shown while the camera goes into the water ,but actually to the heart of human being and we see one cringe, one gun and one religious icon. and these are the metaphors of the human civilizations for my opinion. and all the journey into to the "zone" and finally "room" , actually done into the human being. into our selfishness,into our subconsciousness, our badness,our goodness, our weak and strong parts. actually i can feel that , the things searched in this movie are our lost innocence . the stalker is the only people who believes something and needs to believe .and actually the journey itself is a fake. to go to the truth,faith,justice, goodness are being related with innocence in that movie. the microcosms shown poetically in the water is another metaphor shows human being's selfish behaviour. because human, destroys the things,destroys the innocence, destroys the world living around them.our today's civilization broke our strong cooperation with nature and changed this relationship to a nature disaster. the movie gives the message of the need of mercy to all the living and even non-living things in our nature. because human being's salvation is only related with that.

and the need of hope, need of believe is human being's basic needs. and our modern world destroyed all the hopes and believes. the movie contains metaphors making us to feel and think about those needs.and the most critical thing is felt in the film that self-denial is the basic need in our world.and unfortunately this value is lost and needed to be re-gain.

i can tell about all the metaphors in the movie but no need. because every person understand those things different like kafka's novels. and we just need to watch the movie with no prejudice but with open heart.

i recommend this film to all the cinema-lovers. i recommend also not to try to understand this film. only leave yourself to this great poem and it will give you all you need.

Some have claimed that "Stalker" is not a science fiction film. I'd say it's more of a science fiction film than most of what Hollywood passes off as part of the genre, most of which are simply action films with a sci-fi bent. Stalker is science fiction in the vein of the genres greatest writers like Phillip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem. It's pure science fiction, based on science, metaphysics and speculation, not some action fantasy or space opera that fits into the genre on the technicality that it takes place "in the future" or "a long, long time ago". The film is slow...very slow but it has to be to put you into the mindset of the film. After the opening 30 minutes the pacing actually draws you into the film in a more personal way more than any Cyborg-post-apocalyptic-hell crap Hollywood could spew out. This film is truly sci-fi, and truly great sci-fi.