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STALKER
1979
Director
Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring
Alisa Freyndlikh
Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy
Anatoliy Solonitsyn
Mykola Hrynko
Runtime
162 MINUTES
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“A perverse replay of SOLARIS’s cosmic voyage, a remake of RUBLEV in a secular world of postapocalyptic misery, a premonition of Chernobyl and Soviet disintegration.” – J. Hoberman
Arguably Tarkovsky’s purest articulation of the film as spiritual quest, STALKER develops a radically different attitude to time than the jigsaw of his previous film, MIRROR. “I wanted time and its passing to be revealed, to have their existence within each frame; for the articulations between shots to be the continuation of the action and nothing more, to involve no dislocation of time, not to function as a mechanism for selecting and dramatically organizing the material—I wanted it to be as if the whole film had been made in a single shot,” Tarkovsky wrote. STALKER is comprised of only 142 shots—each chiseled with the greatest precision. The basic outline of the plot derives from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic: ascetic Stalker leads Writer and Professor, both figures of intellectual disenchantment, from a barren wasteland into the lush post-industrial environs of The Zone, a mysterious and forbidden territory believed to actualize desires. Tarkovsky identified with each of the characters but was especially drawn to Stalker as “the best part of myself, and also the part that is the least real.”
“Within this viscous, slow-moving cadence, time is felt in all its heft, divorced from all capitalist anxieties arising from its passage.” – Amreen Moideen
Arguably Tarkovsky’s purest articulation of the film as spiritual quest, STALKER develops a radically different attitude to time than the jigsaw of his previous film, MIRROR. “I wanted time and its passing to be revealed, to have their existence within each frame; for the articulations between shots to be the continuation of the action and nothing more, to involve no dislocation of time, not to function as a mechanism for selecting and dramatically organizing the material—I wanted it to be as if the whole film had been made in a single shot,” Tarkovsky wrote. STALKER is comprised of only 142 shots—each chiseled with the greatest precision. The basic outline of the plot derives from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic: ascetic Stalker leads Writer and Professor, both figures of intellectual disenchantment, from a barren wasteland into the lush post-industrial environs of The Zone, a mysterious and forbidden territory believed to actualize desires. Tarkovsky identified with each of the characters but was especially drawn to Stalker as “the best part of myself, and also the part that is the least real.”
“Within this viscous, slow-moving cadence, time is felt in all its heft, divorced from all capitalist anxieties arising from its passage.” – Amreen Moideen