It’s so quiet out here. It is the quietest place in the world ✵ Stalker - ANGELS AND MONSTERS ✵ 1975–1991 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Science fiction

DIRECTOR

Andrei Tarkovsky

WRITERS

Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky (screenplay and novel)

STARS

Alisa Freyndlikh, Aleksandr Kaydanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn

BEFORE

1966 Anatoly Solonitsyn stars in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, about a medieval iconographer.

1972 Tarkovsky’s movie Solaris begins a prolific period.

AFTER

1986 In his final movie, The Sacrifice, a man bargains with God to save mankind.

Like all great artists, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky was often asked where he found the ideas for his movies. Tarkovsky himself, however, did not think the topic of inspiration was really much of a point for discussion. “The idea of a film,” he once said, “always comes to me in a very ordinary, boring manner, bit by bit, by rather banal phases. To recount it would only be a waste of time. There is really nothing fascinating, nothing poetic, about it.”

Tarkovsy’s pessimistic view of art in general might also seem surprising. “It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything,” he said, “since in 4,000 years humanity has learned nothing at all.”

It is worth mentioning these things since they go some way in explaining the director’s own, oblique attitude to his art, which he discussed himself in his 1986 book Sculpting In Time, its title the perfect metaphor for his cinematic technique. A Tarkovsky movie is in some ways like a piece of sculpture by British artist Henry Moore: the abstractions mean as much as the realities, and what is left out often has as much significance as the elements that remain.

Stalker, like many of Tarkovsky’s other movies, was adapted from an existing work, in this case, the 1971 novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which describes the aftermath of a series of extraterrestrial incursions, called the Visitation, at six zones around the globe.

The casual detritus left behind by the unseen Visitors is compared in the book to “the usual mess” left at a picnic: “apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.” Just as a picnic’s detritus baffles—and threatens—the animals that find it, so too are humans perplexed by the strange phenomena that they stumble across after the Visitors have left.

“When a man thinks of the past, he becomes kinder.”

The Stalker / Stalker

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The movie’s meaning has been endlessly discussed since it first came out. Tarkovsky himself refused to be drawn in.

The unexplained

Unusually for science fiction of the time, the actual Visitation itself was of no concern in the novel; nor is it for Tarkvosky. His interest in the science-fiction genre resulted in another masterpiece, Solaris, but he used the form to suit his own artistic ends. Indeed, Stalker’s slow opening does not even try to explain what has given rise to the mysterious entity called “The Zone.” At this point, nothing is known about its origins, its purpose, or its nature except that anything that goes into The Zone does not come out again, and that it has been sealed off by the authorities, and is guarded by military police.

What it is that lurks in The Zone is something Tarkovsky has no desire to reveal. As the title of Sculpting in Time suggests, he is interested in time, something he uses a lot of—his movie clocks in at around the three-hour mark. It begins on the outskirts of the story, where the title character (played by Aleksandr Kaydanovsky) is getting ready for work. The word “stalker” suggests menace, but in this near-future world, a Stalker is both a thief who tries to smuggle artifacts out of The Zone and a guide who is willing to take others in.

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The “Writer” (Anatoly Solonitsyn) places a crown of thorns on his head as the men wait in the telephone room while in The Zone. Like many images in the movie, the allusion is obscure.

Entering The Zone

The Stalker’s world is poor and run-down, a fact reflected in the sepia cinematography used in the first portion of the movie, but his wife still begs him not to go into The Zone and is afraid for his safety. He brushes away her concerns and heads off to meet his two clients, known simply as the Writer and the Professor, who want to travel to The Zone, hearing that it has strange and possibly magical powers.

When the trio arrive at The Zone, the movie suddenly switches from sepia into the colors of the modern world: “We are home,” says the Stalker. But the men have not yet reached their ultimate destination. Within The Zone, where the normal practicalities of life no longer apply and lots of strange, inexplicable phenomena seem to occur, there is a place called The Room. When they find it, the Stalker tells them, with excitement and awe, “Your most cherished desire will come true here…” adding, “The desire that has made you suffer most.”

However, it is not The Room itself that concerns Tarkovsky but his characters’ arrival at its threshold. What is it that they really want? And what will they find inside? At this point, Stalker mutes its thriller aspect and becomes a postapocalyptic existential drama, in which its three protagonists discuss their lives and destinies, reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1953).

"The quintessence of Tarkovsky’s spaces, the Zone is where one goes to see one’s innermost desires. It is, in short, the cinema."

Robert Bird
Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema, 2008

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The Stalker lies injured as the men first enter The Zone. As they venture into the unknown, to the sound of dripping water, the Stalker describes it as “the quietest place in the world.”

What next?

The final section deals with the Stalker’s wife and child, finally closing in on his daughter’s face as she lies with her head on the kitchen table, staring at three glasses that seem to rattle under her gaze while a train passes. Like many of the images in Tarkovsky’s movie, it comes with no explanation. One might see Stalker as a Soviet answer to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which poses the question, “Where do we go from here?” But as to whether Tarkovsky was making a comment about life in the Soviet Union or life on Earth, the director himself refused to be drawn in: in his mind, a true artwork should not be reduced to its components and interpreted so simply. “We are judged not by what we did or wanted to do,” he said in an interview, “but we are judged by people who don’t want to understand the work as a whole or even to look at it. Instead they isolate individual fragments and details, clutching to them and trying to prove that there is some special, main point in them. This is delirium.”

To realize his stark vision, Tarkovsky searched for a suitably bleak location for Stalker, and found it in Estonia, at an old hydroelectric power station and a factory dumping toxic chemicals upstream. He, his wife, and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn all later succumbed to cancer, possibly due to contamination at the location.

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After the men draw lots, the Writer is chosen to enter a metal tunnel in The Zone. The tunnel leads them toward the mysterious Room.

My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world. And my subconscious is yearning for a piece of juicy meat. But what do I want?”

The Stalker / Stalker

ANDREI TARKOVSKY Director

Born in 1932 to a family of poets and writers in the Soviet town of Zavrazhye, Andrei Tarkovsky decided upon a career in movie in his early twenties. Enrolling to study direction at Moscow’s State Institute Of Cinematography, where Sergei Eisenstein was also taught, he made his first student short film in 1956: The Killers, adapted from a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Tarkovsky’s first feature, Ivan’s Childhood, launched a high-profile career of stylish and nuanced art-house movies. After a slow start—just two full-length features in the 1960s, including the acclaimed Andrei Rublev—he made up for lost time in the 1970s, beginning with the space story Solaris. Characterized by long takes and mysterious symbolism, his movies pose deep existential questions about life and its meaning. He died in Paris in 1986.

Key movies

1962 Ivan’s Childhood

1966 Andrei Rublev

1972 Solaris

1979 Stalker

What else to watch: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) ✵ The Color of Pomegranates (1969) ✵ Solaris (1972) ✵ Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)