alr

Stalker

Screening on Film
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
With Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy, Alisa Frejndlikh, Anatoli Solonitsyn.
Soviet Union/West Germany, 1979, 35mm, color and b&w, 163 min.
Russian with English subtitles.
Print source: HFA

“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, The Village Voice). 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 it to be as if the whole film had been made in a single shot,” Tarkovsky wrote. In the event, Stalker is comprised of 142—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.”

Part of film series

Read more

Time Within Time.
The Complete Andrei Tarkovsky

Other film series with this film

Read more

Five Directors (Part II)

Read more

Close Encounters

Read more

Masterworks of Modern Cinema

Read more

From the Tsars to the Stars:
A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

Read more

Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

Read more

Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

Read more

Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

Read more

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue

Read more

David Lynch, New Dimensions

Read more

Museum Hours: Mati Diop’s Dahomey

Read more

Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained

Read more

Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy