In praise of Stalker – Andrei Tarkovsky’s… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

In praise of Stalk­er – Andrei Tarkovsky’s exis­ten­tial masterpiece

23 May 2016

Words by David Jenkins

A figure in a long dark coat stands amid a vast, hilly landscape of snow-covered mounds in a dimly lit, cavernous space.
A figure in a long dark coat stands amid a vast, hilly landscape of snow-covered mounds in a dimly lit, cavernous space.
The Russ­ian director’s 1979 film is being reis­sued as part of a new retrospective.

UK film dis­trib­u­tor Curzon/​Artificial Eye are rolling out Blu-ray ver­sions of var­i­ous clas­sics by Russ­ian mae­stro Andrei Tarkovsky, and though we hold all of his films very dear to our heart, we’re just going to chan­nel our love towards one here.

Though it’s a stag­ger­ing gen­er­al­i­sa­tion and does vast dis­ser­vice to the director’s intri­cate yet expan­sive world­view, Tarkovsky seemed set on using film as a way to explore a sin­gle, eter­nal­ly per­ti­nent ques­tion: what does it all mean? 1979’s Stalk­er, loose­ly adapt­ed from Arkady and Boris Sturgatsky’s 1972 sci-fi nov­el, ​‘Road­side Pic­nic’, takes place dur­ing a polit­i­cal­ly indis­tinct future where mankind appears in dwin­dling shape.

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Three men, let by Alek­san­dr Kaydanovskiy’s Stalk­er, ven­ture through a patch of post-indus­tri­al scrub­land called the ​‘Zone’ in order to reach a mys­ti­cal place called the ​‘Room’, a venue which has the pow­er to grant dreams and wish­es of those that step inside it. As such, the gov­ern­ment have tried to make sure that peo­ple aren’t able to reach the ​‘Room’, set­ting out a series of psy­cho­log­i­cal boo­by traps along the ardu­ous road.

Though it can be read as a sim­ple exis­ten­tial para­ble of life being worth­less with­out the allur­ing mys­tery of its essence, Tarkovsky con­stant­ly builds on the film’s detail and com­plex­i­ty. The stag­ger­ing final shot even casu­al­ly under­mines every­thing that’s come before. Maybe Tarkovsky is a direc­tor whose films are best expe­ri­enced in the closed envi­ron­ment of the cin­e­ma, where dis­trac­tion is kept to an absolute minimum.

Yet Stalk­er is a movie to be watched as many times as phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble, to be picked apart, dis­cussed, argued over, writ­ten about, to inspire music, books, poet­ry, oth­er movies, teach­ers, philoso­phers, his­to­ri­ans, gov­ern­ments, even the way an indi­vid­ual might chose to live their life. It real­ly is that astounding.

Sculpt­ing Time, fea­tur­ing sev­en of Russ­ian auteur’s films screened from new dig­i­tal prints, runs at select­ed cin­e­mas across the UK and Ire­land from 20 May. To find out where you can see Tarkovsky on the big screen near you vis­it tarkovsky​.co​.uk

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