Stalker (1979 film)

Stalker Сталкер
Directed by	Andrei Tarkovsky
Written by	Arkadi Strugatsky Boris Strugatsky
Produced by	Aleksandra Demidova [A]
Starring	Alexander Kaidanovsky Anatoli Solonitsyn Nikolai Grinko
Cinematography	Alexander Knyazhinsky
Edited by	Lyudmila Feiginova
Music by	Eduard Artemyev
Production company	Mosfilm
Release dates	May 1979 (1979-05) Dom Kino, Moscow
Running time	163 min.
Country	Soviet Union
Language	Russian
Budget	1,000,000 rubles

Stalker (Russian: Сталкер) is a 1979 science fiction film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, with a screenplay written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, loosely based on their novel Roadside Picnic. It depicts an expedition led by the Stalker to bring his two clients to a site known as the Zone, which has the supposed potential to fulfil a person's innermost desires.

The title of the film, which is the same in Russian and English, is derived from the English word to stalk in the long-standing meaning of approaching furtively, much like a hunter. In the film a stalker is a professional guide to the zone, someone who crosses the border into the forbidden zone with a specific goal.

Plot summary

The Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) works as a guide who leads people through "the Zone" — an otherwise mundane rural area scattered with ruined buildings, where normal laws of physics no longer apply — to encounter "the Room", said to grant the deepest, innermost wishes of anyone who steps inside. In his home with his wife and daughter, the Stalker's wife (Alisa Freindlich) urges him not to go into the Zone because of the legal consequences, but he ignores her pleas.

The Stalker goes to a bar, where he meets the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko), who will be his clients on his next trip into the Zone. The three of them evade a military blockade that guards the Zone using a Land-Rover — attracting gunfire from the guards as they go — and then ride into the heart of the Zone on a railway work car. In a single shot, almost 7 minutes long, the 3 sit motionless, looking in 3 opposite directions on the railway work car, with the only sound accompaniment being the squeaking of its winch. As they pass from urban setting to rural, their surroundings grow strikingly colorful in contrast to the urban setting.

The Stalker tells his clients that they must do exactly as he says to survive the dangers that, while invisible, are all around them. The Stalker tests various routes by throwing metal nuts tied with strips of cloth ahead of him before walking into a new area. The Zone appears peaceful and harmless. The Writer is skeptical that there is any real danger, while the Professor generally follows the Stalker's advice.

The three men advance through the Zone while sharing philosophical discussion about their reasons for wanting to visit the Room. The Writer expresses concern that he is losing his inspiration, while the Professor hopes to win a Nobel prize. Meanwhile, the Stalker — who explains that he has never gone into the Room himself — quotes from the New Testament and bemoans the loss of faith in society. The Stalker at times refers to a previous Stalker, named "Porcupine," who led his poet brother to his death in the Zone, visited the Room and gained a lot of money, and then hanged himself. It appears that the Room fulfills all of the wishes of the visitor - the problem being that these might not be the consciously expressed wishes, but the true unconscious ones. When the Writer confronts the Stalker about his knowledge of the Zone and the Room, he says that it all comes from Porcupine.The movie, however, suggests that the Stalker is Porcupine - who came to the Room & found that, despite his conscious wish for material prosperity, what he had actually wished for was his brother's demise in order to marry his wife - and now continues to do this work as expiation.

The men walk through meadows and then enter a tunnel that the Stalker calls "the meat grinder." In one of the decayed buildings, a phone inexplicably begins to ring. The Writer answers and says into the phone that "this is not the clinic," and hangs up. The Professor then uses the phone to call a colleague. In the resultant conversation, he reveals his true motive for having come to the Room. He has brought a bomb with him and intends to destroy the Room out of fear that it could be used for personal gain by evil men. The three men fight verbally and physically; the Professor backs down from his plan to destroy the Room. Their journey ends when they finally arrive at the entrance to the Room. The men sit outside the Room in a long uninterrupted shot and never enter it. A rainstorm begins to fall from a dark sky where a ceiling once was, into the ruined building, and then gradually fades away.

The Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor are shown to be back in the bar in a single cut - as if the journey back is insignificant - and meet with the Stalker's wife and daughter. A mysterious black dog that followed the three men through the Zone is now in the bar with them. When his wife asks where he got it, the Stalker says that it got attached to him and he could not leave it in the Zone. As the Stalker leaves the bar with his family and the dog, we see that his child, nicknamed "Monkey" is crippled, and cannot walk unaided.

Later, when the Stalker's wife says she would like to visit the Room, he seems to have doubts about the Zone; he tells her he fears her dreams will not be fulfilled. The Stalker's wife then contemplates her relationship with the Stalker, only to conclude that she is better off with him. Monkey sits alone in the kitchen. She recites a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev and then lays her head on the table and appears to psychokinetically push three drinking glasses across the table, one after the other, with the last one falling to the floor. After the third glass falls to the floor, a train passes by, causing the entire apartment to shake - an ironical superficial material explanantion, as if inviting those viewers attached to these intellectually, to self-reflect.

Cast

• Alisa Freindlich as the Stalker's Wife
• Alexander Kaidanovsky as the Stalker
• Anatoli Solonitsyn as the Writer
• Nikolai Grinko as the Professor

Supporting actors:

• Natasha Abramova as Monkey, the Stalker's daughter
• F. Yurna, Y. Kostin and R. Rendi

Production

Writing

The film is loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. After reading the novel, initially Tarkovsky recommended it to his friend, the film director Mikhail Kalatozov, thinking that he might be interested in adapting it into a film. Kalatozov, however, could not obtain the rights to the film from the Strugatsky brothers and abandoned the project. Tarkovsky then began to be more and more interested in adapting the novel. He hoped that it would allow him to make a film that conforms to the classical Aristotelian unity, that is the unity of action, the unity of location and the unity of time.

The plot and flow of the film departs considerably from the novel. According to Tarkovsky the film has nothing in common with the novel except for the two words Stalker and Zone.

However, watching the film and reading the novel demonstrates that there are, in fact, several similarities between the novel and the film. In both works, the Zone is guarded by a police or military guard, apparently authorizied with deadly force. The Stalker in both works tests the safety of his path by tossing nuts and bolts (tied with scraps of cloth), ensuring that gravity is normal (i.e. the object flies in an expected path.) Also, a character named Porcupine is a mentor Stalker to the protagonist. Finally, the target of the expedition (the final expedition in the case of the novel) in both works is a wish-granting device.

An early draft of the screenplay was published as a novel Stalker that differs much from the finished film. In Roadside Picnic the site was specifically described as the site of alien visitation; the name of the novel derives from a metaphor proposed by a character who compares the visit to a roadside picnic.

In an interview on the MK2 DVD, production designer Rashit Safiullin describes the Zone as a space in which humans can live without the trappings of society and can speak about the most important things freely.

Some elements of the original novel remain. In Roadside Picnic, the Zone is full of strange artifacts and phenomena that defy known science. A vestige of this idea carries over to the film, in the form of Stalker's habit of throwing metal nuts down a path before walking along it; the characters in Roadside Picnic do something similar when they suspect they are near gravitational anomalies that could crush them.

In another sharp contrast, the penultimate scene of the movie is a first person monologue by the Stalker's wife, where she looks directly into the camera and explains, with increasing authority, how she met the Stalker and decided to stick with him. It is the only such scene in the entire 160 minutes of the film; the content though is a kind of answer to what the same woman had said in the opening scene, when she blamed her husband for their miseries. It carries clear allusions to Christ (who also called strangers to "follow me") and as some reviewers pointed out, echoes the style of 19th-century Russian novels with their bold and passionate heroines.

Production

In an interview on the MK2 DVD, the production designer, Rashit Safiullin, recalls that Tarkovsky spent a year shooting a version of the outdoor scenes of Stalker. However, when the crew got back to Moscow, they found that all of the film had been improperly developed and their footage was unusable. The film had been shot on experimental Kodak stock with which Soviet laboratories were unfamiliar.

Even before the film stock problem was discovered, relations between Tarkovsky and the first cinematographer, Georgy Rerberg, had been in serious deterioration. After seeing the poorly developed material, Rerberg left the first screening session and never came back. By the time the film stock defect was discovered, Tarkovsky had shot all the outdoor scenes and had to burn them. Safiullin contends that Tarkovsky was so despondent that he wanted to abandon further production of the film.

After the loss of the film stock, the Soviet film boards wanted to shut the film down, officially writing it off. But Tarkovsky came up with a solution: he asked to make a two-part film, which meant additional deadlines and more funds. Tarkovsky ended up reshooting almost all of the film with a new cinematographer, Aleksandr Knyazhinsky. According to Safiullin, the finished version of Stalker is completely different from the one Tarkovsky originally shot.

The film mixes sepia and color footage; within the Zone, in the countryside, all is colorful, while the outside, urban world is tinted sepia.

One of the deserted hydro power plants near Jägala Waterfall, recently renovated

The central part of the film, in which the characters move around the Zone, was shot in a few days at two deserted hydro power plants on the Jägala river near Tallinn, Estonia. The shot before they enter the Zone is an old Flora chemical factory in the center of Tallinn, next to the old Rotermann salt storage and the electric plant—now a culture factory where a memorial plate of the film has been set up in 2008. Some shots from the Zone were filmed in Maardu, next to the Iru powerplant, while the shot with the gates to the Zone was filmed in Lasnamäe, next to Punane Street behind the Idakeskus. Some shots were filmed near the Tallinn-Narva highway bridge on the Pirita River.

The documentary film Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of "Stalker" by Igor Mayboroda sheds new light on the production of "Stalker". The relation between Rerberg and Tarkovsky suffered tremendously during the production of "Stalker". Rerberg felt that Tarkovsky was not ready for this script. He told Tarkovsky to rewrite the script in order to achieve a good result. Tarkovsky ignored him and continued shooting. After several arguments, Tarkovsky sent Rerberg home. Ultimately, Tarkovsky shot this movie three times, consuming over 5,000 meters of film. People who have seen both the first version shot by Rerberg (as Director of Photography) and the final theatrical release say that they are almost identical. Tarkovsky sent home other crew members in addition to Rerberg and excluded them from the ending credits as well. Many people involved in the film production had untimely deaths, which were attributed to the long, arduous shooting schedule of the film as well as to toxins present at the shooting locations. Vladimir Sharun recalls:

We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris.

Cinematography

Like Tarkovsky's other films, Stalker relies on long takes with slow, subtle camera movement, rejecting the conventional use of rapid montage. Almost all of the shots not set in the Zone are in a high-contrast brown monochrome.

The film contains not more than 142 shots in 163 minutes with an average shot length of almost one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes.

Soundtrack

The Stalker film score was composed by Eduard Artemyev, who had also composed the film scores for Tarkovsky's previous films Solaris and The Mirror. For Stalker Artemyev composed and recorded two different versions of the score. The first score was done with an orchestra alone but was rejected by Tarkovsky. The second score that was used in the final film was created on a synthesizer along with traditional instruments that were manipulated using sound effects. In the final film score the boundaries between music and sound were blurred, as natural sounds and music interact to the point were they are indistinguishable. In fact, many of the natural sounds were not production sounds but were created by Artemyev on his synthesizer. For Tarkovsky music was more than just a parallel illustration of the visual image. He believed that music distorts and changes the emotional tone of a visual image while not changing the meaning. He also believed that in a film with complete theoretical consistency music will have no place and that instead music is replaced by sounds. According to Tarkovsky, he aimed at this consistency and moved into this direction in Stalker and Nostalghia.

In addition to the original monophonic soundtrack a newer, alternative soundtrack remixed in 5.1 surround sound exists. This alternative soundtrack was created for the 2001 DVD release by the Russian Cinema Council (Ruscico). Apart from remixing the mono soundtrack into stereo surround sound, music and sound effects were removed and added in several scenes. Music was added to the scene where the three are traveling to the zone on a motorized draisine. In the opening and the final scene Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was removed and in the opening scene in Stalker's house ambient sounds were added, changing the original soundtrack, in which this scene was completely silent except for the sound of a train.

Film score

Initially Tarkovsky had no clear understanding of the musical atmosphere of the final film and only an approximate idea where in the film the music was to be. Even after he had shot all the material he continued his search for the ideal film score, wanting a combination of Oriental and Western music. In a conversation with Artemyev he explained that he needed music that reflects the idea that although the East and the West can coexist, they are not able to understand each other. One of Tarkovsky's ideas was to perform Western music on Oriental instruments, or vice versa, performing Oriental music on European instruments. Artemyev proposed to try this idea with the motet Pulcherrima Rosa by an anonymous 14th century Italian composer dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In its original form Tarkovsky did not perceive the motet as suitable for the film and asked Artemyev to give it an Oriental sound. Later, Tarkovsky proposed to invite musicians from Armenia and Azerbaijan and to let them improvise on the melody of the motet. A musician was invited from Armenia who played the main melody on a tar, accompanied by orchestral background music written by Artemyev. Tarkovsky, who, unusually for him, attended the full recording session, rejected the final result as not what he was looking for.

File:Tar lute 022.jpg

A tar, a traditional Azerbaijani instrument that is also called to be as Caucasian tar is used in the Stalker theme.

Rethinking their approach they finally found the solution in a theme that would create a state of inner calmness and inner satisfaction, or as Tarkovsky said "space frozen in a dynamic equilibrium." Artemyev knew about a musical piece from Indian classical music where a prolonged and unchanged background tone is performed on a tambura. As this gave Artemyev the impression of frozen space, he used this inspiration and created a background tone on his synthesizer similar to the background tone performed on the tambura. The tar then improvised on the background sound, together with a flute as a European, Western instrument. To mask the obvious combination of European and Oriental instruments he passed the foreground music through the effect channels of his SYNTHI 100 synthesizer. These effects included modulating the sound of the flute and lowering the speed of the tar, so that what Artemyev called "the life of one string" could be heard. Tarkovsky was amazed by the result, especially liking the sound of the tar, and used the theme without any alterations in the film.

Sound design

The title sequence is accompanied by Artemyev's main theme. The opening sequence of the film showing Stalker's room is mostly silent. Periodically one hears what could be a train. The sound becomes louder and clearer over time until the sound and the vibrations of objects in the room give a sense of a train's passing by without the train's being visible. This aural impression is quickly subverted by the muffled sound of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The source of this music is unclear, thus setting the tone for the blurring of reality in the film. For this part of the film Tarkovsky was also considering music by Richard Wagner or the Marseillaise. In an interview with Tonino Guerra Tarkovsky said that he wanted "music that is more or less popular, that expresses the movement of the masses, the theme of humanity's social destiny. But this music must be barely heard beneath the noise, in a way that the spectator is not aware of it.". As the sound of the train becomes more and more distant, the sounds of the house, such as the creaking floor, water running through pipes, and the humming of a heater become more prominent. While the Stalker leaves his house and wanders around an industrial landscape, the audience hears industrial sounds such as train whistles, ship foghorns, and train wheels. When the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor set off from the bar in an off-road vehicle, the engine noise merges into an electronic tone. The natural sound of the engine falls off as the vehicle reaches the horizon. Initially almost inaudible, the electronic tone emerges and replaces the engine sound as if time has frozen.

"I would like most of the noise and sound to be composed by a composer. In the film, for example, the three people undertake a long journey in a railway car. I'd like that the noise of the wheels on the rails not be the natural sound but elaborated upon by the composer with electronic music. At the same time, one mustn't be aware of music, nor natural sounds."

Andrei Tarkovsky in an interview with Tonino Guerra in 1979.

The journey to the Zone on a motorized draisine features a disconnection between the visual image and the sound. The presence of the draisine is registered only through the clanking sound of the wheels on the tracks. Neither the draisine nor the scenery passing by is shown, since the camera is focused on the faces of the characters. This disconnection draws the audience into the inner world of the characters and transforms the physical journey into an inner journey. This effect on the audience is reinforced by Artemyev's synthesizer effects, which make the clanking wheels sound less and less natural as the journey progresses. When the three arrive in the Zone initially, it appears to be silent. Only after some time, and only slightly audibly can one hear the sound of a distant river, the sound of the blowing wind, or the occasional cry of an animal. These sounds grow richer and more audible while the Stalker makes his first venture into the Zone, initially leaving the professor and the writer behind, and as if the sound draws him towards the zone. The sparseness of sounds in the zone draws attention to specific sounds, which, as in other scenes, are largely disconnected from the visual image. Animals can be heard in the distance but are never shown. A breeze can be heard, but no visual reference is shown. This effect is reinforced by occasional synthesizer effects which meld with the natural sounds and blur the boundaries between artificial and alien sounds and the sounds of nature.

After the three travelers appear from the tunnel, the sound of dripping water can be heard. While the camera slowly pans to the right, a waterfall appears. While the visual transition of the panning shot is slow, the aural transition is sudden. As soon as the waterfall appears, the sound of the dripping water falls off while the thundering sound of the waterfall emerges, almost as if time has jumped. In the next scene Tarkovsky again uses the technique of disconnecting sound and visual image. While the camera pans over the burning ashes of a fire and over some water, the audience hears the conversation of the Stalker and the Writer who are back in the tunnel looking for the professor. Finding the Professor outside, the three are surprised to realize that the have ended up at an earlier point in time. This and the previous disconnection of sound and the visual image illustrate the Zone’s power to alter time and space. This technique is even more evident in the next scene where the three travelers are resting. The sounds of a river, the wind, dripping water, and fire can be heard in a discontinuous way that is now partially disconnected from the visual image. When the Professor, for example, extinguishes the fire by throwing his coffee on it, all sounds but that of the dripping water fall off. Similarly, we can hear and see the Stalker and the river. Then the camera cuts back to the Professor while the audience can still hear the river for a few more seconds. This impressionist use of sound prepares the audience for the dream sequences accompanied by a variation of the Stalker theme that has been already heard during the title sequence.

During the journey in the Zone, the sound of water becomes more and more prominent, which, combined with the visual image, presents the zone as a drenched world. In an interview Tarkovsky dismissed the idea that water has a symbolic meaning in his films, saying that there was so much rain in his films because it is always raining in Russia. In another interview, on the film Nostalghia, however, he said "Water is a mysterious element, a single molecule of which is very photogenic. It can convey movement and a sense of change and flux." Emerging from the tunnel called the meat grinder by the Stalker they arrive at the entrance of their destination, the room. Here, as in the rest of the film, sound is constantly changing and not necessarily connected to the visual image. The journey in the Zone ends with the three sitting in the room, silent, with no audible sound. When the sound resumes, it is again the sound of water but with a different timbre, softer and gentler, as if to give a sense of catharsis and hope. The transition back to the world outside the zone is supported by sound. While the camera still shows a pool of water inside the Zone, the audience begins to hear the sound of a train and Ravel's Boléro, reminiscent of the opening scene. The soundscape of the world outside the zone is the same as before, characterized by train wheels, foghorns of a ship and train whistles. The film ends as it began, with the sound of a train passing by, accompanied by the muffled sound of Beethoven's Ninth symphony, this time the Ode to Joy from the final moments of the symphony. As in the rest of the film the disconnect between the visual image and the sound leaves the audience in the unclear whether the sound is real or an illusion.

Distribution

Stalker sold 4.3 million tickets in the Soviet Union.

DVD

• In GDR DEFA did a complete German synchronization of the movie which was shown in cinema 1982. This was used by Icestorm Entertainment on a DVD release, but was heavily criticized for its lack of the original language version, subtitles and had an overall bad image quality.
• RUSCICO produced a version for the international market containing the film on two DVDs with remastered audio and video. It contains the original Russian audio in a enhanced Dolby Digital 5.1-remix as well as the original mono version. The DVD also contains subtitles in 13 languages and interviews with Alexander Knyazhinsky, Rashit Safiullin and Edward Artemiev.

Reception

Officials at Goskino were critical of the film, on being told that the film should be faster and more dynamic, Tarkovsky replied:

the film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.

The Goskino representative then explained that he was trying to give the point of view of the audience. Tarkovsky supposedly retorted:

I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.

The Western Reception has been a little timid, the movie was slowly made available and since it was after the release the reviews were not concurrent, nevertheless, it currently holds 100% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Film critic Derek Adams compared Stalker to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now also released in 1979, "as a journey to the heart of darkness, [Stalker] is a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's."

Influence

Seven years after the making of the film, the Chernobyl accident led to the depopulation of an area rather like that in the film. Some of those employed to take care of the abandoned nuclear power plant refer to themselves as "stalkers" and to the area around the damaged reactor as "The Zone."

References

Footnotes

^A In the Soviet Union the role of a producer was different from that in Western countries and more similar to the role of a line producer or a unit production manager.

Bibliography

• Egorova, Tatyana (1997), Soviet Film Music, Routledge, pp. 249–252, ISBN 3718659115 {{citation}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
• Gianvito, John (2006), Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 1578062209
• Johnson, Vida T. (01.12.1994), The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Indiana University Press, ISBN 0253208874 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Smith, Stefan (November 2007), "The edge of perception: sound in Tarkovsky's Stalker", The Soundtrack, 1 (1), Intellect Publishing: 41–52, doi:10.1386/st.1.1.41_1
• Tarkovsky, Andrei (1987), Sculpting in Time, University of Texas Press, ISBN 0292776241 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• Stalker at IMDb
• Stalker at Rotten Tomatoes
• Stalker at AllMovie
• Stalker at Nostalghia.com
• Template:Et icon Geopeitus.ee Filming locations of Stalker