A guide leads two men through an area known as the Zone to find a room that grants wishes.A guide leads two men through an area known as the Zone to find a room that grants wishes.A guide leads two men through an area known as the Zone to find a room that grants wishes.
- Awards
- 2 wins & 2 nominations
- Marta, doch Stalkera
- (as Natasha Abramova)
- Sobesednitsa Pisatelya
- (as F. Yurna)
- Patrulnyy politseyskiy
- (as R. Rendi)
- Professor
- (voice)
- (uncredited)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaDirector Andrei Tarkovsky spent about a year shooting all of the exterior scenes. The first part of this shoot was done over the spring and summer of 1977 with cinematographer Georgi Rerberg, using a new Kodak 5247 film stock provided by movie producer Sergio Gambarov. However, after developing these negatives, they came back with an unwatchable shade of dark green. According to the film's sound technician Vladimir Sharun, Tarkovsky always claimed that the movie was sabotaged by one of his enemies, a "well-known Soviet film director": the Kodak 5247 stock was reportedly stolen, and ended up in the hands of this director, while Tarkovsky unknowingly got a regular Kodak stock in return that was then developed incorrectly. Sharun, however, attributed the problem on "the usual Russian sloppiness", as the Kodak 5247 was newer to Soviet laboratories at the time, who didn't know how to properly process it. The disaster proved to be the final straw for Rerberg, who got the blame for the incident and walked off (or was released from) the film, so Tarkovsky had to shoot most of the film again with a new cinematographer, Aleksandr Knyazhinskiy. This contributed to the film's two-part narrative structure. Allegedly, the newly shot footage strayed even farther away from the source novel 'Roadside Picnic', and had a different look. Asked about this, director Tarkovsky said "no mother gives birth to the same child twice."
- GoofsAt about 23 minutes, when Stalker, writer and professor are driving in their car they have to hide for a motorcyclist. In the scene the motorcyclist comes from the right. From an opposite angle of view, he still comes from the right, where it should have been from the left.
- Quotes
Stalker: May everything come true. May they believe. And may they laugh at their passions. For what they call passion is not really the energy of the soul, but merely friction between the soul and the outside world. But, above all, may they believe in themselves and become as helpless as children. For softness is great and strength is worthless. When a man is born, he is soft and pliable. When he dies, he is strong and hard. When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life. That which has become hard shall not triumph.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Distant (2002)
- SoundtracksLa Marseillaise
Written by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle
This is Tarkovsky entering the mind once more. He never does it in any obvious, Inception way, it's never actually the mind; but we arrive at a place, a source of the imagining, where wind blows from and rings each thing into being. In Rublev he was the artist looking to paint the face of god in a godless world that concealed it. In Solyaris he was the cosmonaut. In Zerkalo, a filmmaker who recalled a whole life, receiving visions at the doorstep. Here he's the Stalker who takes us into the Zone, obvious enough.
Each one is self-referential of course about the very process of stepping into the movie. The Zone as a Tarkovsky movie - full of desolate nature and a mysterious presence that bends logic. We first have to cross the iron border where censors (his illiterate Soviet patrons) prevent entry.
This is the border guarded by the irongated mechanisms of reason that has to be crossed before we can begin our guided meditation beyond logic. One way he does this is by splitting himself into characters. One is a scientist, which is Tarkovsky's critique of a mechanistic worldview that reduces a tree to what biological facts it can explain. Another is a writer, a surrogate for Tarkovsky's intellectual self who despairs about the possibility of words to communicate sense. The Stalker himself as who Tarkovsky feels himself to be most purely, the guide who knows the whims of this landscape and wants nothing other than to bring us to the doorstep of miracle.
It's his uncanny ability, as always, to pave the way for that miracle. We never enter "the room", as it were. But we are brought to the doorstep. He cultivates the space that leads up to that apperception, this is what people call elusive and dreamlike. Tarkovsky's real work is that he teaches, rewires, us how to see, effects this change in the whole of logic of space, so that we leave with Tarkovsky eyes to go back out. This is far more valuable, and insightful, than any of the imagery that blends industrial grime, fish and religious iconography (in one memorable instance, with voice-over from John's Apocalypse). It's that elements can swirl and reflect in this way.
He does several wonderful things, some of them completely breathtaking like the meditation on music that rings a chord in the listener who responds to it with what we have no other name to call but soul. He stretches space, seemingly with no effort, both in the industrial segment early and then across the Zone. He makes the geography elastic, shuffles boundaries of forward and back. It's not that this means something again, it's that the place in which you can receive _anything_ (which is perception itself) can bent thus. The result is a marvelous sense of heaving. Thunderous views of a train, or waterfalls, crash across the frame. Same thing. It's his most sculptural work so far.
The dilapidated Soviet locales provide ample opportunity for gnarly imagery, I simply shudder to think that it was actually filmed in places like we see. It's possible that we're seeing the place that killed him and several more from cast and crew.
But there's also another side that I want to draw my distance from. In Zerkalo he had reached a point of equanimity that lets go of questions and accepts what is, that for better or worse a life was lived. This is gone here and replaced with a sense of tiredness and cynicism that narrows down to the personal. Now it's not about what is let go of, it's about what is clung onto. None of it is sci-fi of course. But too much is an artist's stream-of-consciousness on what place his own art has. Too much is angsty here. What am I to make for example of Stalker being escorted to bed by his wife, now a pathetic figure who complains that no one wants what he has to show? This is a dangerous path to take because it substitutes the struggle to make sense of life, with the struggle to deliver art about doing it and complain that no one appreciates it. The latter Tarkovsky is far less interesting to me than the former. I fear he would get worse in this regard, compounded by his exile from home.
I've read about how Tarkovsy was possibly interested in Zen Buddhism and Tao while preparing for this and may have incorporated influence. There is the notion of spontaneous arising in the Zone as the Zen mind and the bit about how the soft endures while the hard breaks that comes from the Daodejing. It doesn't really venture into either, its preconceptions simply lie elsewhere. But Tarkovsky fails to make use of the Buddhist wisdom in his own predicaments. Instead of letting go, he clings to the burden of fixed views. He suffers their weight, for no reason I might add. The title of this post is a Taoist excerpt.
So there are two sides here. The journey to where perception is made fluid and mingles with its reflection and the intellectual burden of its creator. One soft, the other hard. Maybe in another 5 years I will get to see what gives way in Nostalghia.
- chaos-rampant
- Mar 6, 2016
Details
Box office
- Budget
- RUR 1,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $292,049
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $11,537
- Sep 15, 2002
- Gross worldwide
- $395,274
- Runtime2 hours 42 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.37 : 1