/ Film Class #49 / Andrei Tarkovsky / Stalker (Сталкер)

When we talk about Stalker, we are talking about an authentic masterpiece, which basically  only relies on its source a novel Roadside Picnic by Brothers Strugatskiy, and draws just the bare frame of the story and the characters and the characteristic relationships in which they come. Everything else is under the term "superstructure" conceived in the heart and the head of an exceptional creator, Andrei Tarkovsky.
Tarkovsky’s work involved, as adapta­tions almost invariably must, a rigorous simplifi­cation of the story line. For example, the several journeyings into the Zone recounted in the book are reduced to a single incursion, while the Stalker’s companions, the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko), are inventions on the director’s part (though one can recog­nize in them composite ele­ments from different characters in the original (1)
Tarkovsky wrote, “I could extract a very harmonious form from the Srugatsky story; with flowing, detailed action but at the same time balanced and purely ideal – thus semi-transcendant (sic), absurd, absolute”. Tarkovsky recast the title character as a kind of holy fool, a guide to and acolyte of the Zone’s central mystery, a Room that magically seems to grant its entrants their dearest wishes. (2)

The film as a whole, its atmosphere, issues and doubts that are baffling us, but not in the sense that it rationally submits to us in such a way as directly visualizing them. Guided by this line of development of the basic atmosphere, hermetic to exclusivity, the question arises what Stalker is like a film, and what is its peculiarity?



First of all, Stalker is a metaphorical story of the trip of three people to the uncertainty of the "Zone" in which the notion of happiness is something that is at hand, a challenge, therefore, some kind of travel record and its consequences. But because of the fact that he introduced two representative figures of our civilization, scientist and artist into the film, who, together with Stalker, go to the vast spaces of the world for which they didn't even know it exists, Tarkovsky's story adds the dimension of the tracts, first the relationship between the artist and the world in which he lives , as well as the relation of individuals, thus forming a fierce dilemma that should either legitimize or relativize the breakthrough into the "Zone", the breakthrough beyond the given and the existing, where everything is at your fingertips and certain.

STALKER: “Our moods, our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings can bring about change here. And we are in no condition to comprehend them. Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe ones become impassable, and route can be either plain and easy, or impossibly confusing… everything that happens here depends on us, not on the Zone.”

The conceit that the Zone is a nonlinear, and therefore deadly, alternate reality, powers the film. “Within this framework the everyday world in all its commonplace and often sordid reality is authentically transformed and made strange, so that for two hours and forty-one minutes we live inside it and accept its laws.” (2)



In the claustrophobic world Stalker presents to us, the Zone is the only open space, it is a clearing in which the new can become manifest. In it, the laws of nature are supposedly suspended, ready to shift with little notice. Flowers are scentless in the Zone, as if they form part of a façade just barely maintained. The room brings out the hidden desires of those who reach it, fulfilling not those daydreams which people carry around in their conscious minds, but rather the deeper wishes, even those which are horrid.

The Zone works like the imagination, and that is where I see the focus of this film. Tarkovsky seems to be wrestling with, among other things, his artistry, the very eye through which we are seeing this story.
Going into the Zone involves trying to be attuned to a shifting landscape, a world which changes in accord with its visitors. Every work of art which transcends mere didacticism or advertising changes in similar ways based on its reader, its listener, its viewer.
The imagination poses a threat to the most literal and materialistic of worldviews, as it threatens to disrupt all those tidy little categories into which the world is supposed to fit. Creativity threatens, as the Professor seems to intuit, not only the established order but also the very way in which order comes to be established. Lest that sound like an empty platitude, consider the role charisma and the use and abuse of art has played in movements from Nazism to the struggle for human rights. What sort of threat could imagination pose to members of the intelligentsia, though, or to artists? The Writer, for one, may represent a nihilistic strand of the same. This sort of creature, whether affecting ennui or the endlessly parodic manner of the thorough-going “post-modernist,” depends on the perception of the imagination as being exhausted. You can only declare “The Novel (or Poetry or Film or etc.) is Dead” if you can successfully avoid a brush with creativity. If Tarkovsky identifies with anyone in this film, it is obviously the Stalker: a frustrated poet, a man haunted by what he is leaving future generations and how much better a job he could have done. The Stalker stands vulnerable to the Zone, respectful of it, yet also aware of its treacherous and changeable nature. He knows this realm cannot be wrestled into stable categories and he knows a reckless, cynical approach will yield nothing but ashes. (4)

Whatever the Zone may be said to “stand for,” Tarkovsky lays down a striking hint at the end of the film that it has not finished having its say. In the last two minutes of Stalker, he not only upends many of the conclusions viewers may have reached, he does so with a casual, rather self-assured gesture.
That ending retroactively changed the mood of everything you just watched. Give it a try and see what the Zone provokes in you. (4)

Partialy translated from PULSE article ''Stalker- Andrej Tarkovski'' by B.Savkovic

(1) https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4739-stalker-meaning-and-making
(2) Stalker, Brad Weismann, September 2013, Cinémathèque Annotations on Film, Issue 70
(3) Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994, p. 153
(4) In the Zone: An Excursion into Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film “Stalker”, Matthew Pridham