Andrei Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky’s early work includes :
1)Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and
2)Andrei Rublev (1966)
He is probably best known for his work of the 1970s and 1980s:
1)Solaris (1972)
2)The Mirror (1974)
3) Stalker (1979)
4)The Sacrifice (1986).
Mast and Kawin refer to him as a creator of worlds, but perhaps what they mean is that his films typically deal with the metaphysical or the spiritual.
Tarkovsky’s films are typically what some may describe as slow because they use long takes of naturalistic beauty. His films sometimes include images of levitation, dreams, and memories of childhood.
Tarkovsky's film Stalker (1979)
1)A loose adaptation of the Russian sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and
Boris Strugatsky.
2) In the film, a figure known as the “stalker” leads a writer and a professor to a place known as the “Zone,” a place where the normal laws of reality no longer apply.
Scholar Mark Le Fanu relays the history of Stalker in relationship to its literary origin:
"Stalker was (Tarkovsky's) second attempt at grappling with science-fiction subject matter, after the space adventure Solaris (1972), though it is different in almost every way from that earlier film, as well as from The Mirror.
The movie is an adaptation of a novel called Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, Arkady (1925–91) and Boris (1933–2012); Tarkovsky read it soon after it came out in the literary magazine Avrora in 1972.
The outside observer may wonder why he was attracted by this specific tale.
Unlike high-art source material such as Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky,
it belongs very much to the hard-boiled edge of the literary spectrum;
it is full of slang and violence, with characterization and sentiment to match these attributes.
Yet hovering beneath the surface, and attached specifically to the psychology of the character who would become the film’s eponymous protagonist
(in connection with his wife and their mysteriously damaged daughter, Monkey),
one can discern a difficult-to-define tenderness of outlook more in line with the director’s usual preoccupations:
1)a humanistic belief (if one can put it so strongly) in the sacredness of the family unit,
2)even if nothing much else in society can be defined in such terms.
The book’s essential vision is dystopian, but that may have been part of its attraction.
Certainly, there were many things in the Soviet Union at that time to be dystopian about.
That said, the film is a rather free adaptation of the novel.
The basic idea of the Zone—brought into being years in the past by an incursion of aliens,
and full of mysterious dangers that have been explored, illegally,
over the years by freelance agents called stalkers
(offering themselves, sometimes, as guides to doughty tourists)—is common to book and movie.
But the book has many more incidents, characters, and digressions, and unlike the film it unfolds over a period of years.
Tarkovsky’s work involved, as adaptations almost invariably must, a rigorous simplification of the story line. For example:
1) (the book) several journeyings into the Zone recounted in the book are reduced to a single
incursion,
2) while the Stalker’s companions,
a)the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn)
b)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).
At the center of the Zone, and accessible only to travelers who have survived the invisible terrors of the “Grinder” (a seemingly never-ending tunnel full of jagged stalagmites and stalactites),
lies the legendary Room, entry into which, it is rumored, will grant the wayfarer the fruition of his innermost desires.
(In the book, the magic is connected to an object—a “Golden Sphere”—rather than to a destination, yet otherwise the two notions are identical.)
Viewers of the movie, as readers of the book, may have different opinions as to how “deep” a concept we are confronted with here, judged from the lofty viewpoint of philosophy or religion.
Yet, as a terminus ad quem, “innermost desire” is saved from glibness by the sheer complexity of its distribution across the movie: what those deepest desires are (whether altruistic or cynically selfish) is never finally pinned down to any of the three characters in a manner that can be summed up coherently.
The dialogue, then, is throughout magnificently ambivalent:
witty and fantastical beyond measure.
The vivid verbal disagreements of the trio of travelers,
along with their mercurial shifts of mood,
are undoubtedly among the chief treasures of this movie.
Naturally, there is very much else here too, equally wondrous and Tarkovskian—among which must be counted,
a)Supremely, marvelous moments of peacefulness, silence, and sleep.
b)(We should note too the exceptionally beautiful musical score, composed by Eduard
Artemyev.)
c) It might seem rather a cliché to insist that film is a visual medium,
but surely what is not spoken is just as important, in the total effect of this movie,
as the articulation of its earnest ethical strivings.
d)Tarkovsky seems to have found a way of photographing the human head—animated and in
repose—as it had never been photographed before.
e) He makes it monumental: sculptural and philosophical.
f) Granted the chaotic interruptions to the production process (of which more shortly),
h) the concentration of effort he achieved here strikes me as nothing short of miraculous.
i) Naturally, these human heads had to be extraordinary in the first place:
j) not just that of the Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) but the Writer’s and the Professor’s
as well. How hypnotically the camera investigates them!"
The following clip from the film illustrates Le Fanu's observation: what is not spoken is just as important (as what is spoken). The visuals of Stalker communicate much more than plot/story and dialogue.
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979):
Here is a trailer of The Stalker Click Here
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