Stalker (1979)

I sit down to write this post and I find myself, once again, writing about a film that defies strict analysis yet warmly invites contemplation. Despite sitting in the dark at the close of this movie and feeling not quite sure I “got” it, I haven’t stopped seeing the afterburn of it imprinted upon my mind’s eye. It hangs with the viewer, haunts you, continues to quietly ask its questions.

Everything in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker feels like an unknown. None of the characters have a proper name outside of their one-word appellations, we are not provided a time period or a location for our setting, we don’t have any idea why The Zone exists, or what happened to plunge our characters into their apparently apocalyptic world. And don’t expect to figure out any of the answers. They are intentionally obscured, just like the characters’ motives for approaching The Room in the hopes of being blessed with their wildest dreams.

The three primary characters of the story, the Stalker, the Professor, and the Writer,appear to be archetypes of three types of people: The Man of Blind Religious Faith, The Man of Science and Logic, and The Man of Imagination and Inspiration. The Stalker claims he knows the only safe way through The Zone to The Room, a convoluted path based on the teachings laid out by Stalkers before him. The Writer wonders if there might be an easier way, wants to try cutting straight through the field (following his heart) to The Room. And then, when The Stalker follows perceived signs from his mentor to lead he and The Writer on (and incidentally just walks them in a circle), it is The Professor who simply goes back for the bag he left behind and ends up skipping a treacherous part of the journey in favor of having lunch. It is worth noting (warning: ample spoilers here!) that though the Stalker and the world at large promise that The Zone is hugely dangerous and any wrong move or perceived insult could get the three men killed… this never happens. The two accompanying men abuse the Zone, veer off course, and ignore the warnings of The Stalker multiple times and nothing ever happens to any of them.

The film’s purpose, most broadly, is to address the idea of achieving one’s wildest dreams. If you could enter a room, concentrate hard on your life thus far, and be granted your heart’s greatest desire, would you do it? Why? And could you allow such a place to exist, given the potential it has to destroy humanity or bring about catastrophe? In one beautiful shot, Tarkovsky shows us a stream in The Zone full of abandoned remnants of other ways humans have tried to achieve their dreams: Money, weapons, religious imagery, drugs… all of them drowned and equally inviable. Tarkovsky seems to ask if we can truly be happy, and if so, is that what we really want? There is so much to mine in the imagery of this film, I’m afraid I can’t even begin to address things like the Stalker’s own drug use, the unclear motives of the Writer, and Monkey’s part to play in the story in such a brief medium as a blog post.

I also have many thoughts on this film as a subverted Epic story. We approach the Zone laden with warnings about its dangers. We don’t have much faith that the characters will survive, and we are doubtful that The Room even exists, but we maintain a spot of hope that our characters could actually achieve ultimate happiness. As in the Inferno, we have a poetic guide in The Stalker. Our characters are on a very specific journey to get from point A to point B and they experience misadventures and personal change throughout the tale. However, the subversion, to me, is in the scale of the story. While an epic is huge, and while the movie is nearly 3 hours long, technically speaking if The Stalker didn’t insist they sneak up on The Room by taking a long route around, the journey from the entry of the Zone to The Room as the crow flies seems to be about a mile. I loved the idea that the way to the end goal was in sight the whole time, but for seemingly absurd reasons, our characters are forced on a convoluted version of the path to their happiness.

I think Stalker is not only a triumph of art house film, but also a masterpiece of photography. Tarkovsky begins the movie in sepiatone, and every surface seems to be intentionally textured so that the world outside of the Zone reads like Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom. The monotone allows for elegant use of light and shadow and impressionist markmaking. Once the film opens up to color as our trio enters The Zone, the viewer can truly take in the magnitude of the beauty of the shots. Tarkovsky seems focused on artful shots of his characters heads, especially that of Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy (the Stalker). Kaydenovskiy is already a fascinating-looking person, but Tarkovsky’s photography renders him positively sculptural. This focus on his character’s heads reads as a meditation on our fascination with what is going on inside each character’s mind. We can ponder and ponder another person’s likeness but we can never know their mind. Just as this movie’s meaning is a bit obscured to the viewer, we are only given so many glimpses of the inner workings of the characters.

All in all, I am a huge fan of this film and I highly recommend it to any rather melancholic viewer who can sit through a slow-paced 3-hour film.