But as Tarkovsky stresses in Sculpting in Time, “the Zone doesn’t symbolise anything” the Zone is life itself (1986:200).įilming around abandoned power plants and chemical factories around the River Jägala in Tallinn, Estonia, Tarkovsky scouted locations in Tajikistan, whilst considering Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine and Crimea as possible alternatives. We learn Porcupine has come to the Zone as a Stalker before, never to return skeletons are just another part of the landscape. The epigraph is never detrimental, nor should it be ignored, but essential to our perception. As Geoff Dyer highlights in his illuminating deconstruction and memoir on his own relationship with the film, Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room (2012:5), this opening caption was added at the bequest of Mosfilm, situating the film within a small bourgeois country that wasn’t the USSR. What was it? A meteorite that fell to Earth? Or a visitation from outer space?įrom the opening, Tarkovsky confronts us with uncertainty: no troops returned from this “miracle of miracles”. Stalker opens with an aura of documentary and the literary, grounded within science fiction and our own world, using a quote from Nobel Prize winner Professor Wallace as an epigraph. Tarkovsky saw science fiction as a set of ““comic book” trappings and vulgar commercialism”, but the Zone is a descent into mystery, embodying a shifting state of reality. As Mark Le Fanu writes, Roadside Picnic is “hard-boiled” science fiction rife with “slang and violence”, but underneath its dystopian vision is “a humanistic belief in the sacredness of the family unit”. Tarkovsky reconceived, altering the character of Stalker and elaborating the film into a longer two-part epic under cinematographer Alexander Knyazhinsky.Īlthough the basis is the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic (1972), Tarkovsky wasn’t interested in a literal adaptation.

Stalker was troubled from the start: shot on experimental Kodak 5247 stock, the initial print manifested an unwatchable dark green tint, leaving unending debate about whether it was accidental or sabotage. Tarkovsky was in constant negotiation with censors over what his films could represent. Ivan’s Childhood (1962) is a film of stunning images, placed within the final days of World War II Andrei Rublev (1966) is a testament to scale and ideas Solaris (1972) delves into the depths of memory and consciousness.

Andrei Tarkovsky is a director like few others.

Stalker of the endless dunes