Stalker (1979 film)

Did You Know?

• The film contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, with an average shot length of more than one minute.
• The word 'stalker' was at least partially inspired by Rudyard Kipling's character 'Stalky' in his Stalky & Co. stories.

Plot

A forbidden region called the Zone exists where the usual rules of physics are said to be suspended, filled with supernatural dangers. Inside it, a Room supposedly grants any wish to whoever enters. The government has sealed off the Zone, and Stalkers—those who secretly guide others through it—face long prison terms if caught. One Stalker has just finished a lengthy sentence and returned to his wife and daughter.

To his wife's dismay, a frustrated writer and a physics professor hire him to lead them into the Zone. Needing the money, he meets them in a shabby bar-café, insisting they must follow his orders to survive. He describes the Zone as a living entity that demands respect. The three avoid military patrols by slipping through the gate behind a train, then travel across the Zone's empty landscape on a railway work car.

The area holds abandoned factories, dead bodies, weapons, and tanks. The Stalker checks for hidden anomalies as they slowly approach the Room, though nothing strange happens. Along the way, they share their reasons: the Writer fears losing his creative spark, the Professor wants to study the Zone for a Nobel Prize, and the Stalker claims only to help desperate people. He tells them his mentor, Porcupine, gained great wealth from the Room but later hanged himself.

They draw lots to decide who enters a long, dark tunnel called the meat grinder first. The Writer passes through unharmed, surprising the Stalker, who explains the meat grinder kills anyone the Zone judges morally unworthy. The Writer then speaks directly to the camera about the uselessness of knowledge and feeling judged by others. The Stalker reveals that Porcupine once sent his own brother ahead into the meat grinder, where the brother died. The Writer angrily accuses the Stalker of thinking him unworthy.

Themes and interpretations

The film has been described as a dense, complex, and endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness, the necessity for faith in a secular world, and the unpleasant desires in human hearts. Several critics identify the nature of human desire as the central theme. One interpretation suggests that one's innermost desire may not be what one thinks it is, and that achieving it may not be beneficial. Another critic describes the film as capturing a yearning for something beyond reach yet intrinsic to everyone.

Geoff Dyer argues that the Stalker is seeking asylum from the world, and that the film is haunted by memories of the gulag, noting overlaps in vocabulary such as 'Zona' and 'the meat grinder' and the Stalker's shaved head. Writer Lilya Kaganovsky compares the Zone with the Chernobyl exclusion zone established in 1986, noting that some workers at the Chernobyl power plant referred to themselves as stalkers. Midway through the film, the Stalker quotes section 76 of Laozi's Tao Te Ching, which characterizes softness and pliancy as qualities of new life, and hardness and strength as qualities nearing death.

Slavistic Nils Åke Nilsson says that in the context of late Soviet stagnation, Tarkovsky contrasts the oppressive dystopia of the outside world—marked by industrial decay, pollution, alienation, and political repression—with the Zone as a realm of beauty and mystery. The Room represents new possibilities, a utopia amidst the anti-utopian world of modern society, reflecting the disillusionment of late socialism.

Production

After reading Roadside Picnic, Tarkovsky initially recommended the novel to director Mikhail Kalatozov, who abandoned the project when he could not obtain the rights. Tarkovsky then became interested in adapting it, hoping to make a film conforming to classical Aristotelian unity: a single action, on a single location, within 24 hours. He viewed the Zone as a dramatic tool to draw out the personalities of the three protagonists, particularly the Stalker's psychological damage as he finds himself unable to make others happy.

The film departs considerably from the novel; Tarkovsky stated in a 1979 interview that the film has basically nothing in common with the novel except for the words 'Stalker' and 'Zone'. Production designer Rashit Safiullin recalled that Tarkovsky spent a year shooting outdoor scenes, but when the crew returned to Moscow, the film had been improperly developed and was unusable. The film had been shot on new Kodak 5247 stock with which Soviet laboratories were unfamiliar.

Relations between Tarkovsky and first cinematographer Georgy Rerberg had deteriorated, and after seeing the poorly developed material, Tarkovsky fired Rerberg. Tarkovsky wanted to abandon the film, but the Soviet film boards wanted to shut it down. He proposed making a two-part film, which meant additional deadlines and funds. He reshot almost all of the film with new cinematographer Alexander Knyazhinsky. According to Safiullin, the finished version is completely different from what Tarkovsky originally shot.

Soundtrack

Eduard Artemyev, who had previously scored Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Mirror, composed the music for Stalker. He actually made two different versions of the score. The first was purely orchestral, but Tarkovsky rejected it. The second version, which appears in the finished film, was built using a synthesizer alongside traditional instruments that were altered with sound effects.

In this final score, the line between music and ambient noise becomes very faint; natural sounds and musical elements blend together so completely that you cannot tell them apart. Many of the sounds that seem like natural recordings were not captured on set but were generated by Artemyev on his synthesizer. Tarkovsky saw music as something that could shift the emotional feel of an image without altering its core meaning. He believed that in a perfectly consistent film, music would be unnecessary and would instead be replaced by pure sound.

He aimed for this kind of consistency in both Stalker and his later film Nostalghia. For the 2001 DVD release, the Russian Cinema Council (Ruscico) produced an alternative 5.1 surround sound track. This new mix removed and added music and sound effects in several places. For instance, music was inserted into the scene where the three characters ride a motorized draisine toward the Zone, while Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was taken out of the opening and closing scenes.

The opening scene in Stalker’s home, originally silent except for a train sound, had ambient noises added. Tarkovsky did not have a clear idea of the film’s musical atmosphere at first, only a rough sense of where music might go. He wanted a blend of Eastern and Western music, reflecting the idea that the two can exist together but never truly understand each other. One concept was to play Western music on Eastern instruments, or the reverse.

Artemyev suggested trying this with the motet Pulcherrima Rosa, written by an anonymous 14th-century Italian composer and dedicated to the Virgin Mary.