Stalker

Lore & Background

The film was shot over a year on film stock that was later discovered to be unusable and had to be almost entirely reshot with a new cinematographer, Alexander Knyazhinsky. Stalker was released by Goskino in May 1979. Upon release, the film garnered praise in the Soviet and Warsaw Pact press, but only mixed reviews in the West. In later years it was recognised as one of the greatest films of all time. In the decennial critics' and directors' polls published by the British Film Institute's magazine Sight and Sound in 2022, Stalker placed 43rd and 14th, respectively. The film sold over 4 million tickets, mostly in the Soviet Union, against a budget of 1 million roubles.

Reader's Guide

The cast includes Alexander Kaidanovsky as the Stalker, Anatoly Solonitsyn as the Writer, Alisa Freindlich as the Stalker's wife, Nikolai Grinko as the Professor, Natasha Abramova as Martyshka, the Stalker's daughter, Faime Jurno as the Writer's companion, Evgeny Kostin as Lyuger, owner of the bar-café (credited as E. Kostin), and Raimo Rendi as the patrolman. The meaning of the word "stalker" was derived from its use by the Strugatsky brothers in their novel Roadside Picnic, upon which the movie is based.

In Roadside Picnic, "Stalker" was a common nickname for men engaged in the illegal enterprise of prospecting for and smuggling alien artefacts out of the "Zone". According to Boris Strugatsky, "prospectors" and "trappers" were potential word choices before "stalker" was decided on, which was at least partially inspired by Rudyard Kipling's character "Stalky" in his Stalky & Co. stories, of which both authors were fans. Their adaptation of the English word into Russian is pronounced slightly differently, and it came into common usage in Russian after being "coined" by the authors.

Tarkovsky also wrote of the English word, "Stalker is from the word 'to stalk'—to creep" in a 1976 diary entry. In the film, a "stalker" is a professional guide to the Zone, someone having the ability and desire to cross the border into the dangerous and forbidden place for a reason.