Stalker – Andrei Tarkovsky

Anything I could write about Tarkovsky’s Stalker has already been written, probabyl in thousands of permuations.
‘Made’ to sit through 2hour 42minute run time of Stalker, I, like many others was spellbound, until I wasn’t. In brief exxursions of the mind, subtitles ceased to exist and scenes were missed, although after a while, this didn’t seem to matter entriely, as beautiful imagery and haunting soundscapes filled in what you missed.

My notes taken when watching the film are messy, they make no sense, according to alot of other first time viewers, much like the film.

“Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphys­ical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one’s most deeply held desires. Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky created an immersive world with a wealth of material detail and a sense of organic atmosphere. A religious allegory, a reflection of contemporaneous political anxieties, a meditation on film itself—Stalker envelops the viewer by opening up a multitude of possible meanings”.

Quote taken from The Criterion Collective.

I enjoyed the film, it opened my mind up to a hsitory into what filmakign has come from, a film with so much meaning and concept behind it, hardly compares to a ‘modern day blockbsuter’ but perhaps this is a good thigng, how many people would sit through a 3 hour foreign film every Friday night?

Here are my notes, in all their messy glory, feel free to try and decipher any of it!