Stalker (1979) Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, based on their novel Roadside Picnic. Starring Alexander Kaidanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Alisa Freindlich, and Nikolai Grinko.
There are a lot of films with notoriously difficult production stories. Delays, rewrites, changes in directors and cast, clashes on set, battles with studios or governments—the stories about how movies are made are often as dramatic as the movies themselves. And while Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) film didn’t have the longest, most contentious, or most arduous production in film history—although it was all of those things—it did have one of the strangest. There is something eerily fitting about the fact that Stalker couldn’t have normal production woes.
Brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky published Roadside Picnic in 1972; Tarkovsky read it and thought it could be adapted into a film, but he didn’t initially plan on doing it himself. By the late ’70s, Tarkovsky was pretty disillusioned with filmmaking, in large part due to the difficulty of making movies in the Soviet Union. He’d had a great deal of trouble getting his 1975 film The Mirror approved for release. The Mirror is an odd, nonlinear, semi-autobiographical movie that was made in an unconventional manner, and the Soviet officials in charge of approving films did not allow the film to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival or have an official public premiere.
Frustrated, Tarkovsky was already considering leaving the Soviet Union to make movies elsewhere. Among other things, he had wanted to adapt Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but the state censors threw up a bunch of roadblocks to that project. So, alas, we have to include Tarkovsky’s take on Dostoevsky on the list of films that we’ll never get to see but hopefully exist in some alternate universe. Still, Tarkovsky stayed in the Soviet Union long enough to try one more time, and that’s where Stalker comes from.
The production was an ordeal from the start. Tarkovsky initially wanted to film the movie in an empty, arid landscape, which led him to seek out locations in Tajikistan. But the region suffered an earthquake before filming began, so the production had to find a new location. Eventually Tarkovsky settled on a very different environment: industrial ruins in and around the city of Tallinn, Estonia. The scenes outside of the Zone were filmed in an industrial portion of Tallinn where, at the time, old warehouses were being demolished to make room for redevelopment. The bulk of the filming—the scenes that take place within “the Zone”—was done in and around a pair of abandoned power stations on and near the Jägala River.
The filming itself was frustrating and confusing for a lot of people involved. Tarkovsky and cinematographer Georgy Rerberg, who had previously worked with him on The Mirror, essentially shot the whole film twice on that first production in 1977, largely because Tarkovsky kept changing or disregarding the script and Rerberg kept pushing back against this chaotic approach. A member of the camera crew later said, “It seemed strange to me: if they were not Tarkovsky and Rerberg, but someone less known, I would have suspected them of incompetence.” That entire account is fascinating; it is truly a wonder the movie got filmed at all, much less multiple times.
Yes, multiple times. Because the problems got worse. After the filming wrapped in 1977, the film stock was processed incorrectly, and most of the material turned out to be unusable. You can see a few stills from the badly-processed film in that same eyewitness account. So the crew had to go back the next year to film the entire movie again—with significant changes. For one thing, Tarkovsky fired Rerberg. The clash between Tarkovsky and Rerberg is one of film history’s great creative breakups that has developed its own lore over time; there is even an entire documentary about it. It’s clear they were well on their way to falling out even before the processing error ruined an entire movie’s worth of film stock, but that certainly didn’t help matters.
With a new cinematographer, Alexander Knyazhinsky, Tarkovsky reshot the entire film in 1978. Both filming periods were, by all accounts, dirty, uncomfortable, and unpleasant. Abandoned industrial sites look cool on film, but they are miserable and unsafe places to work. This is obvious from what we see on screen: the crumbling infrastructure, the filthy water, the piles of military and mechanical junk everywhere, and all of it contrasted with that deep, vibrant green that only serves to emphasize the abandonment and decay.
The film makes me, sitting on my couch with my cats, feel like I desperately need a decontamination shower and a tetanus shot, so I can’t even imagine how much more uncomfortable it was for the actors and crew. There have long been suspicions that the environment was literally toxic, as Tarkovsky, his wife, and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn all died of cancer just a few years later. The link has never been tested or confirmed, but it’s one of those persistent rumors that has added to the film’s reputation.
It was a whole lot of struggle and strife for a movie that is, in so many ways, deceptively simple.
Stalker tells the story of three men, known only as the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor, who journey into a mysterious region called the Zone. The Zone is of unexplained extraterrestrial origin. In the movie it’s the site where a meteor landed, whereas in the book it was part of an alien visitation that has no obvious mechanism and happens at several places around the world. The film’s Zone is implied to be unique, not one of several; the film doesn’t care about the rest of the world at all. Another difference is that the book takes place over several years and features multiple excursions into the Zone, all of which are compressed and simplified into implied backstory for the film’s single journey.
The laws of nature don’t quite work right within the Zone, and the unnamed totalitarian government has surrounded it with soldiers and barbed wire to keep everyone out. It doesn’t work; people hire illegal “stalkers,” or guides, to get them to “the Room” in the heart of the Zone. Not to be confused with The Room (2003), this Room is believed to make one’s deepest desires come true. The Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) has just gotten out of prison and is already back at it, even though his wife (Alisa Freindlich) pleads with him to get a normal, legal job. The Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) wants to visit the Room to find inspiration for his work, while the Professor (Nikolai Grinko) claims to want to study the Zone but secretly wants to destroy the Room.
The film begins outside the Zone, in a grim, dystopian world cast in sickly sepia monochrome. The three men dodge the authorities to enter the Zone, where the film shifts into full color but retains a limited palette dominated by moody grays, rich greens, and the ever-present rust. The men trudge through this landscape toward their goal, engaging in a lot of rambling philosophical conversations and monologues as they go along. There are moments where the characters seem to be speaking to no one, or directly to the audience. Nothing about the Zone is ever explained: what happens if they stray, how the nuts and bandages prevent that, why the tunnel called the Meat Grinder is so terrifying, where that cute dog came from, how they get out… The danger and unpredictability of the place is portrayed almost entirely via the men’s uneasiness and fear.
There are no visual special effects, but there is some clever sound design that helps develop the film’s unsettling weirdness. Theline between the musical score and the sound effects is deliberately fuzzy. This is apparent right from the start, when the film opens on the room where the Stalker and his family are sleeping. We hear the sound of a train approaching outside, but mixed with the mechanical noise is the discordantly bright, bombastic sound of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. It’s instantly off-putting, designed to put us on edge just as much as the bleakness of the room, the damp distortion of the walls, the pained awkwardness of the Stalker moving about as he futilely tries not to wake his wife and daughter.
The film’s original music was composed by Eduard Artemyev, who also composed the original score for Solaris (1972) and The Mirror. Stalker’s haunting main score features a combination of a tar (a kind of lute common across Central Asia) and a European-style longitudinal flute, both run through a synthesizer to give the music an eerie, altered sound. But it’s more than that: a lot of the sound effects in the movie, including many that sound like mechanical or atmospheric noises, are in fact musical, created by Artemyev with instruments and synthesizers. Artemyev’s description of writing the score shows that with the music, like with everything else in the film, Tarkovsky requested a lot of different versions, using a lot of trial and error, before finally settling on the sound he wanted.
That constant back and forth, push and pull, revision and indecision is the primary theme of Stalker’s production. There is a lot of unclear and contradictory information out there about both the making of the movie and the finished product, and some of that comes from Tarkovsky himself. He contradicted himself often when he spoke or wrote about his ideas and his works. At one point he might say the Zone is not at all symbolic; at another point he links it to very high-minded ideas like love and devotion. One doesn’t get the sense that it’s ever deliberately misleading. It feels a lot more as if, even after he finished the film and moved on to other projects, he kept musing on what it meant and what he was trying to say.
The three men are obviously representatives of three aspects of humanity; their dialogues and monologues explicitly examine faith, art, and science from various points of view. But it’s a stark contrast to a movie like Contact (1997), where the interactions between the representational characters are used to explore the repercussions of how society reacts in the face of the unknown. Stalker’s characters offer a much bleaker outlook. None of them enter the Room in the end; instead they quietly, painfully work their way around to admitting that whatever it is the Room provides, it doesn’t make anybody happier. The Professor doesn’t learn anything about the Zone, nor does he attempt to destroy it. The Writer seems to discount the entire journey as pointless from the start, but he’s still searching for something, something he only knows how to describe as inspiration but really isn’t that at all.
And the Stalker, the man who feels most peaceful within the Zone, who views the world as a prison but the Zone as his freedom, who has built his entire life on finding purpose in the act of leading others right up to the doorway of the Room but never passing through himself, is forced to confront the realization that his work has never truly helped anybody, only harmed them, including his mentor, his family, and himself.
Stalker would be a very different movie if it ended there, with the three men sitting tiredly in grimy water, right at the doorway of the Room they will never enter. It’s a striking and painful scene. It’s also beautiful, because the entire movie is beautiful, even when it most looks like an industrial waste site badly in need of rehabilitation.
But it doesn’t end there. The men leave the Zone and return to the sepia-toned world outside to have a desultory drink in a sad little bar. There the Stalker’s wife finds him, and the men are more or less dispatched from the story. We have no idea what the Writer and the Professor do next. We follow the Stalker home, but the focus has shifted to his wife and daughter. First we see that when the camera is on the daughter (played by Natasha Abramova), the film is once again in full color, even if the drab greens and grays remain.
Then the wife, after tucking her distraught husband into bed, gives a long, beautiful monologue—to her sleeping husband, or to the audience—about their life together and why she doesn’t regret it, in spite her husband’s imprisonment and obsession and their daughter’s disability. Alisa Freindlich is captivating in this scene. Her demeanor is sad, wry, and self-aware, the framing is intimate, and the result is a stunningly focused and human moment after a film full of so much wandering.
Even that isn’t the end, however. There is one more twist as the film shifts back into color to find the daughter seated at the table, reading a book. The clamorous train from the movie’s beginning once approaches outside the apartment. And something—perhaps the girl has telekinetic powers, perhaps it’s just the vibration from the train—slides three glasses across the table.
That’s where the film ends. There’s no explanation, no hint of what’s next in the lives of the characters. It’s a weird and bold way to end a film, to leave us with the realization that we missed a lot while we spent out time wandering with the sad-sack men through the Zone.
There is a constant truth in all the writing and criticism about this film: everybody wants Stalker to be about something. Something specific, something definable, a singular theme or allegory that can be nearly described in a more accessible format. Life in the faltering latter days of the Soviet Union. Faith in a secular world. The sanctity of the family unit. Imprisonment and freedom. The transcendence of love and devotion. Something.
And it is. It’s about all of those things and probably many more. But it still resists the thematic clarity we’re accustomed to seeking when we talk about fiction, and especially science fiction, which often carries with it an assumption that there is a single underlying theme. Right alongside this decades-long critical search for Stalker’s meaning is, unsurprisingly, a parallel backlash; beloved arty movies always have their share of vocally unimpressed haters.
None of this is unusual for a beloved great director; big art addressing big ideas does not lend itself well to simplistic summarization. But it seems to go even farther with Stalker. Dedicated film scholars dig deeply into Tarkovsky’s life, work, writings, and personal journals, and still often come away with the conclusion that they can’t always be sure what was going on in his head. A Criterion essay on Stalker even analyzes the director’s dreams for clues about what he was trying to say. His dreams!
Tarkovsky was aware of the tendency to obsessively analyze his work during his life; he wrote an entire book to acknowledge that people found his work opaque and baffling. Sculpting in Time was first published in German in 1985, around the same time Tarkovsky was leaving the Soviet Union for good and not long before he died of cancer in 1986.
What it comes down to is this: Tarkovsky viewed his art as a way to say things that couldn’t be communicated any other way.
I am definitely not among the haters. I think Stalker is beautiful and strange and lovely and bleak. It is sometimes frustrating, sometimes funny, and always fascinating. I love that it prioritizes experience and ambiguity over explanation and didacticism. I don’t fully know what to make of it, but that’s a mark in its favor.
Oddly, what I found myself thinking about after watching the film actually comes from the book. The movie briefly mentions some ideas about why the Zone might have been dropped on Earth. Perhaps it’s a message, muses the Professor, or perhaps it’s a gift. What the film does not explicitly include, but only suggests in the randomness of a meteor strike, is an additional scenario discussed in the book and the source of the book’s title: the possibility that what the extraterrestrials left behind was of no significance to them, as meaningless as litter left following a roadside picnic, without any thought or intention toward what humans might make of them.
The characters in the film don’t—can’t—consider the possibility that the Zone has no meaning or purpose. But this is one of those nebulous and challenging ideas Tarkovsky was always playing around with: the search for meaning or purpose is a very different thing, with a very different place in human life and consciousness, than whatever we might define meaning or purpose to be.
I have to admit, I didn’t really think very deeply about any of this before choosing this month’s four films. I just wanted to watch some classic, thoughtful sci fi movies. But now that I’ve delved into all of them, it’s apparent they have in common a love and respect for asking questions that don’t have clear, easy answers. That is, after all, one of humanity’s most enduring traits. It’s good to be reminded of everything we don’t know and don’t understand about ourselves, each other, our technology, and our universe. How hollow life would be if all art were familiar and comforting and knowable. It’s much better for all of us if there is also room for the art that lingers in the mind, strange and uncomfortable, more question than answer.
What do you think about Stalker and its place in sci fi cinema history? Or about the suite of movies we’ve watched this months? Get your big thinky thoughts out now, because we’re about to change gears very sharply as we dive into spooky season…
We’re Here to Watch Movies and Chew Bubblebum
…And we’re all out of bubblegum.
It’s John Carpenter Month at the Science Fiction Film Club. We’re going to take a trip through some of his weird-ass sci fi movies from the ’80s. (I promise we haven’t forgotten Dark Star—keep an eye out for an upcoming piece by another Reactor writer celebrating the movie’s 50th anniversary!) Then we’ll cap off the month with the obvious and seasonally appropriate choice—which is not sci fi, but let’s not pretend anybody needs an excuse to watch Halloween again! The music is already stuck in your head. The music will always be stuck in your head.
October 2 — Escape from New York (1981)
This is what Americans in the ’70s and ’80s thought New York was like. (It was filmed in East St. Louis.)
Watch: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.
View the trailer.
October 9 — The Thing (1982)
Perhaps the best argument ever in favor of dogs being eligible for Academy Awards. And one of my favorite movies of all time.
Watch: Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Spectrum.
View the trailer.
October 16 — Starman (1984)
I recently saw some BookTokker confidently claim that Gen Z invented alien-fucking romance.
Watch: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft.
View the trailer.
October 23 — They Live (1988)
I shall not attempt to improve on the official description: “When two men put on special sunglasses they see aliens and subliminal messages.”
Watch: Peacock, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.
View the trailer.
October 30 — Halloween (1978)
Adventures in babysitting in American suburbia.
Watch: Fubo, AMC+, Shudder, Indieflix, Cultpix, Amazon.
View the trailer.
