tarkovsky's stalker

Tarkovsky shot his final two features as an exile in the West. He left the Soviet Union behind, and never returned to science fiction. But he did express an unlikely admiration for James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), claiming “its vision of the future and the relation between man and its destiny is pushing the frontier of cinema as an art.”

Shame T didn't stick around for Terminator 2.

Good piece - I suppose I'll never be able to read another article about these films w/out seeing a quote from Geoff Dyer but hey ho.

i think this might be my favorite movie now?

i watched it last night for the first time. first tarkovsky film i've seen, period. there are so many things that are wonderful about it, but i'll just point out a few things that stuck with me:

- the opening sequence. it starts with a really slow entrance through a set of open doors, but the doors almost seem to be floating in space. gradually a second layer is overlaid on top of the first, but it's so slow and subtle that i think some people wouldn't even notice. the second layer just barely ~shakes~ up and down, creating a hallucinatory feeling. i wish i was at home so i could include a screenshot, but the effect is absolutely amazing. iirc there's a sword that is part of one of the two layers, and it appears to be leaning up against the wall of the underlying layer. a minute later, an earthquake seemingly occurs and the scene really DOES shake - but of course that turns out to be the nearby train which passes periodically during the first part of the movie. it's just a mindblowing way to open the film.

- i think maybe pashmina mentioned this upthread, but the long take rail sequence into the zone is so good. each of the three characters gets a good, loooooooong time on camera, and then they each get a turn again. they're zooming off into toward this...zone...and they look fearful and courageous at the same time, and curious, and disoriented. but it's really the sound that makes the sequence, starting off with the rhythmic track noise and evolving into musique concrete. speaking of sound...

- the sound in this movie is unbelievably creative, and it carries the movie through some of the slower scenes that aren't as compelling as the others. so many of the sounds were obviously constructed in a studio and added in later. most of the time it's not 'realistic' at all but it's nearly always beautiful sounding. the film is pretty much a dreamtrance, and the sound is a big reason why it works so well. it reminds me of the sound design of Eraserhead, which Lynch and Alan Splet labored over for years, meticulously recording and editing each sound.

- i also enjoyed the allusions to wizard of oz (another lynch thing) - popping into color, falling asleep in the field of flowers, searching for something that grants wishes.

watching solaris (finally) later this week, i can hardly wait!

i'm PAINFULLY overdue for a rewatch of motherfucking Stalker

only took me ten years to finally watch this movie it was good !

it's one of my favourites, as well.

but i gather you need to be in the right state of mind to watch it, because of how slow it is, which is one of the things i love about it

yeah, the slowness is key. there's so much time to enjoy the visuals. i only wish that i didn't need the subtitles so that my eyes weren't spending so much time at the bottom of the frame.

Just noticed the comments from a few years ago about the Roadside Picnic PDF. I did that, and I had to take it down because I got a cease & desist letter from a lawyer when the new edition was coming out. (And I was not a member of Fort Thunder, but I did run their web site.)

Around 2003 I spent some time making nice PDFs out of Gutenberg Project texts, mostly as an excuse for experimenting with my text justification postscript code. (I think I was also responsable for the first hypertext version of Gibbon's Decline & Fall?) Roadside Picnic was the only thing I did that wasn't completely legal, copyright-wise. (It wasn't clearly illegal either, but not something to argue with lawyers about.)

this thread is vintage good ilx

very grateful to have seen stalker on projected 35mm last night (even if screen was 'small') but the subtitles were so bad! so many phrases seem to have gone untranslated

remember this thread once this place get engulfed by #futureOfInternets

Lol

i mean

like

http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/stalker38.jpg

"Yes?"

this is surely amongst the great works

it is one of the greatest

The toxic looking set of Stalker is no special effect:
"We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris"

That's a horrific story

yeah but look what they made

Not worth it, even for such a huge masterpiece, ymmv

When you work in the trades you develop a gallows humour about faked asbestos reports and risk assessments and exposure to carcinogens. I'd imagine if you were working for the Soviet film industry in the 70's it would be even more lackadaisical.

i thought this was so boring, should i rewatch it?

depends on if you thought it was boring in the past five years or not and if you can see it in a theater imo

That's a horrific story

― too young for seapunk (Moodles), Friday, 30 October 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah but look what they made

― twunty fifteen (imago), Friday, 30 October 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You are Geoff Dyer and I claim my 50p.

It could be worse, they could've died from making The Conqueror:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/the-conqueror/making-of-movie-that-killed-john-wayne/

My conclusion from reading that = Money is great.

I was about to bring up The Conqueror.

so many phrases seem to have gone untranslated

Pretty common in foreign films that didn't have an upper-tier UK-US distributor in that era.

wowwwww

innit just

watched this again on blu-ray a couple of weeks ago - never fails to be absolutely captivating

the stalker's dream is one of the most spellbinding sequences in cinema imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0VJa3HmsJQ

oh i started watching this the other day but my O/h was really tired and not in the mood for b/w with subtitles and gloominess. I really want to watch it though.

love this so much.

dl, it's only in black and white for a while before it transitions to colour (in another indelible sequence)

the b&w photography is so, so beautiful though. it's got so much texture to it

Yeah, it reminded me of Werckmeister Harmonies quite a lot (I can imagine Bela Tar was highly influenced by this film). As I say, we barely got 20 mins through before we realised this was a film for another time.

A few visual similarities aside, I don't think Tarkovsky and Tarr have v much in common. In fact, Tarr articulated the difference quite well: “Tarkovsky is religious and we are not… he always had hope; he believed in God. He’s much more innocent than us – than me. No, we have seen too many things to make his kind of film… he is much softer, much nicer. Rain in his films purifies people. In mine it just makes mud.”

It is a great quote but Tarkovsky must have seen some brutality himself growing up during the great terror and then the war.

I think that even the religious hope in Tarkovsky's films is tempered by some extreme self-doubt. God is hardly pedestaled as some end to suffering.

I like his famous quote about how Stalker should be “slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.”

I agree. That sequence from Stalker posted above is a good demonstration. Mankind is destined to die and be forgotten, and all of its works, including religion. It's like his faith was in the face of knowing there was no destiny or future for mankind beyond this sort-of ultimate apocalypse, and why his works are so emotionally extreme in their beauty. I'm not a Tarkovsky or film scholar by any means, but that's what I get from it at least.

It is a great quote but Tarkovsky must have seen some brutality himself growing up during the great terror and then the war.

Yeah, nihilists/cynics etc. always think they've seen more that others - the scales have fallen from their eyes, rather than their eyes having scabbed up.

That Tarr quote makes me think significantly less of him.

Reading his dad's poetry and its fantastic, some of the most affecting Russian poetry this side of Tsvetaeva!

Completely agree. Hearing it in Mirror for the first time blew me away.

dowd otm and with best poetic imagery.

he stalker's strong resemblance to Woody Harrelson was distracting.

Haha -- true!

One of our art houses will show Stalker next Tuesday -- I'm looking forward to seeing it again. I wonder if they got their hands on the Criterion early?

The 4K resto is via Janus Films, ie the version that Criterion puts out. It's the way the Film Forum in NYC operates now. So really, fuck DCP.

I'll be seeing the restoration next Wednesday. They showed the Solaris restoration this week, which was really great.

Restoration is striking. Saw it in NYC a few weeks back.

Totally. After only seeing it on that crummy DVD, this looked stunning. Great work.

DCP is great though

If there's a disc, I don't need to pay $15 to see the same thing larger though.