tarkovsky's stalker

is it true that they all died from cancers they picked up while filming in that place?? i can't imagine how wading neck-deep in sewer water in an abandoned hydroelectric plant could have seemed like a good idea ... didn't they have an actor's union?

― renegade bear shot by cops on frat row (vahid)

tarkovsky, his wife, the DP, and the three lead actors all died within 15 yrs of this at relatively young ages iirc, at least three of them of cancer which i think was linked to the filming location (though not definitively.)

A while back I read that it was some rare type of cancer. The fact that they all had it lent itself to the idea that it was caused by shared environmental exposure.

From the Stalker wikipedia page:

Sound designer Vladimir Sharun recalls:
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.[5]

oh, there was another Dyer/screening today :p

http://www.movingimage.us/films/2012/03/11/detail/geoff-dyer-on-tarkovsky-cinema-and-life/

Have always heard about The Conquerer being a movie that was actually fatal for the people involved; had no idea the same happened with Stalker.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/author-geoff-dyer-literary-establishment

^blood boils, etc.

Not really...just 'next', you know.

I am at fkn war w/proper spelling and punctuation tho'.

All nothing compared to the awfulness of people dying from the conditions surrounding the Stalker shoot. Was dimly aware of it when a camera man was talking about T and people who had passed on. A 5 min interview on a DVD that was a kinda gem. Wish I had that round here so I could remind myself of exactly what he said.

I read Zona today - I enjoyed it. It's pretty short (you can probably read it in less time than it takes to watch the film) but that's probably for the best. It was a lot lighter than I expected it to be - more of a cultural sorbet than a cultural vegetable.

Oh, I forgot why I posted. A quote from Zona

"As such it would have rendered that line of Stalker's - 'Home at last' - rather odd. [footnote-] Or maybe not. In the years when I used to go to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert, we were greeted at the festival entrance with the words 'Welcome Home!' and tears always welled up in my eyes because it was true, because I believed absolutely in the Temporal Autonomous Zone of Black Rock City."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMdrz3HSAX0

^ interview here - more of a lamentation for people who passed on, love that shot of the lamp going off..

inside report from fukushima nuclear reactor evacuation zone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp9iJ3pPuL8

Roadside Picnic coming back into print (in English) for the first time in 30 years fwiw

bought it at B&N a couple of weeks ago actually!

More on the video game:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/01/zone-chernobyl-tarkovsky-video-game/

> Roadside Picnic coming back into print (in English) for the first time in 30 years fwiw

amazon.co.uk have always had copies. in fact there as SF Masterworks edition which must be newer as the imprint isn't 30 years old. (2007 it says)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Roadside-Picnic-MASTERWORKS-Boris-Strugatsky/dp/0575079789/ref=sr_1_1

Yeah I read the SF Masterworks edition in 2008.

My brother gave me the Geoff Dyer book for my birthday, but I haven't read it yet. Not sure what to expect.

A heart-stopping, high-octane thrill ride that never let's up, that's what

Dyer's greatest regret in life = a good punchline, esp. 'cause you suspect he's serious.

okay in AMERICA I should have said

xp

the vid milton posted is amazing

otm, completely mesmerising.

i have an english PDF of roadside picnic ... one of the fort thunder guys had it downloadable on his website, i believe it was m4t br1nkm4n ... maybe it was even the fort thunder website itself?

seems to have been taken down now but i can share if anybody would like.

kind of a bummer because it was where i'd go to read all of the teratoid heights comics

RIP providence

http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/tarkovsky/?utm_content=buffer2cf57&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebookbfi&utm_campaign=buffer

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