Stalker - A Meditation on Belief 5/5

Let me first say, this film won’t be for everyone. This is slower than slow cinema. I give this 5 stars for cinematography alone. The greatest impact this film had on me was the cinematography. You could tell that the color, set design, and camera movements were carefully planned. And according to an interview in 1996 with one of the cinematographers this was the case. The schedule was demanding, Tarkovskey was meticulous with movements for camera and actors. Even the Dog would take commands for meticulous movement in regards to its marks (true story!). 

Act 1 plays out a bit like any other sci fi film with characters introduced: a writer, a professor, and a stalker, a journey started, chases, stakes raised, goals aimed for, and an unsettling environment. 

But Act 2 there’s a sharp turn. It gets very disorienting and hard to follow. It becomes more philosophical and debate oriented. Time and space begin to get lost. As we get closer to “the room” the film becomes very atmospheric with a sand dune room, the telephone room, and the scariest place in the zone: the tunnel. As they continue journeying forward there’s long dialogue bits and then parts where you can’t quite tell what’s reality and what’s in a characters head. I think this is where modern audiences will tune out. But towards the end they get to the threshold of the room. The “most important moment of their lives” as stalker says, they “must believe.” There’s several allegories to the Bible in this section. There’s the reading of Revelation 6 about the return of Christ, there’s the story of the road to Emmaus where Jesus walks along with two men who don’t know it’s Him, and there’s the writer wearing a crown of thorns. The revelation reading was one of my favorite parts of the movie. 

It’s interesting that the greatest wish that is sought after is found in a “room” in the zone. Did you notice that the first shot is through a doorway into a room and there’s a sound of a train arriving? By way of repetition several of the following shots are framed through a doorway. Towards the end of the movie after leaving the zone we end up looking through a doorway. Then we end on a shot of the stalkers daughter not looking happy, using telekinesis to move cups, all while hearing a familiar sound...a train arriving.  

These kinds of mechanisms only make me think that Tarkovsky was making some statement about cinema and human beings. The train arrival was one of the first films ever made by the Lumiere brothers. And the doorway framing makes me think of the frames and ratios of a film screen. And in a sense we all enter a zone, with a room, called a theater, where the rules change, and the journey is interpreted by different folks, and in that room we look for our wishes and dreams to be fulfilled. And what we find in cinema is a reflection of ourselves and a hope of what we want to be. The movies reflect us and we reflect the movies.