Hacker Cinema
Roadside Picnic
2013 · Film · short · 24 min
"Roadside Picnic" is a piece produced by Hiroyuki Nagashima and Shigeru Matsui, pursuing the possibilities of “a new form of story telling, by the usage of digital sound technology” (financed by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science :JSPS24652030) . At first, this was planned simply as a sound installation, but visuals made by director/film maker Naoki Kato was joined in, eventually bringing to completion as a full film piece.
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12 comments on Hacker News
The reason Stalker is so different from Roadside Picnic is very simply that Tarkovsky made the film twice, the second time without the original script.
He spent an entire summer filming the Strugatskys' original screenplay. But he was using American Kodak 5247 film stock that was found to be out of date. He tried several times to confirm the problem with the Soviet processing lab, but they were unfamiliar with the stock, and only by the time he was done shooting did they realize that the filmed footage was in fact unusable. Tarkovsky himself suspected it may have been sabotage. Apparently (I've never been able to confirm this) the sepia footage at the beginning of the film is from this footage.
Tarkovsky was at this point despondent, not just unhappy with the destruction of his footage, but also with the direction the film was taking, and with his cinematographer (Rerberg, who was critical of the film and the script), whom he fired shortly thereafter. While negotiating with the Soviet film board to get more money and time to reshoot the film, he had several workshops with the Strugatskys to try to develop a better screenplay. Eventually Boris gave up and flew back home, but Arkady persisted, and finally wrote Tarkovsky a short treatment that suggested reducing the entire film to a bare-bones, more philosophical story with nameless characters and very few overt scifi elements. He then encouraged Tarkovsky to go do his own thing.
This appears to have been the breakthrough that helped Tarkovsky find the direction and inspiration he needed, and he used the treatment as the basis for a new screenplay that ended up having very little to do with the book. He wrote enthuastically to Arkady that for the first time as a director he had a screenplay he could call his own. (His previous films had all been written by others, or collaborations, and mostly adaptations.)
Eventually, Tarkovsky was able to negotiate with the film board to shoot a two-part film instead. They would pretend his first shoot, which had already been financed, was the "first part", and he received the necessary funding to shoot the second half. The Strutgatskys, who were still credited, weren't very happy with the final film.
The whole story of Stalker is complicated. I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, for more information.
Solaris is a great book and I would recommend everyone checking other works by Lem. The guy has many different flavors, most of his work is actually kind of hilarious, Solaris is probably his most "serious" one, still amazing.
Here's my "please read these Lem books" list:
- A Perfect Vacuum: A collection of Prefaces and Reviews of Non-Existent books (including one non-existent book called "A Perfect Vacuum") and of a fictional scientific talk. A lot of fun. One of my favorites: A review of a book written by an author who decides to write fiction without lying to the reader by affirming absolutely nothing existentially, confining itself to what did not occur, during the whole fictional book. The fictional book begins with the phrase "The train did not arrive. He did not come."
- Imaginary Magnitude: This one blew my mind. An exploration of fictional science models and books, including the idea of building an "AI" model out of bacteria, creating AI models to check how good or bad are novels and papers written by other AI due to their inhumane sizes (millions of pages to check... so little time...), as well as a conversation with the only AI that didn't get bored with us humans and decided to explain how things really work... Really clever stuff.
- The Futurological Congress: No spoilers here. One of the trippiest books ever written.
- His Master's Voice: A bit more serious than the previous three, but still more playful than Solaris. I always felt this was Carl Sagan's Contact but for Grownups. The book is told from the point of view of a Topologist (Combinatorics and Topology if I remember correctly). A signal from outer space is received, a multitude of scientists from many different branches are invited to get together at a certain location to try to decipher the message, among them our main character. The ideas and concepts of the limits of knowledge, the "micro-worlds" of science, the exploration of the human mind, and the origins of consciousness are all explored along the way. Mini-Spoilers: No"they're instructions to build a machine" here.
As a side note, if you like Lem, you'll also almost surely like anything by The Strugatsky Brothers. Their entry point is almost always Roadside Picnic (famous for a rather open adaptation as Tarkovsky's movie Stalker), but all of their books are really good.
My favorite Soviet/Eastern Bloc scifi novel is The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years (1981) by Chingiz Aitmatov.
"Ethnic" writers were accorded more freedom of topic than white Russians, confined to village prose in the Breznev era. Aitmatov's book sweeps the vast steppes of Central Asia and interstellar space, begins from the perspective of a fox, considers traumas of the Great Patriotic War and Stalin's resettlement, thousand-year-old traditions, the quest to give a dead railroad switchman a proper Muslim burial, and an international incident caused in space.
Aitmatov was ethnically Kyrgyz. The book's mostly set on Kazakh steppes.
OP was looking for context on the meat-grinder in Ukraine. He won't find it in the meat-grinder near the end of Roadsite Picnic.
Sienkiewicz (1884), With Fire and Sword, set in 1640s-1650s Khmelnytsky Uprising (Cossacks of Zaporozhian Sich vs Polish-Lithuanian empire) is remarkably good, and geographically contiguous with the current meat grinder in Ukraine. A pre-Soviet book from outside what became USSR (Polish), not scifi, but which clearly inspired Frank Herbert and possibly Tolkein. Scifi and fantasy continued the adventure genre, after all. If you read it, be prepared for Iliad or The Bridge on the Drina-level violence at times.
For more non-scifi lit grounded in war in previous iterations of Ukrainian statehood, see especially Bulgakov's (1925) The White Guard. A love song to Kiev, loving and complex critique of its bourgeoisie that could only have been written by a physician.
Roadside Picnic's a fast-paced philosophical read. Solaris (yes it's Polish, but Tarkovsky painted it in film) has the dreamy, encyclopedic quality of something like Moby-Dick. (Post-Soviet) Metro 2033 is lower quality, more pulpy, feels like it was written to be turned into a series, video game, etc. (it was), but it's an interesting page-turner.
As another example of good book + good movie: Roadside Picnic (book by Stugarski Brothers, movie by Tarkovski).
I loved the Three Body Problem trilogy, remains to be seen how good he series/movie will be.
Yeah except Roadside Picnic was published in 1972 and basically invented the term.
From wikipedia:
The term "stalker" became a part of the Russian language and according to the authors, became the most popular of their neologisms. In the book, a stalker is a person who breaks the prohibition, enters the Zone and takes out artifacts from it, which they sell as a living. In Russian, after Tarkovsky's film, the term acquired the meaning of a guide who navigates forbidden and uncharted territories; later on, fans of industrial tourism, especially those visiting abandoned sites and ghost towns, were also called stalkers.
>It’s worth reading the source material “Roadside Picnic” if you haven’t yet. It’s very different from the film
add to that the original movie script by the Strugatski brothers which stands on its own and is different from the book as well as from the movie.
So Roadside Picnic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic) vel Stalker is a documentary after all?
The book, [Roadside Picnic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic) it is based on is equally amazing and both the movie adaptation and the book stand great on their own even though the movie was an artistic interpretation.
Ah, that's why the games based in the exclusion zone are named S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: [something]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:_Shadow_of_Chernobyl
Ah, it's explicit in a paragraph in the intro which I had not previously noted:
The background and some terminology of the game ("The Zone", "Stalker") are borrowed from the popular science fiction novella Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker that was loosely based on it, as well as Stalker, the film's subsequent novelization by the original authors. The term "Stalkers" was later used for the scientists and engineers who explored the interior of Chernobyl's "sarcophagus" after its hasty construction in 1986. In addition, 'The Zone' is also a term used to refer to the 30 kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, established after the accident.
Since it was written in 1971, well before the Chernobyl disaster, it's not surprising that the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic doesn't appear in the article. The book's theme and narrative are so redolent of Chernobyl, however - telling about perilous journeys into the Zone, an area infested with inexplicable, often invisible, and frequently deadly remnants of some alien Visitation - that the comparison is almost irresistible. Some of the caretakers of Chernobyl call themselves "Stalkers"[1] after the book's name for those venturing into the Zone (and also the name of Tarkovsky's film adapting the novel) for example.
With this in mind, if you've read Roadside Picnic it's hard not to see a reference to it in the article's closing words:
For 30 years, authors have heaved their imaginations into the Zone, trying to crack the riddle of the sarcophagus—how to make sense of Chernobyl? Their imperfect answers keep the question alive.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_%281979_film%29
Not directly, and neither does the film, but the entire 'Zone' trope was popularised in Roadside Picnic almost 15 years before the Chernobyl disaster.
Or better yet, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers which the film was based on.