Hacker Cinema
Stalker
Сталкер
1979 · Film · 162 min
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Near a gray and unnamed city is the Zone, a place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers, and where the normal laws of physics are victim to frequent anomalies. A stalker guides two men into the Zone, specifically to an area in which deep-seated desires are granted.
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In the 1979 Tarkovski film the "Stalker" is a person who knows the lost art of safely navigating a particularly dangerous area. People pay the Stalker to guide them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)
I think there’s a value in realism, ARC Raiders is one of my favorite games right now and it reminds of of movies like Stalker or The Shape of Water, movies that show old run down buildings and industrial complexes in their full glory, paint flaking, water in the wrong place, it’s just fantastic. It really sells me on being in a once busy space that’s been abandoned and fallen from its former glory.
Stalker has an interesting history, because Tarkovsky did shoot the Strugatskys' own screenplay first.
But almost all of the shot film was accidentally damaged beyond repair by the Soviet lab — they were using specially imported Kodak film stock that apparently the lab was unfamiliar with — and Tarkovsky had to go back to the Soviet film board and negotiate more money to reshoot the film.
Tarkovsky had been unhappy with the film as he shot it, and during these months of downtime, he repeatedly workshopped the script together with the Strugatskys. Long story short, Arkady Strugatsky proposed that Tarkovsky strip down the story; he wrote a treatment that reduced the entire film to a bare-bones, more philosophical story with nameless characters and very few overt sci-fi elements. Tarkovsky essentially wrote everything around that new core, much of it apparently also written during the second shoot.
I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, which has a whole chapter on Stalker and the difficulties of making that film.
In my opinion, Roadside Picnic is a masterpiece, and I would have loved to see a faithful adaptation of it. Stalker, as it ended up, is not really an adaptation of it.
Another pretty famous example is Stalker, based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. The novel is an ok sci-fi concept, but the film takes it to a whole other philosophical level.
The director's cut of Apocalypse When at, I dunno, about nine or ten hours (take a blanket and pee bottle), is definitely worthwhile, but most films that have gone over about two hours seem to be just the director being so impressed with their own vision that they didn't know when to stop. But then it's also quite a balancing act, there are some films where the studio insisted on messing it up (Blade Runner is a prime example) and others where the studio should have reined in the director a lot more than they did (many films where the director had a huge hit with film n and was given free rein to do whatever they wanted in film n+1).
It doesn't even have to be too long to go off the rails, for example Stalker, if you haven't read Roadside Picnic, is just two nutters wandering aimlessly around the landscape for 2+ hours (Tarkovsky allegedly said that it needs to be slow and boring at the start so that people who walked into the wrong film showing had a chance to leave), and if you have read the book is nothing like the book. It's a fabulous film but presumably completely baffling to anyone who hasn't read the book, and also somewhat unsatisfying to someone who has.
Thanks! Here's the full list: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
Everyone I know who critiques the length of these films agrees we’d literally rather watch an art film like stalker instead of these absolute meandering snooze fests.
Cocomelon is literally memetically designed to make your children demons. Its creators are spiritually/ontologically evil and they will reincarnate either into a cockroach’s or into durian fruit.
> Roadside Picnic I believe would also fall into this category. Though the aliens are just theoretical in the book and the characters deal with what is speculated to be the aftermath of an alien visit.
Another sci-fi classic sorta made into a movie (Stalker).
I see Malick in a lot but similarly I see Tarkovsky in a lot of overlapping movies. I don’t think Americans are as attuned to Tarkovskys influence on modern film. I definitely recommend Stalker as an amazing film.
Actually, like one particular scene from the movie "Stalker" by Tarkovsky.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58a13eba20099eb147e68d26/1588610177264-NDIPMIJG6ACI5SJQUCA2/Stalker+Dunes.jpg?format=2500w
A couple books I'd put in this category:
1. Roadside Picnic, by the Strugatsky brothers, loose basis of Tarkovsky's Stalker movie.
2. XX by Rian Hughes -- hugely under-rated book. Starts with a signal from outer space and goes quite far, and also has a book-within-a-book. Nearly 1000 pages but found it very engaging.
Currently trying to read Stanlislaw Lem's His Master's Voice which has a similar theme of a possible signal from an alien intelligence.
The taste of the general public is not a good meter for the quality of literally anything. The ability of a artwork to grip a person is important, but what many people do not realize is that it can be at times nearly arbitrary who is impacted by a piece of art and who isn't.
Artsy films like that may not get the populus into the cinemas and entertain them in a bread and games way, but them not trying to do that is exactly the reason they have the ability to hit deeper (if you let them).
In his memoires the soviet director Andrey Tarkovsky describes and quotes from letters regular people wrote about his films, many of which have been deeply moved. Films that make Terrence Malick look like mainstream and can be a tough watch if you go into them with the wrong energy.
Yet I remember his film Stalker striking a chord within me I didn't even know existed and you can't say this of many films.
Like the first line says, he is probably the least known famous director. That is, he is not an activist and not flashy, doesn't make a lot of movies, and the general public simply doesn't know about him. But all the other movie directors and famous actors know him and kind of idolize him.
When Thin Red Line came out in 1998 he hadn't done a movie since 1978 (Days of Heaven) and yet he snagged all the famous actors to play in it: Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel (though he wasn't as famous then), George Clooney, Jared Leto, Nick Nolte, John Travolta and others. It's like they were tripping over themselves to be in his film.
But I can't fault the general public for not knowing him either. His movies are more "artsy" so he is like like an American version of Andrey Tarkovsky -- you have to really be in the mood for his movies, like watching Stalker or Mirror by Tarkovsky.
> E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.
Your very own directors depict it this way, mainly Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev or Stalker.
Tarkovsky was making the movies he wanted, and stories were just pretext.
Both Lem (Solaris) and Strugatsky Brothers (Roadside Picnic turned into Stalker) disliked what Tarkovsky did.
> Take the moment where the Cowardly Lion first pounces on his soon-to-be companions. The camera pans back and forth between the Scarecrow and Tin Man, with cuts to Dorothy hiding behind a tree in the distance. The experience at Sphere called for keeping all these elements together, in hyper-realistic detail.
This sounds awful, as if Google thinks direction and editing are technological limitations rather than artistic choices. This entire project seems fit for a culture that loves content and hates art. If these tasteless jokers ever do this to Stalker I will probably riot. (“Carefully composed shots is for anachronistic dweebs, our society demands an Experience Like No Other.”)
> Every change, Hays notes, was made in close collaboration with Warner Bros., to ensure continuity with the spirit of the original.
Considering Warner Bros. Discovery’s track record is 3 years of selling out their own directors and writers, I would be more confident if Google were left to their own devices! DeepMind likely has more respect for the film than Warner Bros. management.
- Ghost in the Shell (1, then 2)
- Children of Men
- Stalker
- Solaris
- Blade Runner 2049
- Devs (a brief tv show, but just one shot the whole series)
- Contact
- Under the Skin
- Paprika
- Annihilation
- Arrival
- Ex Machina
- The 5th Element
- The Substance
- Primer
- Tenet
- Upstream Color
- 12 Monkeys
- Her
It goes on my list of 'dreamlike' movies, they don't always fully add up consciously but you can feel your unconscious going into overdrive while watching them (or maybe there is a surface plot that mostly adds up, like EWS, but there is clearly something going on at a least one other level). The viewing experience is often downright hypnotic for me.
A few off the top of my head, this is a very personal list and I can't even claim that all these movies are 'good' in any particular sense. Just that they put me into this state: * basically anything in lynch's cannon. I'm not always the biggest fan of his stuff, but sometimes they hit me hard. * Cronenberg's Videodrome and it's spiritual sequel Existenz * Donnie Darko & Southland Tales (objectively just an awful movie) * Prince of Darkness * Enter the Void (not for the faint of heart) * Paprika * Solaris (the original mostly, there are some qualities in the remake) * Stalker * Dark City * Sorry to Bother You * The Fountain * 8 1/2 * The Ninth Gate * and certainly Eyes Wide Shut
Stalker is not a silent movie.
Andrey Tarkovsky - Stalker (1979) - one of the best films ever. Aleksey German - Hard to Be a God (2013) - definitely silent but not exactly well detailed.
Both films were made according to brothers Strugatskys' novels.
"There’s some Soviet science fiction like Tarkovsky, which ended up turning into the movie Stalker."
Tarkovsky was the movie guy. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were the writer guys.
I really liked it back then.
>There’s some Soviet science fiction like Tarkovsky, which ended up turning into the movie Stalker
This is hilarious. The movie Stalker was shot by Tarkovsky based on a Strugacki browser novel "Roadside Picnic".
Cat Country by Lao She is debatably science fiction, being set on Mars as a way to satirise and criticise some parts of Chinese life in the early 1900s; there isn't much science in it, it's social commentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Country
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were white Soviet Russian men, famously wrote Roadside Picnic (among other works) which became the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
They were trying to tell stories critical of the way things were, but set in a fantastic world so it could get past the censors. Part of a genre of Russian/USSR sci-fi: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/22412.Russian_Science_Fiction_in_English
Possibly including Stanisław Lem writing in Eastern-bloc Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem
Reddit thread on African sci-fi and fantasy book suggestions: https://old.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/11zngrs/african_scifi_or_fantasy/
The movie inspired by Roadside Picnic (Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker) is one of my all-time favorites.
What a great question! Many interesting movies to check out in these comments!
My own list, I re-watch movies the same way I re-listen to music, often to get in a particular mode of thinking, as they become familiar, I mostly daydream while appreciating some particular concept and whatever new minutiae, or ways of understanding, creeps into my mind.
Hackers - 30+ times, for dreaming about a world that never was and never will be, for reminding myself how cool computers used to seem.
The Crow - 20+ times, for thinking about the world
Koyaanisqatsi - 15+ times, for thinking about my life in the world
Alien - 10+ times, for thinking about the future that passed us by
Terminator 1 and 2 - 10+ times, for examining a time that never was, or passed me by, and because Arnold is awesome!
A Clockwork Orange, 10+ times, to reflect on violence and aesthetic
Event Horizon, 10+ times, mostly for the aesthetic, and who dosen't love spaceships from hell ?
1984 - 5+ times, for thinking about humanity and society
Requiem for a Dream - 5+ times, for thinking about the value of life, and what society is
Once upon a time in the west - 5+ times, for thinking about loss, revenge and justice
Genocyber - 5+ times, to think about what life is for anyway
Stalker - 5+ times, frankly, mostly to look at the pretty pictures.
Lots of other amazing movies, I probably forgot some (time to watch again?)
Bonus:
TV Shows I've watched more than 10 times:
Star Trek TNG
Neon Genesis Evangelion
The book and the movie are quite rough, raw and extradry - i don’t mean this in a bad way. The mood reminds me more of eastern productions like tarkowsky (stalker) and the like.
The best films have long takes. Children of men or stalker come to mind
I knew if I stuck around the Internet long enough I would find someone who agreed with me. Dear lord, Stalker is an awful film.
Stalker is based on Roadside Picnic, basically a scifi novella. Tarkovsky heavily condenses the story to its most basic structure, the story itself is actually a masterpiece in understated commentary on society, class, individual will, and the human response to the unknown. All of this shows up in Tarkovsky’s film albeit in very sparse and intentional ways. As a filmmaker myself, I have realized that to adapt a story into a film it must be radically altered in order to fit the language of cinema because to merely transfer the plot, etc, starts to be more like theater than cinema
Or take Tarkovsky: both Stalker and Solaris are based on books, but only loosely. Stalker, for example, was a short sci-fi / horror story, if I remember correctly, and in the movie this is just a remote backstory, setting the scene to more serious topics and mysticism.
This reminds me the Russian movie Stalker in some way.
> A guide helps a writer and a professor to infiltrate a restricted area, the Zone. Paying no heed to the dangers which lay ahead, they proceed towards the Room in order to fulfil their desires.
He is one of those Russian trolls who roams around HN telling that the slaves brought to the Americans should be thankful for the free trip they got. Except since they work on a different historic context, their vile nature gets lost on most readers.
Pre-WWII Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were quite well developed small countries in Europe. Not on par with industrial powerhouses like the UK, but not the most undeveloped parts of Europe either. Estonia is a particularly notable example, since it shares lots of traits with Finland, comparing them is almost like a twins study. In 1938, Estonian and Finnish GDP per capita were very close, 3771 and 3589 dollars respectively.[1] Both were invaded by the USSR in 1939/40. Finland lost territory, but successfully fought Russians off and remained independent. Estonia was occupied by the USSR until 1991.
By 1995, the GDP per capita of Finland was 26 271 dollars, while Estonian GDP was 3134 dollars. In 2021, the Finnish GDP per capita was 53 489 dollars, while Estonian GDP had risen to 27 943 dollars.[2][3]
That's what 50 years of Russian rule does to a country - incredible economic stagnation, and then incredible rebound as soon as Russian tanks rolled out. In early 1990s, the average monthly wage in Estonia was 37 dollars. In 2023, it is 1800 dollars.
Russian trolls love to say how they "built the infrastructure", but they fail to mention that the natural pace of development would've been a much faster, like it is now.
And speaking of that "infrastructure", to a large degree it consisted of extremely polluting factories that produced uncompetitive garbage and went bankrupt as soon as free trade with rest of the world opened up. A great example of their "infrastructure" has been immortalized in Tarkovsky's sci-fi movie Stalker. The polluted wastelands with foaming rivers and white ebbs falling down like snow in summer weren't special effects. That was toxic waste from an upstream chemical plant that directed its waste unfiltered into a nearby river. Several crew members, including Tarkovsky himself, fell ill and died due to the poisioning received there.[4] Cleanup of such "infrastructure" continues to this day, 30 years later.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, and Russians building infrastructure.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/PolvBbR.jpg
[2] https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/FIN/StartYear/1995/EndYear/2021/Indicator/NY-GDP-PCAP-CD
[3] https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/EST/StartYear/1995/EndYear/2021/Indicator/NY-GDP-PCAP-CD
[4] https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/stalker-killed-andrei-tarkovsky/
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. If you start with their earliest work, like "The Land of Crimson Clouds", you can get vibe, how communist Sci-Fi looked. If you read later stuff, like "Tale of the Troika", then you get story humorously criticizing soviet bureaucracy. Then there is pretty serious stuff, like "The Doomed City" or "Ugly Swans". You probably know "Roadside Picnic" - this interpretations in films and gaming are known as "Stalker".
I wouldn't say Annihilation is in any way a remake of Stalker, shameless or not. It is clearly inspired by it a bit in terms of setting, but it has a very different message to say. Stalker was essentially a movie about faith. Annihilation is a movie about self-destruction, both in the destructive sense, but also as a necessary step to building a new self.
The concept of a special zone where things are not the same as in normal reality is merely a shared motif.
Now watch the film adaptation, Stalker - even more depressing!
Between Stalker and Call of Duty they probably know at least something. And documentaries about Chernobyl were common on Russian TV.
He's an author, not a game dev. The game devs licensed his IP. All of this is explained in the article.
You might also be surprised to learn that Andrei Tarkovsky, director of the film Stalker (1979), didn't personally learn C++ and program S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (2007). Neither did Arkady and Boris Strugatsky who wrote the novel Roadside Picnic (1971) that all of these works, including Metro, are inspired by.
STALKER/Roadside Picnic is one for the few forms of media I know of that has been adapted into two different forms of media (movie, video game) and all three being very enjoyable.
The movie, oddly enough, is definitely more high-brow than the book (usually the opposite is the case). The game series has also, compared to other games of that era, a very different yet mainstream appeal to it.
Btw, the adaptations, both movie and game wise, are only very loosely based on the book.
The game loosely draws on the Roadside Picnic [1] by Strugatsky brothers but moves the plot to the Chernobyl zone.
Stalker the film is based on the Roadside Picnic story, btw.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
The drama|documentary TV series Chernobyl?
Or the soviet era Andrei Tarkovsky movie Stalker based on the novel Roadside Picnic by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (who also wrote the screenplay)?
The later is unrelated to the Chernobyl accident (in any direct sense) as it concerns unfathomable alien technology left as waste on earth after a visitation (or alien picnic along a galactic roadside) with human 'stalkers' raiding the unknown like ants after sugar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
> The question is, when will we feel that those things actually deserve to be thought of as being full-fledged, or at least partly fledged, "I"s?
this LLM thing is more like a collective "we", it is making a prediction in the sense of the relevant training data, it probably wouldn't say anything that contradicts the consensus.
Maybe the LLM's are just a mirror of our society. And our society doesn't seem to assign a lot of value to individualism, as such.
i think that might be similar to the movie Solaris by Tarkovsky. The movie is starring an alien ocean, which is some sort of mirror, that is showing us who we are (maybe it has a different meaning, not quite sure about it). You can watch it on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ZhQPaw4rE (i think you also get this theme with Stalker - this zone is also telling us who we are)
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.
being on youtube is great, but if you have a chance to see stalker in a cinema or a better digitized higher resolution version, i highly recommend it. this movie has among the most beautiful film grain and colors i have seen and this dimension is mostly absent on the linked digitization. this is also probably the worst movie for this to happen as the pace and composition require a nearly meditative immersion into the scenes, like looking at a great oil painting without enough resolution to see the brush strokes.
I'm reaching the conclusion that the Russkies just have a decidedly non-Western idea of femininity; hell, they used to seclude upper-class women in something called terem until the 17th century. Makes me half suspect Russia is a crypto-matriarchy and behind the scenes things are run by Putin's mom
The Żuławskian "evil woman" (Szamanka, Possession) is just so much more interesting as a character, as well as in terms of what her character implies about the world that made her as she is, than the Tarkovskian "mother-martyr" (and her imago form, the "maiden-miracleworker"). One is an incomprehensible embodiment of the most tragic and poetic traits of the individual, the other a temporary personification of an impersonal Motherland; so, besides different attitudes to womanhood, they also demonstrate vastly different views of personhood and the role of the individual in the grand scheme of living nature. It could be an artifact of the respective authors' personal upbringings and experiences - but as the Writer in Stalker explicitly notes, an author only becomes influential by virtue of reflecting something essential about their audience (which in this case would be initially limited to the respective ethnolinguistic communities).
Now contrast with the overarching message of contemporary Netflix-and-children style cinema. Absolutely fascinating! And quite important too - though nearly impossible to discuss.
There are things more important in life than ad revenue, and MosFilm can't directly get it from YouTube at the moment anyway.
RuTracker should always be one of the first options to consider, but I wouldn't be that zealous. Official subtitles might be the biggest problem, as they don't seem to have a definite source. Some are expressive (up to metrical translation of the songs) but too liberal, some were certainly made by cheapest freelancers they could find. The user has to know beforehand that better translations can sometimes be found, and that it is possible to use extensions to load subtitles from local files. Re-uploading the videos as distinct native and translated versions, and changing softsubs to hardsubs and vice versa is another problem resulting in link rot. Video itself usually seems to be fine, though one of the SD masters of “Stalker” was known for relying on digital film stabilization which resulted in artifacts on faster panning shots, but in that case it was the same on DVDs.
For comparison, LenFilm also uploaded movies to YouTube, and they had masterpieces of Alexei German in 1080p, but either recorded with botched brightness correction through some kind of screen capture software at superfast settings, or watermarked with landline phone number (in a second decade of a 21st century) of some subcontracting studio. The whole thing probably relied on some clueless intern uploading files from their office PC. However, LenFilm has been banned as vile and daaangerous “state-controlled media”, and neither German, nor popular Soviet adventure movies for kids, nor dull and boring soc-realistic factory life dramas are officially there.
Personally, I am a bit skeptical about the image of a regular multi-tasking user seeing the scene of a interrogation, a remark about the suicide of Mayakovsky, and a dinner, and getting it all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFZa9CVBeJY&t=2669
Three decades of talking about multimedia, and we still don't have a convenient commentary system to hold all the explanations and notes.
I consider myself a person who really loves and appreciates film, but I could not parse Stalker. It’s clearly dense with meaning and subtext, but I think I had too much going on in my head when I was watching it to appreciate what was going on.
Was re-watching The Limits of Control by Jim Jarmusch recently, and realised it had a reference to Tarkovsky's Stalker in the scene with the "cinema lady".
"The best films are like dreams you're never sure you've really had. I have this image in my head of a room full of sand. And a bird flies towards me, and dips its wing into the sand. And I honestly have no idea whether this image came from a dream, or a film"
I saw A Hidden Life within the last month and it is one of the best movies I have seen. I have also seen Stalker and after an interesting start it eventually bored me. I can see why you make the comparison, but I found them very different.
I need to watch Solaris and Stalker.
Tree of Life was one of my favorite film experiences ever, but I wouldn’t care to watch it again.
I’m curious - why did you feel like Tree of Life was incomprehensible?
I think we have to agree to disagree; I found The Tree of Life (the only Malick movie I've managed to finish) to be a boring, incomprehensible mess of a movie, while Solaris and Stalker have been, in my opinion, somewhat interesting things.
The colour grading on Stalker on YouTube seems quite different to other versions floating around. The YT version seems to have lost the heavy yellow cast of the other versions.
Does anyone know which is "correct"? It makes quite a difference to the feel of the film.
The best way to watch these movies would be by pirating them from the RuTracker, as that way you will be sure that you are not contributing any views or advertisement money to the Mosfilm, with a bonus of much higher bitrates.
Here are the links:
Solaris — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6191155
Stalker — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6182463
Ivan's Childhood — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6194960
The Mirror — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6194964
Andrei Rublev — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6194948
The Passion According to Andrei — https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5820633
Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein is in public domain, and so you can legally watch any other upload on YouTube instead of Mosfilm's, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsQcljysO-8
Tarkovsky's "Stalker" is loosely based on the "Roadside Picnic"[1] a sci-fi novel of Strugatsky brothers.
A. and B. Strugatsky are not that much recognized in the western countries as Andrey Tarkovsky, but they made significant contribution to the Russian literature of XX century, and their books are still popular in the post-soviet countries. In particular, the Roadside Picnic influenced many modern sci-fi works too, including, for example, the "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." and the "Metro" video game series.
Tarkovsky's "Stalker" is quite distinctive from Strugatsky's novel both in style and plot, but the screenplay of the movie was written by Strugatsy brothers too. Basically, they made completely different work in the same setting, but following completely different narrative. Also, they included a lot of pieces from their other (less famous) work "The Ugly Swans" into the screenplay, which is closer to Tarkovsky's film style. For example, the Writer's monologue[2] is just a direct translation of the same monologue from The Ugly Swans.
"Solaris", another Tarkovsky's famous sci-fi movie, based on Stanislav Lem's novel of the same title, was a more controversial work. Stanislav Lem made quite critical reception of this adaptation that simplifies and distorted his novel's original ideas. However, I think that Tarkovsky's "Solaris" is still the best adaptation of this book we currently have.
Aside from this, I would recommend "Ivan's Childhood" a war movie about orphaned child, and the "Andrei Rublev" a historical movie about the famous Russian Orthdox Icon painter set place in the late middle ages, and about survival of artistic people in hard times.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwIoSI1Eqak
Stalker is a beautiful movie but perhaps not the easiest one to watch, especially if you are not used to 10 min long shots of nature (e.g., water in a stream). Possibly Solaris, which you recommend too, would be an easier movie to watch first.
The game is more like the Stalker movie than the book.
In the book there were research missions and active urban life as well as smuggling, whereas the movie is spearheaded on going through the Zone while uninvited. The movie also has the post-apoc vibe whereas the book does not. The whole point of book is co-existence of the unknown with normal(ish) human society.
I watched a random segment from Stalker, the embedded movie, and at 15:10 the woman gets in the car and the subtitles say "Come with me", while the character clearly says "Go!". Very confusing. The auto-generated subtitles got this one word right but have other gaps. So warning if you're gonna watch these that the subtitles might not be perfect.
It's one of his most accessible movie, and usually resonates with tech people for obvious reasons. His best movies imo are Mirror, Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Stalker and then Solaris, Nostalgia and Sacrifice.
Now Solaris book by Lem is far superior to Tarkovsky's rendition.
IMO the Stalker game is like the darkest and most raw take of the general theme, the movie is the most philosophical and artsy take and the book is somewhere in the middle. And they’re all worth it.
Related. others?
How 'Stalker' claimed the life of Andrei Tarkovsky and his wife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32588569 - Aug 2022 (1 comment)
The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782009 - Jan 2022 (79 comments)
The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26132544 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)
The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126004 - Feb 2021 (44 comments)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Message to the Young: “Learn to Be Alone” (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22196779 - Jan 2020 (91 comments)
Andrei Tarkovsky – Poetic Harmony [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11601651 - April 2016 (18 comments)
Tarkovsky Films Free Online (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7107215 - Jan 2014 (52 comments)
STALKER created an entire franshise on it's own. Which to date has a very dedicated community.
It is one of the best psy-films of all time.
that is so crazy i was in one of the shooting locations yesterady by accident (it is now a kultural venue location) and wondered why an area there had the name "stalker", of course i thought about my favorite movie but i never considered it being filmed where i live. thanks for this mind blow
IMHO, if you’ll be watching your first Tarkovsky film start with Stalker, which is how my girlfriend (now wife of 27 years), introduced me to him many years ago. I was very much a Fellini person, and the Bergman-Tarkovsky school seemed cryptic (at best) at the time. When finished, ask yourself (1) if you would have gone into the room and (2) what the dreamlike sequences with Stalker’s son meant.
Second one should be Solaris, if you’re into SciFi or The Mirror if you’re not of if you’d like a challenge. I think The Mirror is the better movie, the woman (stand in for T’s mom) looking at the wheat field (T had these specifically planted for the film!) haunts me to this day.
I personally couldn’t relate to The Sacrifice, perhaps his most personal film. His earlier films (Ivan and Rublev) I could not watch at all.
To be a genius artist like him in the Soviet Union meant privileges unheard for art film directors in Europe (let alone US), eg see the wheat field thing above. It also meant you’re at the mercy of the “masses”. I had read an article once that included a comment for The Mirror from a regular filmgoer, saying after 30mins it caused such a headache! The funding was based on such feedback and the movie was labeled as elitist (it is) which greatly impacted his career. It’s infuriating to think T lost time due to such petty interference (OTOH, I could only finish the film on my third try, falling asleep in first two attempts! So she had a point)
Solaris is by far his best movie, even better than STALKER (which is itself excellent). It seems many have not seen it. They are missing out.
Hard to compare. They’re completely different in terms of plot, mood, style… everything, really. Roadside Picnic has the signature Strugatsky Bros dark comedy running through it, while Stalker really has no comedic elements whatsoever. I prefer the book, for what it’s worth. OTOH, I prefer the film Solaris to the Lem novel.
The Stalker shooting locations are actually close to Tallinn in Estonia, a former Soviet republic that’s an EU and NATO member today. So if watching the film turns you into a super fan, it’s not too hard to go visit the sites!
I was also thinking Tarkovsky’s Stalker while reading the parent comment - a great accompaniment to a nap on a lazy afternoon. Nice atmosphere, but did anything happen in that movie?
Surely, as this is a purely subjective experience, what matters is not if spoilers don't affect enjoyment in general, but whether they affect enjoyment for me?
One of my favourite films, Stalker as a scene referred to as "the meat grinder". I knew how it went before I first watched it, and have always wished that I didn't. In general, I find it much more enjoyable to go into a film with as little foreknowledge as possible.
That's what I would think as well, but I can't count how many people my age (40-ish) and younger that I've spoken to who haven't even heard of Tarkovsky, let alone seen his films. And I hang out with largely artists and musicians in NYC, where I've lived for 15+ years. I've even had actor friends who are successful in their field (Broadway, major film and television) say they've heard of but never seen Tarkovsky -- and of course they're all blown away when they see Stalker.
That's all to say I'd agree with you, that Solaris is one of the best sci-fi films of all time, but time and again I'm surprised that people just really haven't seen it, even in circles with people you'd expect would have a higher probability of encountering it.
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.
In that case, here's what I'd say:
Tarkovsky, the director, is considered one of the greatest ever. He's not just some random Russian director, or some random 70s director. And he only made seven movies. Based on those facts alone, I would think it'd be worth seeing at least one or two of the seven. If you're into sf your best bets are Solaris or Stalker. Personally I prefer Stalker, but Solaris is also great.
There's plenty more that could be said about Tarkovsky, Solaris, Stalker, or his other films, but for me at least those facts alone would be enough to take a look.
I think it just requires a reframing of what to expect. Films from Tarkovsky or other capital D Directors "of Director's Directors fame" are less plot driven. Films from older eras are less plot driven / hadn't developed the tempo of modernity (I'd summarize the tempo change as needing to lead the viewer into what's next). Combine them both and you get something that feels like watching paint dry, the catch being the paint dries on 120ft of canvas. You're in the museum and the tapestry moves. Rather than trying to constantly figure out what's next / where this is going (you don't notice this in modern films as the tempo has already fed it to you / shuttled you along to the next plot point), just sit there and enjoy the view. In Stalker the shots are (op/im)pressively long. And I love them.
Yeah, that film is Stalker (and boy is it boring)
Anyone else prefers Solaris over 2001? Both are great movies for sure but somehow Tarkovsky made everything more emotional and relatable. I love 2001 but to me Solaris is on another level (and Stalker too)
If you have never watched it's on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ZhQPaw4rE (Mosfilm is generally one of the GOAT Youtube channels with their uploads)
There is an older upload on their other channel if you want different subs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-4KydP92ss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXa6XpaxBS0
(2 parts because of the original 2 reels)
I'm a huge fan of Tarkovsky. Stalker and Mirror are two of my all-time favorite films, and The Sacrifice is great too, but Solaris was a huge letdown.
The 1972 version is one of the best sci-fi films ever made and as a STALKER fan, I think that Solaris is still the best work from this director.
It's insane how modern it seems using a 1972 Soviet budget
To quote the movie Stalker,
'My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world. And my subconscious is yearning for a piece of juicy meat. But what do I want?'
I think that Stalker (the movie) [1] does not feature more than 3 people in a scene.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)
Is it empty? Is it cheap?
I always thought that Stalker is pretty much the Soviet version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both are really good, but by modern standards extremely slow.
Stalker is only very loosely based on the Roadside Picnic universe, since you like you movie you should definitely give the book a go.
> I still think it could have the potential be a really interesting TV show.
It's already a movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)
> But their masterpiece, of course, is Stalker.
Pardon me, but isn't the book titled 'Roadside picnic' upon which the movie 'Stalker' was based?
Maybe overworked and tired population needs spandex instead of Tarkovsky’s movies. After 1,5 hours commuting and 9,5 hours in the office I prefer Netflix’ Red Notice over Stalker. And I guess I am not the only one.
On the other hand as non native Polish speaker I will enjoy some evening with some great movie recommended in this thread.
> Yes, many Mosfilm classics seems to be on YouTube
This seems to vary a lot. I just checked and there were several Moscfilm films available (including Stalker) but I'm pretty sure I checked this about 6 months ago and there weren't many available - some were available for rent, but not free view.
If you enjoy classic Russian films, many of the Soviet era are available on YouTube including Stalker, Come and See and other unusual classics.
> I enjoy the pace of Blade Runner. Many movies today are just too busy and pointlessly hysterical.
Agree, Blade Runner has perfect pacing for me. It is not action movie, but i do not expect nor want it to be one. Compared to other classic sci-fi movies like 2001: Space Odyssey, or Tarkovsky's Solaris or Stalker, these are slow-pacing movies.
I have heard very little of his music so far, only in some of the Tarkovsky films like Stalker which I adore.
This theme for Urga: Close to Eden is beautiful, I must watch the film one of these days - https://youtu.be/_U_DOuAWz4g He always seems to utilise a rich mix of styles and instrumentation.
The very first impression I have of Stalker [seen on a projector] is being stunningly beautiful. Very few films [including all of Tarkovsky's, with maybe the best being Mirror] manage to create this sense of stunning beauty so that's something that needs to be mentioned.
Other than this, the film simply hypnotized and drew me in. I wasn't analyzing or thinking about the story, rather observing and experiencing, which allowed the magic to unfold. There are scenes that freeze time, the only words that maybe do justice to them are "bewitchingly intense". His philosophical magnum opus [1], Mirror, is even more powerful.
Tarkovsky was not only an artist extraordinaire but a supreme genius, the kind of person that appears once every few centuries. His films are full of something that you certainly won't find in any movie today [especially American], which is called "soul", and a full appreciation of him and his work entails opening up that part of yourself and allowing it to engage with Tarkovsky's as expressed in his output.
[1] I use "philosophy" here to mean meditations on the human condition that are understood / made real through praxis, i.e. its original definition.
Tarkovsky is a genius. The original novel for Stalker is a must read (esp. if you can read Russian). But I cannot watch some of his movies after I learned that he _cruelly_ killed a horse in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Rublev_(film)#Depictions_of_violence. I cannot justify this for the sake of art.
If you are a fan, I strongly recommend Weird Studies' 2-part episode on Stalker. Phil and JF generalize the concept of "the zone" and discuss other examples of zones in art.
Tarkovsky was truly one of cinema’s great directors. His films aren’t simple or easy, but they are gorgeous to behold and if you put in the time, you’ll be richly rewarded. As others have mentioned, Stalker and Solaris are his two great sci-fi films, easily on par with Kubrick’s 2001. For history buffs, Andrei Rublev is fantastic too.
There are some movies you think about for years.. The Sacrifice and Stalker were like that, for me.
Tarkovsky's advice to young people is also something I think will ring true with the Hacker News crowd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Vvdtaaprzw
If you have some time, watch "Stalker". It's pretty amazing this twisted-reality dreamlike film was made in 1979. It feels right out of 2010.
Well, first of all Roadside Picnic was actually published by the state. Then, the state funded a rather expensive Tarkovsky movie, inspired by the book ("Stalker"). I think I even had this book at parent's apartment. Plenty of Strugatsky's brothers novels were actually published by the state publishing houses. I think they ran into some problems with their more satirical pieces ("Tale of Troika" comes to mind, for example).
Your description of artists' life is pretty simplistic and one-sided. There were some people who did propaganda posters, but there were many things that existed outside the political domain, from book illustrations, to paintings with less ideological overtones, to working in theater. There was also Soviet cinema and animation, which would hardly be seen as only a propaganda vehicle, there was a lot of very nuanced works, which raised important questions. A lot of good stuff was shelved, or circulated underground of course.
So why is that surprising? There are few or no quality scifi/fantasy movies if you actually read scifi/fantasy books.
Villeneuve did something competent-ish with Dune. Altered Carbon season one was decent. I couldn't watch the second season because they really went off the rails with it. That's about all lately.
Funny enough, I think the best sf movies are the one that ignore the source material and do ... something else. Blade Runner for example. Or Tarkovski's Stalker. Note that they aren't named as the books that inspired them.
As for Foundation, I haven't seen it and don't intend to. But judging by people's opinions it looks to me that not only it has no connection with the book. It's also a bad movie taken as a standalone movie?
It might be a good novel (I've only seen the Tarkovsky film, Stalker) but this wasn't written by Stansilaw Lem.
I don't see why this is flagged. Is there some kind of convention that in the context of movies "k" must only be used in terms of resolution - but only if it's a well-know resolution? So "5k" movies will be ok to refer to 5000 movies but not "4k" or "8k" movies?
In fact the list contains many interesting movies, for instance Tarkovsky movies such as Solaris, The Mirror and Stalker. Or a film by Peter Greenaway about Darwin.
I am skeptical about the licensing, though, because many movies are probably not free. Also some on Youtube are "not available" (to me?). For instance "Fargo" is most likely not free.
I want to spoil a magnificent movie, the Russian classic Stalker [1]. If you haven't watched the film and want to one day, please stop reading this comment.
It is a deep film with many themes but one main theme involves a curious plot device. From the Wikipedia article: "The Zone contains a place called the "Room", said to grant the wishes of anyone who steps inside." The theme of that plot device is that once a group of explorers finally get to the room they refuse to go inside. The "Room" isn't a monkey-paw like device that distorts your wishes and gives you a bad outcome, rather it sees inside your soul and gives you what you truly desire. It raises questions about man's conscious desires compared to his unconscious desires. Do you really want to know what you truly desire, even the desires you hide from yourself?
I can't do justice to the film but I think of it often and usually with respect to AI and the unreasonably effective algorithms that drive modern feeds. TikTok is in some ways our first true glimpse into the "Room" of Tarkovsky's Stalker.
All this to say: I don't see any of the things you are saying you see on TikTok. Whether you like it or not the algorithm is sending you what you engage with. You have been sorted into the "desires wild canoe ride" TikTok. You are sorted into the "desires smug fashion gatekeepers" TikTok.
And if you happen to have read this comment and haven't seen Stalker - it is still worth it.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)
No. The cleanup workers after the Chernobyl accident noted the similarities between their "Exclusion zone" and the zone in the book and movie, and some started calling themselves stalkers. A dangerous zone, controlled by the government where only certain people are allowed to go, filled with invisible dangers.
The game just expanded that connection, mashing up Chernobyl history and Stalker/Picinic details, and brought it to the western gamer audience.
If part of Australia was overrun by biker gangs I'm sure people would start calling it the Max Max zone. Same thing.
I’ve also seen it many times and love it but I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. Here’s a list with the top 1000 films of all time as voted by MUBI (a community of movie geeks that like arthouse films). Stalker is at sitting at no 5. https://mubi.com/lists/the-top-1000
"Stalker" is my favorite film of all time and I highly recommend it.
Also in the movie Stalker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk1PxpZ-hfE
Reminds an idea from Tarkovsky's Stalker
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)
Despite the fact that the film is officially based on Strugatsky 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, the sphiere idea from resemblance 'the Room'.
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.
Don't forget about the film:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)
I was a little underwhelmed by Tarkovsky's take on Solaris; the book was written with a lot more evocative prose, especially with respect to color, which made the film seem just so plain. But I really liked Stalker - then again I hadn't read Roadside Picnic. My understanding is that Tarkovsky's adaptations are usually quite different from the source material.
Stalker is fantastic, as is "Roadside Picnic," the novel on which the film is based. Both inspired the acclaimed computer game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.
Just a few days ago I watched Sci-fi classic "Solaris" by Andrei Tarkovsky and I had no expectations or knowledge about the movie or Director before watching it and it blew my mind. I then looked into other movies directed by Tarkovsky such as "Stalker" and "Andrei Rublev" which nobody in my age group knows or talk about but these are great movies. I am looking forward to finding such hidden gems and watching these films.
The article talks mostly about lighter-hearted movies, but I'd still want to recommend my favorite examples of "burdensome beauty" (as they put it) by Tarkovsky:
"Зеркало" (The Mirror): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYZhXm02kN0
"Сталкер" (Stalker): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGRDYpCmMcM
"Андрей Рублев" (Andrei Rublev): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6kqlveBhVY
And, if you're into Slavic cinema in general, I'd also recommend "Life is a Miracle" by Emir Kusturica: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322420/ -- he's not a Russian director, but he is fantastic.
> My main grief is that surprise is only obtained with a combination of visual effects, fast rhythm and loud sounds
It would be interesting to see a Pixar take on Stalker, a famously slow film, discussed just recently [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126004
I understand what you're getting at with the quite different, immersive style of Stalker. I don't necessarily agree that the lack of connection is necessarily due to people being accustomed to "voyeuristic and pornographic [experiences]". Sure, there's plenty of movies like that and many who would dislike Tarkovsky are devotees of that style.
But one can be a lover of subtle, beautiful cinema and still find Tarkovsky boring. I can easily sit through Nashville or Beau Travail or La Cienaga and still find Tarkovsky boring. Indeed, attributing dislike of Tarkovsky to being unsophisticated in one's taste is precisely what I was critiquing in my previous comment. Tarkovsky is not the arbiter of one's film taste.
Well said. When I recommend Stalker to someone I tell them to make sure they don't have anything else to do. Hide your phone. Prepare yourself as if you are preparing to meditate. Slow way down, notice how the scenes make you feel. They're the antithesis of American films where something is blowing up or crashing every minute or so. In some sense you have to detox from American cinema in order to appreciate a Tarkovsky film. The problem isn't Tarkovsky, it's our frenetic pace. Tarkovsky's sense of time is much different than ours.
My thesis is that people have troubles connecting with Stalker because they are accustomed to movies being a very voyeuristic and pornographic experience, with in-your-face exposition at every corner and the producers making sure there is nothing ambiguous happening ever. Stalker is not made for you to be a spectator. It's filmed as if you're getting on the journey of the characters. A lot of time they rant alone, they're speaking to you. They asks questions and nobody answers, because that was addressed to you. People either "get into" that movie and it's one of their favorite ever, or they don't and it's extremely boring, which is normal. I think it should be approached with that in mind, that you have to actively take part in the story to appreciate it.
Some of the action in the hyperactive cold-war thriller 'Atomic Blonde' takes place in a cinema showing a screening of Stalker [0].
I always wondered whether this was an intentional contrast in tempo given that the other cultural references in Atomic Blonde are music-based [1] and much more contemporary with the late-80s setting of the film
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)#Influence_and_legacy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde#track_listing
Ah, Stalker and Adrei Rublev are among my favourite movies. Contrary to what some may feel, I find their pacing to be a nice, almost meditative experience. The others of his movies came to me as more pretentious, although also nice in their way (maybe I need to give them another watch).
For a similar kind of experience, but more down to earth, I would recommend the movies of Béla Tarr.
I have mixed feelings about Tarkovsky. He is certainly profoundly important. His sensuality is unmatched. Whether it's the perfect use of sound (endless dripping water, the ringing of a fallen cup), the incredible imagery or the beautiful stories (I think about the bell story in Andrei Rublev a lot), Tarkovsky is the king of making you feel the movie.
That said, I don't worship at the altar of Tarkovsky. I don't love that his movies have this impenetrable length. I don't love that his movies inevitably have some long philosophical lecture by a male character while the women stay to the sides, often silent. I will sound like a petulant digital native, but I have been bored by a Tarkovsky.
Too often Tarkovsky is used as this unquestionably brilliant artist. To appreciate him is to be a true cinemaphile, while to hate him is to indicate your pedestrian tastes. I don't agree. There should be no shame in being bored by Stalker, in not getting Andrei Rublev, in finding The Sacrifice a little too navel gazing.
If I had to explain Tarkovsky to someone who doesn't watch art movies, I'd say that he's like the Velvet Underground. Unless you have a particular taste, you probably won't enjoy songs like Heroin or Venus in Furs. But you'll definitely enjoy the music made by people who did like Heroin or Venus in Furs. You don't have to enjoy Tarkovsky. But watch some of his movies, and you'll start to have flashes of recognition in movies like Arrival, La Cienaga, The New World, etc.
I can’t say I’ve noticed that - I saw most Tarkovsky movies in the late 80s before I knew about these details.
When it comes to Stalker (which I recently rewatched) I’d imagine the sound would add to the strangeness.
And then you see the train scene in Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker which is essentially the same, but so well placed and carried out that it stays with you for life.
When I applied for film school, two different film schools had a no music rule for the application process. This rule was in hindsight mainly meant to weed out very bad applications who would try to drown out other issues with music, but it was also a rule meant to be broken.
I feel very much the same as you do about the musical interlude: it mostly gives me nothing and throws me out, despite (or because?) me being a musical person who likes music.
In a very old interview, Eduard Artemyev, one of the pioneers of electronic music, says how Jugalbandi inspired his soundtrack of the sci-fi movie Stalker (1). I think it is the Stalker meditation theme, which distinctly has a Persian oud/tar like effect (2).
(1) https://youtu.be/xjVT7MlE5rY?t=629s
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP1QXKbhqr4
I just came across Mark Fisher this past year - his ideas are interesting. He reminds me of David Foster Wallace for some odd reason. Here's a few of my favorite excerpts from Fisher's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures:
> Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal — from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms — but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before. Or, as Simon Reynolds so pithily put it, in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down.
> The most productive way of reading the ‘personal is political’ is to interpret it as saying: the personal is impersonal. It’s miserable for anyone at all to be themselves (still more, to be forced to sell themselves). Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves.
> Joy Division always sounded as if they had experienced one too many of those desolating voidings, so that they could no longer be lured back onto the merry-go-round. They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t want really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.
> To leaf through other people’s family photos, to see moments that were of intense emotional significance for them but which mean nothing to you, is, necessarily, to reflect on the times of high drama in your life, and to achieve a kind of distance that is at once dispassionate and powerfully affecting. That is why the - beautifully, painfully - dilated moment in Tarkovsky’s Stalker where the camera lingers over talismanic objects that were once saturated with meaning, but are now saturated only with water is for me the most moving scene in cinema. It is as if we are seeing the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an Alien-God. Otto claims that the sense of the numinous is associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness, experience with a ‘piercing acuteness [and] accompanied by the most uncompromissing judgement of self-depreciation’. But, contrary to today’s ego psychology, which hectors us into reinforcing our sense of self (all the better to ‘sell ourselves’), the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace. There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us.
> [A]s Rudolf Otto establishes in The Idea of the Holy, encounters with angels are as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons. After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy? Otto, a conservative Christian, argued that all religious experience has its roots in what is initially misrecognized as ‘daemonic dread’; he saw encounters with ghosts, similarly, as a perverted version of what the Christian person would experience religiously.
> Capital can never openly admit that it is a system based on inhuman rapacity; the Terminator can never remove its human mask.
It’s strange. I can definitely give you a list of books that made me see the world differently, but I find it much harder to come up with a list of films, even though I tend to enjoy the medium more. Broadly speaking, I keep reflecting on scenes from Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, and Miyazaki films more than any others, even though they’re not necessarily my favorite films. I would recommend Stalker, Dreams, and Mononoke.
There’s also Man on Wire, for both the sheer joy of impossible achievement that it evokes, as well as the beautiful minimalist soundtrack. On reflection, maybe that’s one of the few films I’ve seen that had a different person leaving the theater. The mood of that film is imprinted in my personality.
I’d you liked Stalker I also recommend the book it was based on (“Roadside Picnic”). The book is very different from the movie in terms of tone, but I feel like the book gives a bit more context to the movie. It’s a case of the book/film being complimentary to each other in a really nice way.
Movies with great impact on me:
1. Untouchable - must see
2. Gattaca - are we going there?
3. 1984 - must see
4. Idiocracy - initially looks like joke/stupid movie, but it's more real then we may want to agree
5. Life of others (made in Ge)
6. Amelie Poulain (made in Fr)
7. Turtles can fly (made in Ir)
8. Stalker - the russian original (3 parts) (made in Ru)
9. Metropolis
Other good movies:
Lost Horizon
The Bucket List
The Truman Show
Solaris 1972
Enemy at the Gates
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Tips for good movies in general: take countries one by one and search best ever movies from that country.
> Usually movies are too fast
Stalker consists of 143 shots in just under three hours. A blissful pace.
Roadside Picnic is the equivalent of LOTR or Neuromancer when it comes to defining a genre of pop culture.
It was published 7 years before the movie Stalker.
It is a short novel and a great read, it is also a stark contrast to Western SciFi.
I'm not a huge film buff or anything, but I did watch Stalker. The music and cinematography was captivating in a way I rarely get in anything but video games or books. Usually movies don't capture me that way, they're far too fast, literal and descriptive. Stalker left so much to the imagination that I was constantly engaged in trying to figure out what they were thinking, where they were going, and what it was they expected to find. It gave me all the time I needed to think about it too.
Roadside picnic didn't coin the term stalker. Stalker is a Soviet film based on the book.
This and Stalker, I think are one of the best Soviet sci-fi movies. But unlike Stalker, Kin-Dza-Dza is very difficult to understand for foreigners (based on watching it with different people over the years). Only someone who lived through transition from Communism to Capitalism will relate to the protagonist.
I could not find them on Eastern European Movies but the movies directed by Andrei Tarkovsky left an impression at me. While some were made when he lived in exile and are therefore technically not Eastern European they still fit the genre. Besides the obvious Solaris and Stalker I can recommend Nostalghia and especially The Sacrifice.
On a more lighter note I really enjoyed the children movies and TV series that were made in Czechoslovakia in the 80s a lot as kid and so does my kid today. My favorite is The Visitors aka Adam '84. Classics are also Pan Tau, all the fairy tale movies from Hofman/Polák, Lucie, postrach ulice and Létající Čestmír. Generally everything out of studio Barrandov is worth to have a look at.
Lem hated Tarkovski's "Solaris".
Strugatski brothers hated his "Stalker" based on their "The Roadside Picnic".
Tarkovski was always making his own movies based on his own (understanding of) stories. Basing them on other people's work was just a pretext :)
Beyond the beautiful cinematography and sound design, the thing that blew me away when I saw it (on a big screen, I think I also dozed off for a few minutes) was how he stretches time almost to a hypnotic effect.
The scene when they are on the train tracks, slowly morphing from black and white into colour - so slowly that it takes a while for you to figure out what's going on, while being lulled into almost a trance like state. I did not realise film could elicit such experiences prior to seeing Stalker. It's beautiful
>Stalker is still the most beautiful film I've ever seen
It's my favorite movie of all time
I'm down that rabbit hole right now. The HBO series Chernobyl made me start up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that's been sitting in my steam library for years. That game made me check out the film Stalker just last week and that made me pick up Roadside Picnic just the other day.
I think people are too used to the "American style" of moviemaking which focuses solely on goal driven characters in a rules driven world. While the characters in Stalker have some goals it's not all that important.
There is no "explanation" as in a series of rules of the universe and character internal goals that together drive the plot. Why would one think there has to be? "Film is a mosaic made up of time."
As far as i know Tarkovsky wasnt really scifi fan. Maybe thats why Stalker is so unlike the book.
He made Solaris as answer to Kubrics Space Oddesay and after that he got big budget for another scifi.
Sadly the Stalker was disaster. Very unsafe poisonous conditions where many got sick. Movie almost didnt happen. Its suspected Stalker is reason why Tarkovsky died early.
I think that a lot of the "understanding" part of these kind of films are quirks to do with constraints that the filmmakers had. I would contrast this with Annihilation, which was confusing because it's not properly thought out IMO and with Inception, which was not confusing but did sacrifice artistic expression for mainstream appeal (for example the scenes with a lot of gun fighting).
The immediate things about Stalker that bothered me are, in retrospect, solvable with a higher budget or better film support. Of course, some people prefer the authentic aura of such films. Bellflower would be another example of a good idea and story done on a budget of next to nothing.
It’s worth reading the source material “Roadside Picnic” if you haven’t yet. It’s very different from the film in a way that I think lets you appreciate what Tarkovsky did with it even more.
Roadside Picnic is also the incredibly rare example of the book, the movie (Stalker), and the video game (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) each being able to stand on their own merits. This is probably in part because they are so different thematically.
Stalker is still the most beautiful film I've ever seen. I took a film class in college and fell asleep when we were watching it (embarrassing, but the professor was wholly understanding) - I watched it 3 or 4 times later the same week on my own. But it's also the film that's been hardest for me to understand. I "get it" the least of all, I'm still not sure what it's about - it's an otherworldly experience, though.
With Stalker I turn to Fellini - I don't like the idea of "understanding" a film. I don't believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn't. If you are moved by it, you don't need to have it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it. That's why I don't think my films are misunderstood when they are accepted for different reasons. Every person has his own fund of experiences and emotions which he brings to bear on every new experience-whether it is to his view of a film or to a love affair; and it is simply the combination of the film with the reality already existing in each person which creates the final impression of unity. As I was saying, this is the way the spectator participates in the process of creation. This diversity of reaction doesn't mean that the objective reality of the film has been misunderstood. Anyway, there is no objective reality in my films, any more than there is in life.
“I’ve never seen a happy man”
— Stalker
(from the movie Stalker by Tarkovski. A stalker is a guide that leads men to a place where their innermost dreams are fulfilled)
Reminds of a movie from Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker. The guy may be the Stalker, leading people to the center of the Zone - the elephant foot in this case.
Any art form that was created by the Soviet artists will be considered propaganda since it was state sanctioned. And they were pretty vocal and straightforward about that, art was to educate the people. In US, art many times is just away to make money. But I actually prefer the propaganda art. My favorite propaganda movies are by Tarkovsky - Mirror and Stalker....
Tarkovsky's my favorite director, but I really did not like Solaris. For me, Tarkovsky's Stalker is the infinitely better film.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Primer, Videodrome, Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Open Your Eyes (aka Abre Los Ojos), and Empire Strikes Back would be others I'd put on my favorite scifi movie list.
I don't know about you, but I'm somewhat fascinated by these opinions! I mean, if Inception and Interstellar are "juvenile", what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!
In all seriousness, of course Inception and Interstellar are very different films to 2001 (just as 2001 is very different to Kubrick's other films, really), and made I think for a very different audience. There actually aren't all that many films that can easily be compared to 2001 - Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are probably as close as you're going to get, and both of those are, relatively, only a little more recent. Malick's The Tree of Life isn't quite a sci-fi film, but always feels to me like a very good companion to 2001.
Perhaps the reason you won't really see much like 2001 ever again is that modern audiences, on the whole, just can't really cope with it - the pacing is regarded as risible and the ambiguity is too much intellectual effort.
I think it's very unlikely. "Things to come" and "metropolis" were huge in their day, but ultimately didn't have the same effect 2001 did. "M" by fritz Lang is my comparator for a film which defined a genre (film noir)
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
This is what I've been hoping to try to read eventually https://web.archive.org/web/20060629211922/http://www.shnaresys.com/roadside/picnic/parallel.htm
The book is the basis of the film Stalker, which is a must-see
Thanks for the recommendation, I adore the Stalker film.
This is very similar to Strugatsky Brothers' Roadside Picnic[1], a book which inspired, among other things, Andrey Tarkovskiy's film Stalker and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game franchise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic.
Stalker is interesting in that Tarkovsky originally used the Strugatskys' screenplay, but went back and changed it.
Tarkovsky had become increasingly disillusioned about the whole project as he entered into production — he had fights with his cinematographer and had doubts about the story. At one point, they had filmed 6 months of material when they discovered the film negatives were unusable, for reasons nobody has been able to figure out (they used Kodak stock imported from the US, which Soviet labs were unfamiliar with, and it may have been out of date; Tarkovsky himself suspected it was sabotage). As a result, the project went into hiatus while Tarkovsky considered his next steps and sought new funding from the Soviet film board to reshoot. It was actually Arkady Strugatsky, after many discussions and drafts, who suggested a compromise, where most of the sci-fi elements would be stripped from the film, and he encouraged Tarkovsky to build up the screenplay again based on his own ideas.
It's fascinating to think what Stalker might have been, if Tarkovsky hadn't deviated from the original script. Roadside Picnic is certainly a novel that could work as a film or miniseries. (WGN considered producing a TV show based on Roadside Picnic last year, with Matthew Goode as the lead, but the pilot was rejected.)
Yes, having read the book makes a huge difference. I tried watching the film first, but I failed and stopped watching a short way into it. Then at some point I read the book, which I really enjoyed. I thought I'd give the film a second chance and I'm glad I did because it was brilliant, having read the book.
Strongly recommend treating them as two integral parts of one work of art -- consuming either one and not the other will leave you much less satisfied.
I think that may be true for several other longer adaptations including STALKER (from A Roadside Picnic) and Apocalypse Now (from A Heart of Darkness).
wikip says: Tarkovsky's Stalker is loosely based on it, as are quite a few video games, movies and plays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) - German movie from 1972 similar to the Matrix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire
Stalker - Andrei Tarkovsky film from 1979 on the indifference of aliens and humans' inability to comprehend alien intelligence. Somewhat like Solaris.
The Incident (El Incidente) - a nightmare time-loop movie and possibly the most disturbing movie I've ever seen written and directed by Mexican director Isaac Ezban. You can watch it on Netflix. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3528756/
Speaking of Ezban, Cosas Feas / Nasty Stuff is a disturbing sci-fi short he did in 2009 available on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/65601847
One more: They're Made of Meat is available on YouTube and only 7 minutes long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfPdhsP8XjI starring the guy from Cash Cab.
There is not always a company dedicated to this thing. There is a private tracker where the three most popular torrents are the following: Andrei Tarkovsky Stalker, Chris Marker L'héritage de la chouette , Louis Malle Le feu follet AKA The Fire Within. Tens of thousands of movies, series etc you'd have serious trouble obtaining with money.
The second Vernay adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo from 1954 is considered perhaps the truest to the book but it is impossible to get hold of, especially in any digital format. It seems there was a VHS edition in 1988 and Amazon.fr occasionally has third party sellers selling them. Or you can torrent it. Vernay himself is dead for 40 years, Marais only 19 years -- but of course the movie is now over 60 years old. I do not lose much sleep over "stealing" it.
I am sure everyone on that tracker has similar stories.
Edit: I am so wrong! Apparently in 2015 a German publisher made a DVD out of it! I am off to amazon.de to purchase it. I haven't checked the last few years because it seemed rather futile. This time Hackernews served as a rubber duck for debugging, sort of :D
I bet you could task the entire production team of Pulp Fiction with creating a movie, but without Quentin Tarantino it would never reach the same heights.
sub:
Paths of Glory : Kubrick
Seven Samurai : Kurosawa
Stalker : Tarkovsky
I watched both movies. Tarkovsky's version is my favorite but I grew up with Soviet cinema so maybe that's why (though one can argue his films are so outside the norm with Soviet cinema that it wouldn't matter).
One of the keys to Tarkovsky's movies is that he is concerned with human relationships primarily. Romantic relationships, parents and children, etc. Even when he directed "sci-Fi" movies, they were never about rockets, aliens, shooting, explosions.
This quote from the movie, illustrates that well I think:
---
We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we want a mirror. We seek contact and will never achieve it. We are in the foolish position of a man striving for a goal he fears and doesn't want. Man needs man!
---
I remember watching this movie and being disappointed because I expected more sci-fi stuff. Same thing with Stalker, his other sci-fi film. Only after seeing The Mirror (my favorite of his films) started liking his other movies.
It doesn't even need to be hostile to be trouble.
The Strugatsky brothers book "Roadside Picnic" (inspiration for game and movie "Stalker") is based on the idea that aliens came and visited Earth and ignored us completely.
However, they left behind a lot of weird and often deadly trash that people are scavenging.
Cinema entirely possesses the capacity to suggest elements of the world which are not defined explicitly, just as books do. In fact I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding of perception to think a film can possibly be a 'fait accompli'. As an easy example, I just watched Tarkovsky's Stalker this past week. The film revolves around the exploration of a physical supernatural phenomenon called 'The Zone'. Yet there is not a single thing on screen to demonstrate the supernatural characteristics of this place, aside from the protagonist's reactions to it.
Stalker was a unforgettable mesmerizing, almost hypnotic film. I didn't know there had been an earlier attempt! IMHO that Tarkovsky was able to make ANY film at all in the hostile bureaucratic atmosphere in which he worked gives a ray of hope to artists everywhere.
We'll never know. Another lost work I would kill to see is Tarkovsky's original version of Stalker.
He spent an entire summer filming the Strugatskys' original screenplay, based on their masterpiece Roadside Picnic. But he was using a type of American Kodak 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 footage was in fact unusable.
At this point Tarkovsky had used too much money, and had no choice but to go back to the Soviet film board to negotiate a new financing deal. At the same time, he was deeply unhappy with what he'd filmed so far (he had also fired his cinematographer), and was desperate to start over fresh. Helped by the Strugatskys, he developed a new, miminalistic framework for the film that eliminated most of the scifi trappings of the novel, and he reshot the film almost without a script. (The whole story of Stalker is much more complicated, of course. I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, for more information.)
I don't know what happened to the damaged footage, but I guess it must have been destroyed. We'll never know what it was like. I don't think anyone except a handful of people have seen the footage, and they are all dead.
Stanislaw Lem, and the Strugatsky Brothers - I think that Soviet-era SF really asked the 'big' questions and is far away from today's 'SF but actually just an action movie with lasers instead of bullets' standard.
For Lem, try Solaris, or His Master's Voice. He often dealt with how alien intelligence is impossible to understand (compare Wittgenstein: if a lion could speak we would not understand him). He also wrote many satires (Pilot Pirx / Fables for Robots).
The English translations of the Strugatsky Brothers you commonly get aren't good as they're translated from (I think) German, not Russian, but the new direct translations from Olena Bormashenko are MUCH better, they flow so much better. Stay away from the old ones.
Get Hard To Be A God, or maybe Stalker.
Also seconding Borges, and perhaps Umberto Eco, and Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
The point I was making is that non-mainstream films released a long time ago still have active quality ongoing discussion on IMDB.
I didn't invest a lot time choosing an example film. You're not happy with my choice in Stalker, then replace it with whatever you like that happens to have good discussion on the boards. Perhaps "Celine and Julie go Boating (1974)" would qualify as obscure...
Is anything considered obscure anymore? Before the internet if you wanted to watch Salo (Pasolini), you'd be out of luck unless some film festival was showing it. Now you can just grab the torrent and head to IMDB to join the discussion.
'Stalker' is not an 'old obscure film' and reams have been written about it. For instance, a recent book - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/books/review/geoff-dyers-zona-examines-the-film-stalker.html
Exactly. The good finds on the boards are worth the bad contributions - which could be managed with a bit of effort and changing the format.
The value of attaching discussion to a movie database is unmatched by any alternative.
Take for example the old obscure film Stalker (1979). We see discussions 4 pages long about the meaning of the dog in the film. Or this one, "Other 'visually beautiful' films?", and people respond with suggestions. This information will be lost, and the opportunity to create similar threads in a sensible place in context with the movie, also lost.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/board/thread/138657635?
I enjoyed Stalker, Zona (and those games), but the book is by far my favorite of any of them. The book centers around someone the Strugatsky brothers (authors both of the book and the screenplay, I believe) called "Tough Guy Stalker" as opposed to "Holy Fool Stalker". I'm fond of Holy Fool Stalker, but 'Red' (the protagonist of most of the book) is just in another league.
Anyone who hasn't read Roadside Picnic should pick up the SF Masterworks version (a new translation that undoes some Soviet-era cuts).
I did find the complete absence of mention of the book source material in Zona to be peculiar... for such a close reading of the film, it seems like you have to at least mention the book.
Stalker is one my favourite films. The atmosphere created is absolutely haunting.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/
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
Mosfilm, the Soviet/Russian film studio also uploaded a lot of their old films to youtube[1] including Stalker, Solaris, and Battleship Potemkin. Many of them also have English subtitles. Here's a small list of more examples: http://366weirdmovies.com/your-guide-to-mosfilm-in-english-on-youtube/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/mosfilm
The trend isn't even restricted to the post communist block - one of Tarkovsky's most famous movies (Stalker) is based on this aesthetic.
Stalker - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/
In German, some of their novels were published by a major publisher, Suhrkamp. The movie Stalker is well known, which is based on one of their novels. I'd say they probably were the most prominent USSR SF writers of their time.
Roadside Picnic, and Stalker the Tarkovsky film based on it, are very high on my list favorites. Roadside Picnic is kind of parallel to Clark's Rendezvous with Rama. They're both about a chance encounter with alien life, or more specifically, the technological trappings of alien life. And both stress out insignificance and ultimately irrelevance to the more highly developed aliens. Rendezvous with Rama strikes me as more optimistic, I think because the protagonists are all high up the ladder--chosen astronauts. The protagonists of Roadside Picnic are akin to black market smugglers, and that creates a dirtier world, and makes our position relative to the never seen aliens seem so much more puny and underdeveloped.
Parent meant the famous PC game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:_Shadow_of_Chernobyl
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.
This lady reminds me of Tarkovsky's Stalker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)
There was a very interesting documentary on PBS a month or two back about the 'Radioactive Wolves' of Chernobyl. Bottom line: they don't seem any more or less healthy than other wolf populations in the region, but do well because nobody hunts them.
If by "they" you mean Tarkovsky, sure; Stalker doesn't have much to do with the book, and hardly any plot elements survive. However, there is an explanation for it.
Tarkovsky originally shot the film based on a screenplay by the Strugatsky, an adaptation which was, I believe, quite faithful to the novel (this is not inconceivable, considering that Solaris was fairly faithful to Lem's story). But during post-production, the negatives were handled by an inexperienced lab worker who managed to damage the negatives beyond repair.
Tarkovsky fought to find funding to re-shoot the whole film, but at this point he was bored with the material, and essentially improvised the whole shoot based on his own ideas. The Strugatskys were not happy with the final film.
There is also a Finnish indie movie based on (or inspired by) it, called Vyöhyke (the zone) [1]. Nowhere near as good as Stalker, but it was published on Youtube [2], so it's easy&free to watch if you have the time to spare.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2627842/
[2] http://youtube.com/watch?v=EwkIaJX3hmg
Definitely check out the Andrei Tarkovsky film adaptation of "Roadside Picnic", called "Stalker." He also adapted Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris," which was mentioned below.
If you liked "Roadside Picnic" you should really watch Tarkovsky's "Stalker" (though the film is much more mystical and less science-fictional than the book).
If you like Lem, I would heartily recommend "Cyberiad".
Unfortunately, Tarkovsky's adaptation of Lem's "Solaris" was pretty awful, especially compared to the likes of "Stalker" and other great Tarkovsky films like "Mirror" and "The Sacrifice".
Curiously, despite Stapledon's enormous influence, to my knowledge none of his books have ever been made in to major motion pictures.
There are also blurays of OFFRET, ZERKALO, RUBLEV, IVAN, SOLYARIS. Wow, only just realized STALKER is the only one missing.
Oh, and the fantastic VOYAGE IN TIME! This one is often overlooked, but it's in fact directed by Tarkovsky and has some beautiful shots. It's a documentary of some of the processes in making NOSTALGHIA.
More concretely, if you live in/near NYC, follow http://screenslate.com - we get a wealth of repertory film screenings all the time. I've managed to see Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, Nostalgia (twice!), and Stalker all in 35mm over the past couple years.
I watched Stalker years after reading the novel it was based on. It was the first Tarkovsky film I watched and I didn't even know who Tarkovsky was at the time. My thoughts immediately after watching it were "wow, this is bad, the book is so much better", and then I found out that this is actually a critically acclaimed movie. I don't get it.
Watching a Tarkovsky movie is a very interesting experience. People that never did are in for a treat. All you need are good subtitles.
One might say that a movie is a movie, a sequence of images, and it can't be that much different.
Yet, there is that feeling, that unmistakable sensory discovery that you make, when watching a movie like Stalker, or Mirror. You will find yourself in an unusual, novel, state of mind, and will witness your thoughts wandering on new territory.
I have, as many others here, difficulty putting these things into words. But that is for the better, as you should see for yourself.
Roadside Picnic is one of my favorites. I've been wanting to watch the Tartovsky film (Stalker) but had been waiting for a Blu-ray version. This works, too!
(Never touched the game, but the reviews look good. Unfortunately I'm terrible at FPS games, so I doubt I'll ever play this.)
I recommend reading Roadside Picnic[1] if you’ve watched Stalker (movie is based on the book).
There is also the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game series[2] that’s loosely-based on both. Also recommended if you’re into post-apoc and want a different perspective on it than western video games.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R._(series)
I can recommend the book: "Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room"
http://amazon.com/o/asin/0307390314
which is a short, personal appreciation-cum-memoir of Tarkovsky's "Stalker"
I have only watched "Solyaris", but I believe I can say that Tarkovsky is one of the greatest directors who ever lived. I read the novel after watching the film, and while the film missed a few of the core themes of Lem's masterful piece of sci-fi, it still was able to capture the essence of the planetary being that is Solaris.
Stalker has been on my watch-list for quite some time now, but I haven't got around to watching it. Maybe tonight?
Apropos of nothing in particular, but just because I love this Akira Kurosawa anecdote --
"Tarkovsky was sitting in the corner of the screening room watching the film with me, but he got up as soon as the film was over, and looked at me with a shy smile. I said to him, ‘It’s very good. It’s a frightening movie.’ He seemed embarrassed, but smiled happily. Then the two of us went to a film union restaurant and toasted with Vodka.
Tarkovsky, who does not usually drink, got completely drunk and cut off the speakers at the restaurant, then began singing the theme of Seven Samurai at the top of his lungs. I joined in, eager to keep up.
At that moment, I was very happy to be on Earth.”
That's wonderful. Stalker changed my life, it's a wonderful film. Do watch it.
Tarkovsky made films about what he cared about and what interested him. His Solaris wasn't really meant to be about Lem's book, just as his Stalker isn't about Roadside Picnic. Those books simply offer a setting where he could explore his own ideas.
> (2) His use of color is incredible. Some films, especially stalker, are near black and white with incredibly vibrant and poignant uses of green.
Actually the first part of Stalker was (re)shot in black and white because they damaged some part of the original film reel. After about 40 minutes or so into the movie it switches to color.
The tint you're talking about is a technique created by Tarkovsky which alters the film temperature: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/trivia?ref_=tt_ql_2
Tarkovsky is my favorite 20th century film director bar none. Here's are some reasons why and why you might also be interested in his films:
(1) He described his art as poetry applied to cinema or "sculpting in time," a fundamentally different conceptual idea of the cinematic art that he went to a great length to clarify (in a book of the same name, highly recommended).
(2) His use of color is incredible. Some films, especially stalker, are near black and white with incredibly vibrant and poignant uses of green. This is a bit like Bergman at his best, but even better.
(3) He was deeply religious in a "mystical" sense, with a lot of respect for past traditions, but not in a dogmatic sense and with appreciation for both Christian and pagan elements (see Andrei Rublev for both aspects)
(4) He knew other European traditions extremely well. Ivan's childhood is a meditation on the war with Germany, including shots of Duehrer's prints. Nostalgia involves his time in Italy traditions including Madonna cults and important artwork. Sacrifice has Shakespearean references, Rembrandt, Japanese samurai, and magical traditions. In general, his films are full of long shots of important pieces of Renaissance art with profound meaning.
(5) He spent a lot of time thinking about the integration of technology and the rest of life. Solaris is the futuristic spaceship version of this. Stalker is the apocalyptic version of this.
I think in a century Tarkovsky will rightly be credited as inventing a whole new type of cinema, his way of approaching it was fundamentally in tune with a "mystical" sense and integrated with other forms of visual art (i.e. the long gaze you have at a painting), and the punctuated, rhythmic reading of poetry.
Watching Stalker may forever alter your taste in cinematography, it's so beautiful. Solaris is also good (watching it back to back with the Clooney remake is an interesting experience); Lem pretty much hated all three adaptations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)), an adaptation that reflects the alienness that he wanted to underline would be an interesting movie. You might want to think about what repressed personification would confront you if you had traveled to Solaris.
Swedes evidently think "too much of a good thing can be wonderful": they have had a Minister of Gender Equality since the 50's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(Sweden)) and there are efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun (http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_sweden_s_new_gender_neutral_pronoun_causes_controversy_.html, although this has been tried in English, too). In the Global Gender Gap Report 2012, Sweden is named as a world leader in gender equality (http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2012), etc. etc. I mean, the country even has an official gender equality webpage in English (http://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/). It seems they can't go any further. And then this.
Even Jezebel (http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces-new-movie-rating-system-based-on-the-1459696241) has to admit the "test" is not perfect:
"Sure, the Bechdel test is imperfect (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker doesn't pass, for instance, but you could hardly argue that a female-helmed war movie doesn't empower at least one woman), but that doesn't make it useless as a starting line for sniffing out broad trends in gender bias. And that's what we're talking about here. Trends. Analysis. Examination. Critical thought. Information. I'm sure there are plenty of people who consider themselves scrupulously egalitarian who never even noticed that there are only like THREE WOMEN IN ALL OF MIDDLE EARTH."
I understand that this is just a thing introduced by a a few movie theaters, i.e. it's not the law or anything (yet). Yet, that's what riles me most: as librarians are the first to defend any censorship, movie professionals should push back on any arbitrary limitation on what can be shown. Some examples of movies that fail the test are given, e.g. LOTHR Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, Pacific Rim, etc. However, the test would also exclude many art films such as Tarkovski's Stalker and Solaris. How about movies with only a single female lead that don't quite fit the purpose of the test, e.g. Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly? How to handle movies with no dialog, or experimental movies such as Eraserhead? One can easily see that this sort of simplistic testing can have little artistic or practical merit.
> which I think Metro pulls from
Metro 2033 is adapted from a russian '05 novel of the same name, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R is from both the '72 novel Stalker and its '79 movie.
They bear no lineage.
Stalker is perhaps the best movie of all time.
Also, don't miss the movie adaptation of Roadside Picnic by Andrei Tarkovsky: "Stalker".
My favorite example of weird adaptions is STALKER/Roadside Picnic. It started out as a sci-fi novel about an alien invasion. Then Tarkovsky made an excellent movie adaption that never explained what the cause of the anomalies was, and mostly served to explore philosophy and the human condition. Years later, it was turned into a first person shooter/horror (sort of) game.
They're making a TV show based off of the game now.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/