Stalker

This book examines Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, one of the most powerful science-fiction films ever made, with the goal of unraveling the film’s many intricacies, from its difficult production and inspecting its many cinematic elements. Included are examinations of composition and cinematography, the many philosophies, poetic and literary influences, and the enormity of its influence across the following generations. The film juxtaposes its speculative elements with a gripping tale of human fragility and introspection. It is as much a movie about the complexity of the human as it is the mysteriousness of the film’s labyrinthine landscape: the ambiguous Zone and its epicenter, the Room of Desire. Stalker challenges us to engage with film in a different way: taking the sensuous and the analytical viewers to task and presenting a narrative that is both deeply pessimistic and yet profoundly hopeful and embedded in a framework of the deepest and most sincere form of faith. The resulting experience is a film viewing unlike any the viewer has experienced before, irrevocably altering cinema forever.