Andrei Tarkovsky’s STALKER takes place in the fantastical land known as the Zone
STALKER (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Friday, July 17, $10, 7:00
Series continues Friday nights through August 28
212-299-7777
madmuseum.org
Set in a seemingly postapocalyptic world that is never explained, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is an existential work of immense beauty, a deeply philosophical, continually frustrating, and endlessly rewarding journey into nothing less than the heart and soul of the world. Alexander Kaidanovsky stars as Stalker, a careful, precise man who has been hired to lead Writer and Professor (Tarkovsky regulars Anatoli Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko, respectively) into the forbidden Zone, a place of mystery that houses a room where it is said that people can achieve their most inner desires. While Stalker’s home and the bar where the men meet are dark, gray, and foreboding, the Zone is filled with lush green fields, trees, and aromatic flowers — as well as abandoned vehicles, strange passageways, and inexplicable sounds. The Zone — which heavily influenced J. J. Abrams’s creation of the island on Lost — has a life all its own as past, present, and future merge in an expansive land where every forward movement is fraught with danger but there is no turning back. An obsessive tyrant of a filmmaker, Tarkovsky imbues every shot with a supreme majesty, taking viewers on an unusual and unforgettable cinematic adventure. Loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers, Stalker is screening July 17 at 7:00 as part of the the Museum of Arts & Design film series “Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time,” which runs Friday nights through August 28 and includes all seven of Tarkovsky’s masterpieces (Solaris, Stalker, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice) before concluding with the behind-the-scenes documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky, who died in 1986 at the age of fifty-four, was a superior craftsman whose cinematic oeuvre is filled with poetry and wonder, mystery and self-examination, exploring life and death, the past, the present, and the future, incorporating mesmerizing sound and visuals in telling complex stories like one else before or since. (For our 2012 twi-ny talk with Geoff Dyer, the author of Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, which offers quite a unique take on Stalker, go here.)