STALKER
dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Pacific Cinematheque
Wed Sep 14, Fri 16 | 7pm
Sat 17, Sun 18 | 8pm
IMPORTED 35mm PRINT! Tarkovsky’s brilliantly dense, breathtakingly textured Stalker suggests a fantastical confluence of in-the-Gulag Solzhenitsyn and post-apocalyptic science fiction, and could be an elaborate, allegorical, otherworldly illustration of that old maxim, “Be careful what you wish for ...” Guardian critic Philip French likens it to “The Wizard of Oz adapted by a disciple of Dostoevsky and Kafka” and calls it “possibly Tarkovsky’s finest work.” In a devastated post-industrial police state, two men, a writer and a scientist, engage the special mystic skills of a Stalker to guide them through the forbidden Zone, a damp, fecund, overgrown wasteland where the rules of nature no longer apply. At the centre of the Zone, it is reputed, is the Room, a place where the deepest desires of one’s heart are said to come true. The amazing journey there will test the limits and adequacy of the way each of the three protagonists makes sense of the world: through art, through science, and through faith. Distinguished by a remarkable sense of tactility, composed of stunning sepia images, and offering layer upon layer of meaning, Stalker is a haunting and unforgettable work from a visionary director whose too-few films are quite unlike anything else in world cinema. “A masterpiece ... Not an easy film, but most certainly a great one” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader). B&W and colour, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 163 mins.
REVIEWS
"Tarkovsky conjures images like you've never seen before; and as a journey to the heart of darkness, it's a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's."
Time Out
"Visually unforgettable and possibly Tarkovsky's finest work."
Observer
"A vast prose-poem on celluloid whose forms and ideas were to be borrowed by moviemakers like Lynch and Spielberg."
Guardian
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