Book: APPRECIATING CONTEMPORARY ART

Andrei Tarkovsky: Stalker (1979)

Alcoholic mysticism and narrative misdirection: an appraisal

German poster for Stalker, capturing some of the imagetic and narrative confusion inherent in the film itself.

(There is a ‘Scene summary’ at the end of the article.)

Stalker becomes an extremely difficult film to account for and ‘explain’, if you take director Tarkovsky at his word, and avoid treating it either as an allegory for a very specific Soviet predicament, or as philosophically and religiously metaphorical. Tarkovsky supposedly wants us to view it primarily as a straightforward story that unfolds in cinematic time and form, and not to allow ourselves to get side-lined into interpreting everything as representing other than what it appears to be. But approaching the narrative ‘directly’ doesn’t make the film any easier to parse, and in many ways succeeds only in elevating it from the ordinarily complex into the almost impenetrable. This may be exactly what Tarkovsky had in mind; whether consciously or distantly.

But let’s take Tarkovsky at face value, avoiding, as far as possible, all noises off, and instead treat Stalker as a narrative film like any other, subject to more or less the same interpretative framework as we might apply to any movie we view without precondition. So we not looking in advance either for profundity or superficiality, or for an…