Navigating the Nation Factory

IN 1979, Andrei Tarkovsky, the great Russian filmmaker, completed Stalker, the last film he would make in his homeland.

- Ruchir Joshi

The film was loosely based on a 1972 novel by the Strugatsky brothers called Roadside Picnic. As with Tarkovsky's earlier film, the epic Andrei Rublev, this film, too, had a maddeningly difficult route to completion: the first attempt at making the film took almost a year, but the negative processing turned out to be flawed and the whole thing had to be re-shot; there are different versions that recount the parting of ways between Tarkovsky and his cinematographer; likewise, the script apparently changed considerably by the second attempt and, depending on who you believe, the film was either identical to the first version or completely different from it. In any case, despite the hugely bumpy journey, what finally emerged on the screen was one of the most powerful fiction films ever made.

The eponymous Stalker is a guide, a bit like a wildlife guide, who illegally takes visitors into a prohibited zone, sneaking them in past the military patrolling the perimeter, soldiers under orders to use terminal force to stop people entering this deadly area. Exactly why the zone is dangerous and out of bounds stays unclear through the film, but the uninhabited wasteland, littered with ghosts of rail lines, water channels and industrial plants, is booby-trapped with a number of lethal obstacles and physical phenomena that could have been brought about by human error on a massive scale, extraterrestrial activity or some other undefined agency. At the centre of the zone is a room. Each visitor is desperate to reach this room because it apparently fulfils their innermost desires once they are inside. In the film, Stalker takes two men, a scientist and a writer, into the deepest core of this post-apocalyptic maze.