Product description
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Stalker
.com
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Challenging, provocative, and ultimately rewarding, Andrei
Tarkovsky's Stalker is a mind-bending experience that defies
explanation. Like Tarkovsky's earlier and similarly enigmatic
science fiction classic Solaris, this long, slow, meditative
masterpiece demands patience and total attention; anyone
accustomed to faster pacing is likely to abandon the nearly
three-hour film before its first hour is over. On the other hand,
those who approach Tarkovsky's work in a properly receptive (and
wide awake) frame of mind are likely to appreciate the film's
seductive depth of theme and hypnotic imagery. Set in what
appears to be a post-apocalyptic future (although the time-frame
is never specified), the eerie and unsettling story focuses on
the title character, Stalker (Aleksandr Kajdanovsky), who leads
characters known only as the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) and the
Scientist (or Professor, played by Nikolai Grinko) into a
mysterious region called The Zone. Tarkovsky films their journey
as a long odyssey, or religious pilgrimage, and center of The
Zone--said to be under an alien influence--is where each of these
men hopes to find a kind of personal transcendence. Despite
obvious parallels to The Wizard of Oz, Tarkovsky's film is devoid
of special effects or any fantastical elements typically
associated with science fiction or fantasy. Instead, Stalker
makes astonishing use of sound and bleak-but-beautiful imagery to
envelope the viewer into the eerie atmosphere of The Zone and the
dank, colorless landscape that surrounds it. And while the film's
glacial pacing may be off-putting to some viewers, there's no
denying that Stalker has a mesmerizing power of its own,
including a thought-provoking and highly debatable ending that
propels the film to a higher level of meaning and significance.
--Jeff Shannon
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Additional Features
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Kino's DVD release of Stalker is impressive for a number of
reasons. The superb image quality accurately preserves
Tarkovsky's stark contrast of a dreary future with the colors of
The Zone. Even more impressive is the surround-sound mix, which
is nearly three-dimensional in its 5.1-channel clarity (allowing
the film's dank, dripping environment to literally come alive on
the soundtrack). Disc 2 offers new (2006) interviews with three
of Tarkovsky's surviving collaborators (music composer Eduard
Artemyev, cinematographer Aleksandr Knyazhinsky, and set
decorator it Safiullin), each providing their own unique and
reverent perspective on Tarkovsky's creative process. A
five-minute excerpt from "The Steamroller and the Violin"
(Tarkovsky's 1960 diploma film from the Soviet film school VGIK)
shows the young director already in admirable control of his
craft, and "Memory" is a five-minute short from 1997 (directed by
Serghei Minenok) that combines images of Tarkovsky's abandoned
home in Russia with images from Stalker. Also included: A photo
album of production images and behind-the-scenes stills, and
language options including the original Russian, dubbed English,
dubbed French, and optional English, French, or Spanish
subtitles. --Jeff Shannon
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