Artificial Eye 2 Disc Set
Region : 2
Length : Disc 1 63 minutes; Disc 2 92 Minutes
Sound : Mono; Dolby 5.1
Extras : Interviews with A Knyazhinsky, and R Safiullin; Extract from 'The
Steamroller and the Violin' and Cast and Crew Biographies and Filmographies
Aleksandr
Kajdanovsky ....Stalker
Alisa Frejndlikh ....Stalker's Wife
Anatoli Solonitsyn ....Writer
Nikolai Grinko ....Scientist
Natasha Abramova .... Martha, Stalker's daughter
Plus
Ye. Kostin
R. Rendi
F. Yurma
Directed by…Andrei Tarkovsky
Writing credits
Arkadi Strugatsky…Boris Strugatsky…Andrei Tarkovsky (uncredited)
Produced by…Aleksandra Demidova
Original music by…Eduard Artemyev
Non-original music by…Maurice Ravel (from "Bolero")
Ludwig van Beethoven (from "9th symphony")
Cinematography by…Aleksandr Knyazhinsky
Production Design by…Andrei Tarkovsky
Costume Design by…Yelena Fomina (as Nina Fomina)
Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Maria Chugunova....assistant director (as M. Chugunova)
Larisa Tarkovskaya....assistant director
Emil Chatschaturjan ....conductor
Ivan Gekoff....steadicam operator
Konstantin Lopushansky....production assistant
Vadim Murashko....still photographer (as V. Murashko)
Oskar-Martin Vedru....location manager: railroad-specific scenes (uncredited)
Stalker is controlled by the Russian Cinema Council.
This review is of the Artificial Eye release of Stalker, which is
identical to the second Ruscico release, apart from the DVD labels and box
artwork. The first Ruscico release lacks the original mono soundtrack –
crucial with this film as the 5.1 remix is significantly different.
Andrei Tarkovsky did not like the label ‘Science-Fiction’ being applied to his films, but as Stalker does not fit in any other genre it is a label that has stuck, and to a degree fits. In fact most people will never have seen anything quite like Stalker. It’s a work from a master that could not be mistaken for anyone else’s – but more than any of his other films it’s completely bound up in its own strange, utterly distinctive universe. Despite the generic billing it does not quite qualify as “Science Fiction” in the accepted sense – apparently Tarkovsky’s “first draft” was rather closer to the novel but when he revised the screenplay for the present version he’d eliminated virtually all the sci-fi trappings. (Almost uniquely in film history, Stalker had to be shot a second time after the lab in Moscow ruined the footage – the conspiracy theorists say that the authorities did like what they saw)
Stalker is rather closer to the kind of spiritual quest that relates to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – the whole theme is of a quasi-religious pilgrimage to a holy shrine.
The shrine in this case is a mysterious Room which apparently contains the power to grant one’s innermost desire. It’s at the heart of the Zone, a cordoned-off landscape riddled with pollution and the detritus of modern civilisation, rigged with physical and psychological booby-traps. The Stalker of the title (Alexander Kaidanovsky) is one of a tiny band of men who know the secrets of the Zone and how to traverse it to reach the Room. He is hired by the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko) to take them there, and most of the film concerns their tortuous journey, their experiences and dreams en route, endlessly and usually fruitlessly speculating about what they’re likely to find at the other end – which, needless to say, is nothing like what they expected.
Throughout their journey, we learn the cautionary tale of a man named Porcupine, who travelled to the Room specifically to cure his terminally ill brother, only to find himself made immensely wealthy – because the Room realised that that was what he really wanted, for all his protestations of charity. Porcupine hanged himself out of shame – and his shadow looms over everything the Writer, the Professor and the Stalker say and do, as they try to come to terms with what they really want as opposed to what they merely believe they want before they find out the answer the hard way.
Much like 2001: Stalker has very much its own pace and rhythm, and how you responds to it depends largely on your engagement with the film in general. I’ve always found it so beautiful to watch that I barely notice the running time – the scene on the trolley car as they approach the Zone being typical: for about three minutes you do nothing but look at the men’s nervous, expectant faces in extreme close-up as you hear the wheels clanking in what seems like the far distance.
It sounds unbearably tedious, and yet in practice the sequence is curiously gripping. Most modern film makers have lost, or never had, a sense of pace and time – the MTV generation would find it impossible to sit and think for so long. Similarly, the scene where the men sit outside the Room, too terrified to go in, is a single take of several minutes, during which it starts to rain and we wait, with them, for it to finish.
Most of Stalker contains similar moments of inexplicable beauty and power – Tarkovsky turns the most ravaged, polluted, Godforsaken landscape imaginable into something bizarrely lovely. So sensitive is Tarkovsky to the surroundings and the tactile detail that it’s tempting just to watch the background – when you’ve seen the film once you know what is going to happen.
One of Tarkovsky’s greatest gifts was his ability to devise unforgettable endings - Solaris, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice close with images that imprint themselves on two levels: they’re extraordinary from a purely aesthetic viewpoint, but they also contrive to sum up everything the films have been about in a single breathtakingly simple idea. Stalker may well have the most totally satisfying ending of any Tarkovsky film with an ending that is haunting, mysterious and logical, with an emotional charge that rivals anything else he did.
With a film as uncompromising as Stalker, it’s inevitable that not everyone will respond to it in the same way. Those who tend to over-rationalise will probably find it baffling, while those who favour action over meditative contemplation will most likely be bored out of their skulls (the Internet Movie Database provides a useful selection of responses). Personally, I think it’s not only Tarkovsky’s masterpiece but one of an infinitesimally tiny number of films that really do make you look at the world in a different way.
Like Solaris and quite a few of the longer films in Ruscico’s collection, Stalker has been split across two discs to maximise the transfer quality. It only has two soundtracks (and one of them mono) in place of the three 5.1 soundtracks of the earlier disc. The second disc begins with a ‘Part Two’ title card that I recall from seeing the film in cinemas – although I cannot remember the film being played with an intermission.
The virtually pristine condition of the Ruscico print comes as a very pleasant surprise – they appear to have taken a great deal of trouble with all the films they control to only release the best possible print.
From the Black and White/Sepia opening to the de-saturated colour of The Zone the picture is razor-sharp, exposing all the fine detail that DVD is capable of resolving, and despite the high contrast there’s plenty of shadow detail, creating the strong impression that what you can’t see is meant to be invisible.
There has been a lot of debate over the aspect ratio, and I agree it does seem unusual that a 1979 cinema film would be in 4:3 – commercial cinemas, even in the USSR were playing films in 1.85:1. But you only have to look at the film to see that Tarkovsky’s images are so precisely composed that any cropping would seriously unbalance them. Although it is still a mystery as to why that ratio was chosen, and certainly, the cinemas that played the film could not have done so in 4:3.
As for the sound, this has been the subject of considerable controversy – to the point where Ruscico’s original release had to be replaced after its initial purchasers complained that the Dolby Digital 5.1 remix was so different from Tarkovsky’s original that it was deeply disturbing to those who knew the film well. The disc was subsequently reissued with the same remix, but with the option to select the original mono soundtrack as well – and full marks to Ruscico for taking such prompt action.
The mono track is never more than adequate but one thing that struck me when watching it this time round is how little it mattered: Tarkovsky’s images are so eloquent that they barely need a soundtrack to support them, and although it’s important that we hear what Tarkovsky intended, it’s far less so that they’re delivered with pristine clarity. The 5.1 version is technically superior but aesthetically suspect, while the mono track is true to Tarkovsky but relatively basic.
The extras look fairly sparse at a first glance, but that’s largely because they’re spread over both discs: in actual fact, this is a pretty decent package offering over 40 minutes of interviews (and solid, information-packed interviews at that) and a couple of short films on top of the standard package. The menu designs are stunning – animated typescript redolent of secret intelligence reports overlaying sepia-tinted images from the film.
The usual Ruscico extras are included: a stills gallery – selectable, as ever, via thumbnails – and the filmographies cover Andrei Tarkovsky, writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, cameraman Alexander Knyazhinsky, composer Eduard Artemyev, production designer Rashit Safiullin and actors Alexander Kaidanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsin, Nikolai Grinko and Alissa Friendlikh. Each filmography is also accompanied by a brief biography – which amongst other things reveals that virtually everyone who worked in the film on a major creative capacity: the director, the three lead actors, the cinematographer - has since died, despite the film being less than twenty-five years old.
The Eduard Artemyev biography/filmography also contains not only a hidden trailer for Solaris but also a 21-minute interview in which Artemyev discusses his three collaborations with Tarkovsky (Solaris, Mirror, Stalker), specifically on what it was like working with a director who believed that the composer’s role was essentially to organise sound as opposed to composing original music. Just to make things somewhat harder, Tarkovsky was a fairly accomplished musician himself, which had advantages and drawbacks, especially when he started requesting the sound of obscure ethnic instruments that hardly anyone could play. Every so often the interview dissolves to a montage of Tarkovsky images (both from his films and footage of the director himself) accompanied by examples of Artemyev’s music. He’s an engaging and articulate person, and there’s a lot of worthwhile material here – what’s particularly interesting in the light of the 5.1 remix controversy is his confirmation that Tarkovsky insisted that snatches of Beethoven and Bizet accompany the trains passing the Stalker’s dwelling.
There are two more interviews on the disc – a relatively brief (five-and-a-half minutes) one with cinematographer Alexander Knyazhinsky and a longer one (just under fifteen minutes) with designer Rashit Safiullin. The Knyazhinsky interview is relatively brief, and was clearly made under conditions of some difficulty – he died shortly after making it, and it looks like it was shot in a nursing home. It’s well worth a look as there are some fascinating anecdotes about the shooting (interspersed with on-set footage of Tarkovsky directing: something I wish there had been more of and a very funny story about the difficulties encountered in getting the dog to perform (“He was an Estonian dog and only understood Estonian”).
The Safiullin interview is rather more informative about the actual shooting – and not just of the film that we’ve seen: he also describes the experience of spending a year shooting the first version and Tarkovsky’s reaction when he discovered that the footage had been destroyed (to this day, no-one knows if it was a genuine accident or deliberate sabotage on the part of the authorities who disliked what he was shooting). As a result, re-shooting Stalker was understandably fraught with tension – the budget was much lower, most of it having been blown on the first version, and the shooting schedule much tighter: Safiullin and Tarkovsky had to work miracles of improvisation when materials became scarce. Watching this interview makes it clear that the men’s tortuous journey in the film was mirrored in every way by the agonies suffered while making it – especially as Tarkovsky was determined not to repeat the first version in any way: according to Safiullin, the current Stalker doesn’t bear the faintest resemblance to the first draft.
And finally, there’s a tantalisingly short extract from Tarkovsky’s graduation film, The Steamroller and the Violin, made when he was at the VGIK film school in Moscow. It’s a pity that they did not include the whole thing, as at 40 minutes there seems to be no good reason why they couldn’t have squeezed it onto one of the discs, and this five-minute extract makes me keen to see more.
This DVD set is the great Stalker DVD that film buffs had been praying for, and I’d certainly recommend it to anyone – the visual transfer is superb and the extras favour quality over quantity in the way that I much prefer. But the soundtrack controversy is irritating, and, as with Solaris, the feature split over two discs would be less of an issue if you didn’t have to sit through copyright notices in three languages and the Ruscico logo before getting down to part two.