Arseny tarkovsky biography of william

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Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker is more like a poem than any film I know. I watch it every few years, and on each viewing it is more profoundly uneasy, more beautiful, more luminous with sorrow. There may be greater films than Stalker - although surely not many - but I know of none that touches me more personally; it lives beneath my skin and quickens my sense of what it means to be conscious and alive.


Tarkovsky's films often have a nimbus of prophecy, and Stalker is no exception. It is commonly pointed out that the landscape of the Zone, shot near an Estonian chemical plant in the late '70s, uncannily prefigures the abandoned homes and rusting tanks of post-catastrophe Chernobyl, but there is more to the film's haunting power than its glimpses of a post-human world littered with the detritus of civilisation.

The Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) is a man whose dangerous vocation is to guide people to the Zone, an abandoned village under heavy military guard. Something strange happened some years before (the story is that a meteorite crashed, although the incident is never fully explained) which caused drastic changes in its substance. It is now a place of deserted ruins and luxuriant natural growth that is full of strange but fatal traps for the unwary. In its centre is a place

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