Stalker: A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky | 
 enlarge | Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Actors: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Alisa Frejndlikh, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, Natasha Abramova
Studio: Kino Video
Category: DVD
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $19.06
You Save: $10.89 (36%)
New (30) Used (7) Collectible (1) from $19.05
Rating:  147 reviews
Sales Rank: 11268
Format: Ac-3, Black White, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Ntsc
Languages: Russian (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), English (Dubbed), French (Dubbed)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Items: 2
Running Time: 163 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: D4882D
UPC: 738329048822
EAN: 7383290488226
ASIN: B000I8OOG0
Theatrical Release Date: 1979
Release Date: November 7, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW AND FACTORY SEALED
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Challenging, provocative, and ultimately rewarding, Andrei Tarkovsky's iStalker/i is a mind-bending experience that defies explanation. Like Tarkovsky's earlier and similarly enigmatic science fiction classic iSolaris/i, 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 iThe Wizard of Oz/i, Tarkovsky's film is devoid of special effects or any fantastical elements typically associated with science fiction or fantasy. Instead, iStalker/i 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 iStalker/i 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. i--Jeff Shannon/i
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| Customer Reviews: Read 142 more reviews...
 Read the short story first or you will miss too much. November 3, 2008
Dale Mitchell (Las Vegas, NV)
Unless you read the short story ROADSIDE PICNIC, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, before you see this film you will not understand a great deal of what is going on. The movie maker has only so much time, so most of the underlying story revealed in ROADSIDE PICNIC will be lost on the viewer, or the viewer lost. This is also a movie that is best viewed in uninterrupted silence. br / br /And, yes, "Stalker" was a terrible choice for the title, especially because that term had taken on an awful criminal/psycho association in the US press. He should have left it as simply "The Guide". br /
 and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time October 26, 2008
Phillip Kay (Sydney)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Watching Tarkovsky's Stalker was not an enjoyable experience, but it did make something about his achievement much clearer to me. In this film, and in most of his work that I have seen, Tarkovsky tells the viewer nothing: no plot, no characters, no resolution. He sets up an ambience through beautifully textured photography and lighting, stunning command of soundscapes, and a carefully undefined nexus of meaning. Then he allows the viewer to create a meaning. For some it is an overwhelming experience, for others a bore. This is not cinema as we normally know it but much closer to the effect of great poetry. It is sound and setting used as metaphor by means of which we can create what we can. Or not. br / br /Forget the Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic (just as you had to forget Lem's Solaris when watching Tarkovsky's film of the same name). There is something called the Zone, but we don't know what it is, where or why it occurred. For the confused or troubled, something inside the Zone can provide a revelation. What it is or how it works we don't know. It's perimeter is guarded, but we don't know who guards it or why. Three men enter the Zone, we don't really know why, nor who they are. Viewers who claim to know more are reading information from the novel's plot, or quoting other viewers who are. br / br /The Stalker (think of one of Fenimore Cooper's characters like the Deerstalker), the Writer, the Scientist are on a journey like Dante's. They seem confused and inarticulate, but they do know something is wrong, and they hope to remedy it, somehow, within the Zone. The Stalker is as driven as the other two. Tarkovsky suggests what the men are seeking by filming outside the Zone, a sterile no man's land of ruin, in a washed out sepia, and inside the Zone, a lush natural tangle of vegetation, in vibrant colour. br / br /Stalker is about the search for redemption, filmed in such a way the viewer must conduct the search themselves. Unlike Solaris, whose themes of love and memory were presented in the form of a screenplay the viewer could engage with, Stalker is a much more extreme film which approaches the limit of what a film can do. It is a film which can have no clear climax, no rationale, no explanation. The journey is the important part. br / br /I regret the fact my rational self would not let go while watching it, that I thought the lack of proper names risible and just like everybody's first novel, that the contrast between inside and outside the Zone was too obvious. I hated that the film was unnecessarily divided over two disks as it was for VHS release and that the subtitles were sometimes in such bad English they were hard to follow. This time around it wasn't for me. Maybe next time.
Search for Faith September 23, 2008
VoiceOver (Netherlands)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Maybe you know it yourself, the so-called "Hour of the Wolf", defined in my favorite Sci-Fi series Babylon 5 as follows: br /"My father taught me about it. It's the time between three and four in the morning. You can't sleep and all you can see is the troubles, and the problems, and the ways that your life should have gone, but didn't. All you can hear is the sound of your own heart. At times like this, my father used to take one large glass of vodka before bed, to keep the wolf away he said. Then he would take three very small drinks of vodka, just in case she had cubs while she was waiting outside." br / br /I think we all have hours like these, maybe at a different time as the one mentioned above, but nevertheless. When in such moments hope seems far off and the beating of your heart is not the knock on a door that is opened as a result offering a new perspective, no, if all doors remain closed and the wolf has not left your house for a long time, wouldn't it be wonderful if there were a place, where hope is reborn and wishes fulfilled? br /You say, there is no such place, but there is. You have to go to a place in Russia, strictly off limits to anyone, guarded on the periphery by soldiers, in short almost impossible to get to. br /In all likelihood you'll give up on the plan, already ridiculed by friends and acquaintances, since there's no way to get past the soldiers, the road blocks and even if you do succeed, where exactly do you go, because there are no maps of this area where the house is supposed to be located where hope lost can be found again. br / br /That is, unless you know a guide, who knows how to get around the obstacles ... his name is Stalker and the area ominously known as "The Zone" he knows like his back pocket. It's the place where he is happy and where each time he makes the trip puts his life at risk. br /We get to know his most recent companions in this Tarkovsky masterpiece as a burnt out and cynical writer and a scientist who seems extremely focused on his backpack. Stalker informs them that the Zone has its own laws and you can't get from A to B in a straight line or the Zone will punish you and therefore Stalker uses screws tied to handkerchiefs and throws them haphazardly and wherever it lands, that's their next destination. br /What follows is a surreal and philosophical journey to the deepest truth to each of the three men, who are , every one for his own reasons, men without hope, that desperately need to find the Room to find an answer to their desperation. br /It will turn out to be Stalker's most difficult journey, which as never before will put to the test the meaning of his endeavors to the Zone as to his entire existence. br /The movie Stalker is a work of art difficult to put into words. It is a journey, an exploration of the deepest layers of your being, with half the time not even knowing exactly why. If you allow the movie to take you along, you will experience a journey that is unique which will confront you with difficult questions like the ancient one concerning the meaning of life or whether science has impoverished us to such a degree that the sound of wind in the trees and grass dancing to its rhythm will not make us stop in breathless expectation and that maybe hopelessness has already spread so widely, that the well of wishes has dried up long ago. br /The images are of a unique beauty and visual poetry unequalled, supported by the intriguing electronic music of Artemyev (who also wrote the music to Tarkovsky's "Solyaris"). br /Kaidanowsky as the title character is amazing to look at and the Zone itself will bind you in its spell and make an indelible impression. br / br /A journey between black and white and color, science and nature, fear and hope. br / br /See it ... NOW! br /
 Good September 18, 2008
Cosmoetica (New York, USA)
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker () is not the great nor masterful film its most ardent critical supporters proclaim, nor is it the slow, boring Eurotrash that its most vocal critics counterclaim. It lies somewhere in between- a film that risks and occasionally fails, although it is far closer to greatness than trash. That's because Tarkovsky has crafted a film of unusual visuals with even more unusual power. There are scenes that recall the old telefilm The Lathe Of Heaven, released the same year as this film, 1979; Carl Theodor Dreyer's great Vampyr, in its use of shadows and fog; the 1976 sci fi classic Logan's Run, in that the three leads of the film are running away from their society; Tarkovsky's earlier Solaris, in its mix of color and sepia images; and, most of all, with Alex Proyas' 1998 sci fi classic Dark City, which, like Stalker, creates a wholly believable alternate world unlike any other put on screen. Visually, Stalker most reminds me of the human portraits of the great Austrian painter Egon Schiele, with its myriad of gaunt, pallid, balding, dirty, twisted characters. br / But, as in most Tarkovsky films, it is not the visuals that dominate, rather the philosophic depth of the characters. What they don't say or dream is almost always as important as what they do say and dream. Stalker succeeds because its ellipses are more brilliant than its fodder. Stalker misses greatness, however, because its fodder some times fails.... Of course, there are the usual misreadings by critics, who praise the very things that do not work- like the ending, or imbue their own interpretations of Stalker as a Christ-like figure (his being a religious character makes him no stand-in for a religious figure), when the film is surprisingly shorn of any religious mumbo jumbo (humanist philosophy and religion are not analogues), and the three lead characters are in no way merely symbols- of Christian Wise Men, the Trinity, nor any tripartite invocation. Do they bear some symbolism? Of course, since they are known only by their professions. But, each is a unique character, not a caricaturization. Thus, Stalker achieves a rare intimacy in film, one absent from most films, Hollywood or foreign, and if not a great film, certainly it is an excellent film, and one of the most unique visions committed to screen. See for yourself how even failure can fail better than most. br /
tarkovsky July 27, 2008
straub (Hailey, ID USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
dvds are kind of a pain in the a-- (movie is split between 2 discs), but great movie. criterion needs to release this title.
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