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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2039 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 10, 2025

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So I recently watched Tarkovsky's Stalker, an eminently wanky, pretentious arthouse film I was fully expecting not to like. The plot is simple - three characters (the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor) conduct a pilgrimage through a wasteland called the Zone, supposedly filled with traps, to reach a room at the centre that's said to grant people their greatest desire.

I am the furthest thing from a cinephile you can imagine (I truly hate most of what New Hollywood put out, for example, and that's way less wanky than Tarkovsky), but I ended up watching the full thing and being thoroughly transfixed the whole way, and I can't really even explain why. The pacing is slothlike and tends to linger on specific moments, with an average shot length of over a minute and a total runtime of almost three hours, and not very much happens throughout the film - but there's such a dreamlike and liminal quality to the filmmaking that it doesn't really matter. The film fosters a trance-like rhythm that lulls you into a reverie and gradually accustoms you to its slow pace.

The Zone portrayed in the movie feels downright haunted, in spite of little that's overtly supernatural in it; the site is overrun with overgrown tanks from previous aborted military expeditions into the area, and abandoned industrial structures that were built on the site before it became anomalous. All the characters, particularly the Stalker, treat the area with a certain reverence, and you're constantly waiting for the Zone to react to the presence of the main characters. The film is perhaps the only one I've seen which perfectly captures the feeling of being in an empty church or temple, perhaps with all the candles somehow still lit or incense still burning, and being overcome with that ineffable sense of hallowedness which religious spaces inherently evoke. The kind of reverie which makes you feel as if you shouldn't speak loudly, because it somehow feels like doing so would be to defile the very space in which you're standing. I think the lack of any clear and explicitly spelled-out threat only intensifies that feeling, it almost creates a sense of pareidolia where you're assigning supernatural explanations onto events in the film, and given that Tarkovsky was a committed Orthodox Christian who infused the film with a lot of religious imagery, I find it hard to believe that this was not intentional.

Apparently Tarkovsky was incredibly fastidious about every shot in the movie, at one point asking that all the dandelions be picked out of a field before shooting. As such the filming process was arduous, with at least one reshoot required due to improper development of the film. An aspect of this that makes Stalker even more surreal to watch is that the production possibly killed much of the crew - all the shots in the Zone were filmed around a small river nearby a half-working hydroelectric station which was actually contaminated by a chemical plant upstream. Tarkovsky, his wife, and the actor that played the Writer all died from lung cancer after the filming of the movie.

I could analyse the movie to death (to be honest I didn't find the main thrust that difficult to glean), but it's a movie you feel in your gut more than pick apart, and as the director himself said:

Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.

In line with his filmmaking philosophy, it's a movie that's probably not going to click with everyone, and I don't think there's a coherent argument that could be made for why someone should like it. It's just a vibe.

Lots of older films are just vibes and this is often missing in newer flicks.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feels similar, tho totally different.

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