STALKER Screening as part of Sculpting Time: Nationwide Touring Programme

Last film in our

Tarkovsky Season

Director Andrei Tarkovsky

Cast

Alisa Freindlich Alexander Kaidanovsky Anatoli Solonitsyn

Nikolai Grinko Stalker synopsis provided by Tony Janssens, Inverness Film Fans Natasha Abramova While “Solaris” is probably Tarkovsky’s most well-known film because of its genre associations and its 2002 remake, the post-apocalyptic setting of “Stalker” holds just as many genre trappings, but is Screenplay arguably more successful. Set in a post-nuclear world, the film chronicles two men’s journey, a writer and a scientist, into the Zone — a strange, mystical, abandoned place guarded by barbed wire and Arkady & Boris Strugatsky soldiers, which houses a room which allegedly contains the opaque utopia of one’s innermost hopes and dreams. Not bounded by the laws of physics and inexplicably and invisibly dangerous, the Zone can only be navigated with the help of a Stalker — an individual with special mental gifts who risks Photography government imprisonment for taking the desperate, or the curious, into this forbidden area. Against his wife’s wishes, one particular Stalker agrees to accompany the two men into the Zone, where, as they Alexander Knyazhinsky spiral down into the depths of the building, each one of them faces moral, psychological, existential, philosophical and even physical questions and conflicts. As enigmatic and mysterious as any of Production Tarkovsky’s pictures, the vague science fiction elements give it enough narrative to make it one of his most engaging pictures, yet it never compromises in grappling with the metaphysical and spiritual Designer R Safiullin themes that inhabit all of his work.

Music The use of Music in Stalker, by Chal Ravens, writer for FACT magazine and The Wire

Eduard Artemiev Stalker contains just under 17 minutes of music – a tiny fraction of the film’s 160-minute runtime – yet its otherworldly atmosphere and subtle science-fiction twist rest on Andrei Tarkovsky and composer Eduard Artemyev’s extraordinary handling of sound. Long, disorienting sections of near-silence, Produced by Mosfilm Studio echoes of classical music in the clatter of passing trains, a locomotive rhythm dissolving into eerie electronic drones – nothing is quite what it seems when you enter the Zone. Run time: 162 minutes Even at the end of his career, Tarkovsky had conflicting ideas about the purpose of music in cinema. Certificate: PG In his book ‘Sculpting in Time’, published just before his death in 1986, he emphasised how “important and precious” music had been to his films, but admitted: “In my heart of hearts I don’t believe films Russian with English subtitles need music at all.” In Stalker, he attempted to resolve this contradiction, showing how the barest use of sound could be even more expressive than an emotive musical score. He directed Artemyev not to write music but to use sound to create “states and conditions” establishing the Zone’s atmosphere of USSR 1974 unreality. Watching the film, our suspicions are raised through subtle changes – a distant river suddenly becomes audible, beckoning our three travellers, or we hear a breeze but notice the grass Colour & Black and White isn’t swaying. The laws of physics do not seem to apply in this strange territory.

Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 Artemyev, one of ’s pioneers of electronic music, used the British-made Synthi 100 synthesizer to build on this alien mood. Stalker’s short musical score, first heard in the opening titles, places the long, airy drones of the Synthi 100 under a flute and an Iranian stringed instrument called a tar. This suggestion of Eastern music (particularly Indian classical music, where a tanpura provides a Tarkovsky.co.uk continuous harmonic drone underneath a sitar’s melody) adds to the sense of dislocation – we’re a long way from the sepia-toned Russian town where we first encounter the Stalker.

CurzonArtificialEye Next Film: Women in Love, 6th December 2016 at Eden Court at 7:15pm ArtificialEye

#SculptingTime Following the relationships between two sisters and two men in a mining town in post First World War England, this film explores the nature of commitment and love. A faithful and frank adaptation of DH Lawrence's 1920s- set novel concerning the complexities of love and friendship, from an unusually restrained Ken Russell.

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