Week 12 Film: Stalker

I loved Stalker. I feel a little guilty liking more than anything in an avant-garde film class because it had the most engaging narrative of anything we’ve watched.  The fact that it was a journey of sorts held my curiosity because I knew there was an end goal, almost like a structuralist film. But I think the narrative being so intriguing helps to keep our attention for the two and a half hours so we can appreciate all the artistic choices that Tarkovsky makes.

His use of perspective was very creative. The contrast between the extreme wide shots and extreme close ups was always surprising—at the beginning I became used to seeing the three characters from afar and allowing them to blend together. But then we got lingering close-ups and I could see the distinct character in each of their faces. These extremes almost felt like I was playing a computer games with set views. But I don’t mean to diminish these choices by saying that. It leant itself well the adventuresome quest feel of the film.

I actually found this to be one of the more transcendental films we’ve seen in several ways. The sequence where the camera moves up a sepia-tone stream, only to end up on the same character we departed from, was extremely meditative. It felt like a separate part of the film in that I fell into a trance while watching it and forgot the larger narrative that it was a part of. It was also mind blowing to end up where we started after traveling in one non-circular direction.

It also had a very transcendental ending. I felt at first that it could’ve ended when the three men were still in the zone, but because we see the stalker rejoin his family and have almost a normal familial experience (when they roamed the beach), it seemed like he was content with the bleakness of his life.