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Product description ------------------- Stalker .com ---- Challenging, provocative, and ultimately rewarding, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker is a mind-bending experience that defies explanation. Like Tarkovsky's earlier and similarly enigmatic science fiction classic Solaris, 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 The Wizard of Oz, Tarkovsky's film is devoid of special effects or any fantastical elements typically associated with science fiction or fantasy. Instead, Stalker 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 Stalker 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. --Jeff Shannon P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100); }); }); Additional Features ------------------- Kino's DVD release of Stalker is impressive for a number of reasons. The superb image quality accurately preserves Tarkovsky's stark contrast of a dreary future with the colors of The Zone. Even more impressive is the surround-sound mix, which is nearly three-dimensional in its 5.1-channel clarity (allowing the film's dank, dripping environment to literally come alive on the soundtrack). Disc 2 offers new (2006) interviews with three of Tarkovsky's surviving collaborators (music composer Eduard Artemyev, cinematographer Aleksandr Knyazhinsky, and set decorator it Safiullin), each providing their own unique and reverent perspective on Tarkovsky's creative process. A five-minute excerpt from "The Steamroller and the Violin" (Tarkovsky's 1960 diploma film from the Soviet film school VGIK) shows the young director already in admirable control of his craft, and "Memory" is a five-minute short from 1997 (directed by Serghei Minenok) that combines images of Tarkovsky's abandoned home in Russia with images from Stalker. Also included: A photo album of production images and behind-the-scenes stills, and language options including the original Russian, dubbed English, dubbed French, and optional English, French, or Spanish subtitles. --Jeff Shannon See more ( javascript:void(0) )