All-time favourite director, and Stalker is one of my/possibly no 1 favourite film(s). It’s possibly the most thrilling film where not much actually happens.
It also probably killed him, his wife/assistant director and the lead actor. The scene with the foaming water got messed up by the film lab, and they had to return to Estonia to re-film it. The usual casual Soviet attitude to pollution and environmental disaster meant that no-one had bothered to tell the film crew that the water was full of toxic waste, and the three of them involved with the film died young of the same kind cancer a few years later, and the sound editor is convinced the chemical waste poisoned them.
saw nearly all the films on re-release last year. had seen most of them too many times already but found that nostalghia was much better than i remembered, possibly my favourite of his now.
I saw that when it was first going round- but some of the subtitles were a bit crap, they weren’t the professionally translated ones you’d get on a dvd.
The ideal is to be happening to walk past the BFI on a day when you don’t have much on, and then see that say Ivan’s Childhood is on there in about half an hour.
i dont really buy dvds, tend to either only watch them once or never watch them. got a Fassbinder box set which I think i’ve only weatched 2 out of. had that for about 5 years
Well get a proper download/stream of it, best cinematography ever (like you can pause the films and every frame makes a great photo) and bad translation will really spoil it, as people don’t speak that often in his films.
I recommend Solaris too as a first Tarkovsky film.
Yep watched a few of these during the retrospective last year. Wasn’t there supposed to be some big release of all the newly remastered films on dvd/blu-ray? Was looking for it over Christmas but found no sign of it. It mentions it here:
Am actually reading Roadside Picnic at the moment which is the book Stalker is based on.
