Film | STALKER (1979)

DCP (restored) | 1979 | Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky | Soviet Union | 161 minutes | Russian with English subtitles Free admission. No registration required. A hired guide, known in the film only as the Stalker leads a writer and a professor through the Zone, a restricted region full of hazardous ruins, in search of the Room, a mythical place that is said to fulfill the desires of all who enter. As the three men illegally trespass through the mysterious Zone, existential questions become tangible problems with uncertain consequences. Andrei Tarkovsky’s STALKER is a work of philosophy set within a science fiction narrative, loosely adapted from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel, Roadside Picnic. Awarded the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes Film Festival, STALKER explores how—and whether it is possible at all—to have faith in a disenchanted world, reflecting Tarkovsky’s belief that art is a spiritual tool that can improve humanity. Widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers in history, Tarkovsky was lauded by fellow director Ingmar Bergman for inventing “a new language, true to the nature of film as mirror of life, life as a dream.” Cinema of Contamination stages contact, confrontations, and entanglements with enigmatic toxins and landscapes. Spanning suburban California, the Andean mountain range, a forbidden zone, and a poisonous forest, the series examines how to make meaning within ecological collapse and in the aftermath of dictatorship and war.