FILM 1174: STALKER
TRIVIA: According the film's Sound
Designer, Vladimir Sharun, at least 3 members of the crew (including the
director) died as a result of chemical contamination encountered on location in
Estonia.
The original negatives were
destroyed (by a processing error at the laboratory) and part of the film had to
be shot again from scratch with a new director of photography.
The Zone of the film was inspired
by a nuclear accident that took place near Chelyabinsk in 1957. Several hundred
square kilometers were polluted by fallout and abandoned; of course there was
no official mention of this forbidden zone at the time.
Tarkovsky built long film
processing vat which had different temperatures along the way, allowing him to
change the color tone over a long strip of film, over an extended take.
It is said that the rushes of the
first version of the film were kept by editor Lyudmila Feyginova in her
home for years. They were destroyed by fire, that also claimed her life.
Towards the end of the movie, the
Stalker's wife smokes cigarettes from a carton that bears the same AT (Andrei Tarkovsky) insignia
as the policeman's helmet.
When the Stalker is referred to as
'Chingachgook' and 'Leatherstocking', these are references to characters in
James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans".
The scenes of the girl moving the
object with her mind on the table at the end of the film, was honored in the
video Bed Time Stories from Madonna.
Like Tarkovsky's other films, Stalker
relies on long takes
with slow, subtle camera movement, rejecting the use of rapid montage.
The film contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, with an average shot length of more
than one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes.
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