Stalker

Abstract

Stalker resumes the quest for belief that Tarkovsky had first taken up in Andrei Rublyov. The director described his later film as a philosophical parable. It is a metaphysical, inward journey in which again a trio of men — in this case, a scientist, a writer and the stalker — set out on an expedition to a lost spiritual domain. At the same time the film marks a new phase in the director’s creative life, forming a hinge between the middle and late works. The last film he was to realise in the Soviet Union, Stalker prefigures his own journey into exile, into an alien world in which he sought a new home.

There was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

Revelation 6: 12–13