Stalker

A scientist and writer journey into the Zone. The mysterious promise that the Zone represents is dangerous for one intellectual, while the other refuses to believe in it at all. The Stalker who guides them lacks the education of both companions - he knows only the way.

Petr Král: "Not only is everything here inseparably material - sensory - and 'spiritual', so that the external forms of things cannot be separated from their emotional meanings and from the investigation of their inner sense - to the point that Tarkovsky's films are a rarely rigorous account of how a single subjectivity functions. They transcend the boundaries of art also in how they unite 'deliberate' creative effort with sensitivity to mystery in its 'natural' state. However self-composed Tarkovsky's visions may be, they possess the necessity of spontaneous deposits, images that the filmmaker did not invent but allowed to mature and crystallize within himself; they retain a dark, irreducible core much like the mysterious situations in life or like those enchanting, 'heaven-sent' films to which unique poetry was given more by the play of circumstances than by authorial intent. They are simply created in an almost divine sense, like being itself; and people and things come to us in them with such unique precision, urgency, grace, as if we ourselves had found ourselves in a state of grace and suddenly perceived everything with doubled intensity. (...) Perhaps they are built over an abyss, yet human existence and the world itself are not without meaning for Tarkovsky. In 'Stalker' there is a shot where the camera slowly leaves the clayey, moss-covered ground and rises toward a grey background that seems empty, yet in which we suddenly discern the water of some bay; on the horizon a row of trees bounds it, their reflections in the water like fragile, weightless roots. Water seems to be the materialization of emptiness, trees as if inscribe meaning identified with emptiness itself, with its awareness and acceptance. It is, in a sense, only about admitting the world's otherness, but not reconciling oneself to it, transforming it into one's own openness and receptivity. Tarkovsky here comes close to Antonioni and his sounding of the universe's alien expanses."