What you are looking at is legendary director,
Andrei Tarkovsky’s response to one of the
worst things that can happen to a filmmaker—
while filming the most expensive shot of his
movie The Sacrifice, involving a man burning
his house down in one long take, the camera
jammed during the take and the house burned
down...
without being filmed.
Jammed!
They scraped together some money and rebuilt
the house over two weeks to film it again.
This wonderful edit at the end is actually
just the end of the take because they used
up the entire reel on the one shot (Wiki).
Reportedly, the cinematographer had advised
Tarkovsky to use more than one camera for
the shot the first time around, but the director
decided against it (stopsmilingonline). I
mean, at least he didn’t choose to bring
zero cameras…
although he might as well have.
I bet you’re thinking, ’that’s some
bad luck right there' well, that’s nothing.
Seven years before filming The Sacrifice,
Tarkovsky sacrificed his sanity to make this
movie: Stalker. Stalker had one of the most
difficult productions in cinema history and
possibly even caused Tarkovsky’s death.
You don’t have to have seen the movie to
watch this video, but it’s very possible
you already have — it’s currently the
most streamed movie on The Criterion Channel
streaming service.
So let’s see why one crew member described
the production of Stalker as
“a mirror of a hellish trip” (Cohn).
This is CinemaTyler Show.
If you are unfamiliar with Andrei Tarkovsky,
here is a mini-bio:
Andrei Tarkovsky was a Russian film director
who’s main work was between 1962 and 1986.
His style was slow, methodical, and atmospheric—
often involving really beautiful shots of nature.
His father was a poet and you could
say that Andrei was a poetic filmmaker.
He’s most similar to directors like Ingmar Bergman
or Robert Bresson. And you most likely have
seen his influence even recently. Much like
Christopher Nolan today, Tarkovsky's main
interests in the art of filmmaking revolved
around time. He thought of filmmaking as “sculpting
in time” and he is known for lingering on
a shot for long periods for the purpose of,
as Roger Ebert put it, “absorbing” you
rather than entertaining you.
My favorite movie of his is ’The Mirror,’ but I would
start with Ivan’s Childhood (about a child
army scout during World War Two), which is
more traditional, or Solaris (about a space
station orbiting a mysterious planet that
creates perfect copies of people from your memory),
which is his movie that seems to
have caught on the most in the mainstream.
And it’s a direct answer to the cleanliness
of Stanley Kubrick’s future in 2001: A Space Odyssey—
Tarkovsky was quoted saying, “Let’s
make OUR space station like a broken down bus."
He hated 2001: A Space Odyssey, by the way,
but he hated it in a motivating way.
It’s very likely that we got Solaris because of
2001. It makes sense— Kubrick is one side
of the brain and Tarkovsky is the other. There
is a fascinating video showing the similarity
in style and imagery between the two directors, which I'll put a link to down in the description.
Out of the seven features Tarkovsky directed,
only Solaris and Stalker were really science fiction movies.
It is really interesting seeing Tarkovsky
apply his craft to science fiction. Personally, I would
have loved to have seen a Tarkovsky horror
movie or even a screwball comedy or something.
Apparently he didn’t consider himself a
sci-fi fan, calling the genre full of “comic book” elements
and “vulgar commercialism,”
so I guess he wouldn’t like some of these
'sci-fi' movies coming out now (BFI). But
I’m sure there are many he would like and
many that were influenced by him. That said, shortly
before his death, he saw James Cameron’s
The Terminator and said its “as a vision
of the future and the relation between man
and his destiny, the film is pushing the frontier
fo cinema as an art” (Wiki).
Stalker takes place after a mysterious object
from space crashes into a fictitious country.
Troops were sent in, but never returned.
The government put walls up around this ‘Zone’
to keep people away from its strange effect
on reality.
Imagine if you can, a forbidden Zone of unimaginable
mystery and one unauthorized guide to the
Zone known as a Stalker, hired to sneak a
Writer and a Professor into the heart of the
Zone’s magic— a room that grants the deepest
desires of anyone who enters it.
And it stars Natalie Portman…
just kidding.
The film was based on a novella named ‘Roadside
Picnic’ by the Strugatsky brothers (Wiki).
The film is extremely slow moving, but that’s
the point. It envelops you. You feel like
you are there instead of watching the story
happen to other people.
I almost feel like some of these really long
takes allow your mind to wander as if you
were the character— you are intrigued by
the nature of the Zone and what will happen next,
but you are given space to contemplate
the concept as the character would without
being told what to think at any given moment.
And the movie seamlessly transitions into
these contemplative segments.
Tarkovsky hired Georgy Rerberg as cinematographer.
Rerberg had shot Tarkovsky’s previous film,
The Mirror, in 1975. They wanted to use the
“expressive texture” of the abandoned
power plants in Estonia and Tallinn, which
as strangely beautiful as it was, caused lots
of logistical problems. The crew often had
to work in some very uncomfortable situations
for hours on end, but we’ll get more into
that later (Cinephilia & Beyond).
One of the earlier issues involved Tarkovsky’s
wife Larisa— who demanded to play the role
of the Stalker’s wife in the film (The Guardian).
She was very difficult on the set, earning
the nickname: “the Empress” (The Guardian).
Rerberg asked Tarkovsky if he wanted Larisa
or the actual actress, which was apparently
enough to get Tarkovsky to come to his senses
and hire Alisa...ummm… Alisa (The Guardian).
Larisa, his wife, was piiissssed. She hated
Rerberg.
The real problems would begin once they got
the footage back. The footage had been brought
to a lab in Moscow to be developed, but when
it was done, they noticed that “the image
looked dark and greenish” (Cinephilia & Beyond).
I’m not sure why they were just starting
to see footage after several months of shooting,
but nevertheless, the film was ruined. Months
and months  of extremely stressful hectic
work was destroyed (Le Fanu). Can you imagine
looking back on all the issues on the set
and all of the problems and realizing that
you might as well have not had film in the
camera at all?
The problem was twofold— a mistake in the
development
along with a defective batch of film (Cinephilia & Beyond).
Here are somestills from the ruined film, so you can see what it looked like. They had been
shooting on an, at the time, experimental—
Kodak 5247 (actually one of the more famous
film stocks) and the Soviet film labs were
not yet experienced in how to develop it (Safiullin, Wiki).
Alien, The Shining, Star Wars, and Blade Runner were
also shot on that film stock (shotonwhat).
What happened next, as you can imagine, was
a nightmare of determining who was to blame
and the decision about whether or not to go
on. They fired the second cameraman who was
apparently [quote] “responsible for exposure,”
but it probably wasn’t his fault (Cinephilia & Beyond).
The next to go was the production
designer and so on down the line (Cinephilia & Beyond).
Tarkovsky had already been having problems
with Rerberg, his cinematographer, before
the film stock was ruined (Wiki). Rerberg
had said that he was trying to make his own
film simultaneously (Cohn). He even said that
when he worked on The Mirror with Tarkovsky,
which was Tarkovsky’s auto-biography, that
[quote] “Andrei made a film about himself,
and I, about myself. Luckily, it was the same
film” (Cohn).
That's kind of messed up, right? Isn’t that like
hiring a stalker to take you into the Zone,
but instead he just takes you over to his
house so he can show you his Blu-ray collection.
And you’re like, “What’s so special
magical this place?” And he says, “Oh man,
you just have to believe. You just have to
belieeeeve, man.”
Rerberg was born into a highly intellectual
family in 1937— during the height of Stalin’s
repression of poets and artists who were often
arrested for their work (Cohn).
The thing you must realize is that Stalker is about
a an artist-- a writer-- who lives under a
repressive government. Of course Rerberg is
going to want to tell the story.
His parents drilled into his mind the importance
of authority in your artistic voice (Cohn).
So, Tarkovsky and Rerberg would often butt
heads on the set. One time Tarkovsky asked
Rerberg to do an effect that he saw in an
Ingmar Bergman film. They even had a “special studio”
made to get the effect, but Rerberg
couldn’t do it the way Tarkovsky wanted
and Tarkovsky flipped out on him (The Guardian).
I wish I knew what the effect was.
If you have an idea, let me know in the comments.
So when he found out the film stock was ruined,
Tarkovsky immediately fired Rerberg.
Hasta la vista, baby.
This was a whole thing and there was even
a documentary made in 2009
detailing Rerberg’s side called
“Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The
Reverse Side of “Stalker."
In 1993, Tarkovsky’s diaries were published
and not only did he write that Rerberg was
a terrible cinematographer, but that he sucked
as a person, too (The Guardian). But… this
disdain might not be as intense as it seemed--
apparently Tarkovsky would dictate his diary
for various people for write down including
his wife, who you’ll remember, hated Rerberg’s guts (Cohn).
According to his diaries, the 70s were particularly
tough for Tarkovsky (Le Fanu). At one point,
he considered quitting cinema entirely and
directing theater productions (Le Fanu).
I mean, the film can’t get ruined if there
is no camera, right? Stalker was actually the climax
of Tarkovsky’s decade of anguish (Le Fanu).
His film Andrei Rublev from 1966 “bad been
denied a domestic release” and the script
he wanted to make next was denied because
it was too personal— this would later become
The Mirror (BFI).
The studio was ready to pull the plug on the
whole thing (Wiki). They were losing money,
but instead of scrapping the production entirely,
they decided to let Tarkovsky try again (Safiullin).
Tarkovsky had "proposed a two-part film,”
and used the leftover money to reshoot, but
they only had enough money to shoot one of
the two parts (Safiullin).
With Rerberg gone, Tarkovsky had to find a
new DP to shoot his film. He hired Leonid
Kalashnikov and, the following autumn, they
reshot for months at “an abandoned hydroelectric
power station in Estonia” because the original location
they wanted had an earthquake (Dyer).
Tarkovsky saw what he had shot and… it sucked.
It had no magic. Tarkovsky was like,
“This is bullshit, man! This isn’t the way I wanted
it, damnit!”
So, yeah, he fired Leonid.
So, Tarkovsky decided to shoot Stalker for a THIRD
TIME! This time with a new cinematographer
named Alexander Knyazhinsky and Tarkovsky
changed the script around and apparently, the version
shot by Alexander is very different from what
was shot the previous year (Wiki). The version
shot by Alexander is the one that we know (Le
Fanu).
This final version of the film was shot using
a KSN camera, which is the Soviet version
of the Mitchell NC (Cinephilia & Beyond).
Nearly every shot in The Zone that isn’t
a close-up, was shot using a Cooke Varotal
20-100mm T3.1 zoom lens (Cinephilia & Beyond).
This lens was [quote] “as big as an artillery
shell
and it cost the same as a passenger car” (Cinephilia & Beyond).
The first shot of the new production was the
one where the handcar finally stops in The Zone (Cinephilia & Beyond).
The production
designer, Rashid Safiullin, said that the
shots leading up to the men’s entry into
The Zone required a large fence with barbed wire,
but the production didn’t give him any materials this second time around (Safiullin).
Although, when they were ready to shoot, he saw that
the fence had been set up—
could it be the zone????
But really, he was implying that
there was something going on in the background
whether that be stealing, finding, swapping,
or you know, buying materials somehow (Safiullin).
Another shot affected by the diminished budget
was the shot of the tanks “lurking in the mist.”
In an interview, Safiullin said,
"The first year we had had seven or eight
tanks and five armored troop-carriers. It
was all brought from Moscow and placed around.
The next year there was no money. The limit
was three tanks and two armored troop-carriers.
All right, we took it.
Andrei said, “Can you draw a sketch of it?”
I worked for two or three days drawing the
storyboard. Because he needed a full-blooded
picture, didn’t he? With him there had to
be not a single unmotivated flower in the
frame, let alone the tanks. We needed an illusion,
a great number of tanks being there and like
something had happened to them. Like they
had melted or gone to pieces, people in there
disappearing somewhere. The whole scene had
to breathe a drama. He had two, three scattered
points in his mind. I knew the situation and
I said, “I’ll do this.” But they brought
the tanks and gave us 1.5 hours instead of
the two or three days that we really needed,
so that they could be seen from several angles.
And they had to be placed at the very entrance.
But a tank passing the marshland destroys
it for five to ten years. And there had to
be no trace that they had just been brought there.
We needed an illusion they had been
there for about 20 years… overgrown with moss.
So it was a predicament” (Safiullin).
That said, Safiullin noted that, as much
as Stalker was altered over the course of
its productionS, “not a single alteration
was accidental. It was a result of complex
creative work” (Safiullin). Apparently
the alterations were so frequent that they
were doing reshoots way back during the first
version with Rerberg because they had changed
something in the script and had the reshoot
the scene (Cinephilia & Beyond).
Tarkovsky is so good at making the setting
look stunning that you don’t really realize
how miserable it was to actually be there.
One scene had the crew standing for hours
[quote] “up to their knees in stinking puddles
of oil, while effluent discharged, upriver,
from a paper processing plant enveloped the
set in a fetid miasma.
This went for months on end (Le Fanu).
In fact, one of the only two shots from the
original version of the film that made it
into the final cut involved a “river covered
in reddish foam” (Cinephilia & Beyond).
This was [quote] “the waste of pulp and
paper [that] was dumped into [the] river from
an industrial complex" (Cinephilia & Beyond).
The other shot from the first version was
the one where the camera floats over the mirror (Cinephilia & Beyond).
The main part of the movie where the three
men journey through the zone was shot at
“two hydro power plants on the Jägala river near
Tallinn, Estonia” as well as in "Maardu,
next to the Iru power plant" and some of the
scenes before the scenes in the Zone were
shot at “an old Flora chemical factory,
in the center of Tallinn, next to the old
Rotermann salt storage and the electric plant
(Wiki).
So, you can probably tell where this is headed…
many of the crew members would later pass
away from illnesses likely related to their
time working near hazardous chemicals and
radiation (Dyer). Three of these deaths would
be Anatoly Solonitsyn the fantastic actor
who played the writer— definitely check
him out in Andrei Rublev and The Ascent—
Tarkovsky’s wife, and Tarkovsky himself
(Dyer). Tarkovsky was only 54 when he died—
he could be alive right now. He’d be around
87 years old. Just think of all the masterpieces
we missed out on.
The sound designer, Vladimir Sharun is convinced
that it was the chemicals they were working
around that killed them. He said that this
shot here of what looks like "snow falling
in the summer and white foam floating down
the river” was, in fact, “some horrible
poison” and many of the female crew members
got
“allergic reactions on their faces” from it (Wiki).
This kind of makes the film feel similar to
the that picture of the core leaking out after
the Chernobyl disaster. You shouldn’t be
able to see this and survive, and yet, you’re
looking at it right now. And this picture
was taken a decade after the disaster when
the radiation died down to one-tenth of what
it had been (Rare Historical Photos).
In fact, the Chernobyl disaster, involving
a catastrophic explosion at the power plant,
made the surrounding area uninhabitable and
the area was referred to as the “Zone of
alienation,” and some of the people who
make trips into the Zone to care for the Chernobyl
power plant call themselves “stalkers”
(Wiki).
So, what happened to the first version of
Stalker— it was a little greenish, right?
We might be able to use color correction software
to fix that. Well, sadly, the film was destroyed
in a fire in 1988 (Le Fanu). The people who
had seen the first version said that, even
though the film was damaged, it was still
“extraordinarily beautiful” (Le Fanu).
Rerberg may have also been one of the victims
of Stalker’s hazardous chemicals having
died at only 61 years old.
Nearly all of the dreams Tarkovsky wrote in
his diary between 1974 and 1977 involved being in prison—
and one dream had Tarkovsky escape from prison only to want to go back.
Tarkovsky wrote: "At last, to my joy, I saw
the entrance to the prison, which I recognized
by the bas-relief emblem of the USSR. I was
worried about how I was going to be received,
but that was as nothing compared with the
horror of being out of prison” (Le Fanu).
In an essay by Mark Le Fanu for Criterion,
he argues that Stalker is a fantasy wish to
leave Russia, but knowing that it would be
either impossible or wrong to (Le Fanu).
In 1976, Tarkovsky had bought a new house
“about two hundred miles southeast of Moscow,”
but in 1979, shortly after Stalker, Tarkovsky
started traveling to Italy, ultimately deciding
in 1982 never to return to Russia (Wiki).
Over the three versions of Stalker, 16,000
feet of film was shot and yet some who have
seen the both first version and the version
we’ve seen claim that the two versions“
are almost identical (Wiki). So, who knows
what’s going on. They’re identical; they’re
extremely different. I don’t know. Maybe
the first one and the third one are similar
and the second one was different— who knows,
but I’ll leave you with a quote from an
interview with Tarkovsky that I really think
sums up this story.
He said, "To make a film you need money. To
write a poem all you need is pen and paper.
This puts cinema at a disadvantage. But I
think cinema is invincible, and I bow down
to all the directors who try to realize their
own films despite everything” (Cinephilia & Beyond).
Thank you, Andrei.
And thank YOU for watching! Let me know in
the comments if you want more videos on Stalker—
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