Sightlines · reception
How Stalker was received
1979 · Andrei Tarkovsky · Stalker on Sightlines
The arc
Soviet authorities were baffled by it and gave it a grudging, limited release, while early audiences split between rapture and walkouts; today it sits comfortably in the greatest-films-ever conversation and near the top of every 'films that changed me' list.
What’s debated
The eternal Stalker fight: is its glacial pace a transcendent, meditative experience or the ultimate cinephile endurance test people pretend to love?
Its footprint
'The Zone' escaped the film entirely — it named the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games, got retroactively fused with Chernobyl (whose real-life trespassers call themselves stalkers), and inspired Geoff Dyer to write an entire book, 'Zona', about watching it.
Where it stands
An absolute canon fixture and Letterboxd rite of passage — the 'you haven't really started with slow cinema until you've sat with Stalker' film.
Did you know? Tarkovsky essentially shot the film twice: a huge portion of the original footage was ruined in the lab (improperly developed film stock), cinematographer Georgy Rerberg left the production, and Tarkovsky reshot the movie with Alexander Knyazhinsky.