Andrei Tarkovsky – like his fellow Russian Alexander Solzhenitsyn – suffered at the hands of the capricious and vengeful Soviet cultural bureaucracy, and – like Solzhenitsyn – was eventually forced into exile. When Nostalgia was shown at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, the Russian filmmaker on the jury fought against it being given a major prize.

Tarkovsky only made seven major films in the period from his first film, Ivan's Childhood (1962), to his last, The Sacrifice (1985), which was made in Sweden with key members of the crew who had worked with Ingmar Bergman, whose Cries and Whispers Tarkovsky had admired.

In Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979),a “stalker” is a guide who takes people through The Zone where there is a Room which will grant one's deepest wish. In the film, the Stalker takes a Professor and a Writer through this devastated landscape, but when they reach the Room, they do not enter.

Takovsky describes what Stalker is about:

“The hero goes through moments of despair when his faith is shaken; but every time he comes to a renewed sense of his vocation to serve people who have lost their hopes and illusions.

I felt that it was very important that the film observe the three unities of time, space and action. If in Mirror I was interested in having shots of newsreel, dream, reality, hope, hypothesis and reminiscence all succeeding one another in that welter of situations which confronts the hero with the ineluctable problems of existence, inStalker I wanted there to be no time-lapse between the shots. I wanted time and its passing to be revealed, to have their existence, within each frame; for the articulations between the shots to be the continuation of the action and nothing more, to involve no dislocation of time, not to function as a mechanism for selecting and dramatically organizing the material – I wanted it to be as if the whole film had been made in a single shot.

Such a simple and ascetic approach seems to me to be rich in possibilities. I eliminated all I could from the script in order to have a minimum of external effects. As a matter of principle, I wanted to avoid distracting or surprising the audience with unexpected changes of scene, with the geography of the action, with elaborate plot – I wanted the whole composition to be simple and muted.

More consistently than ever, I was trying to make people believe that cinema as an instrument of art has its own possibilities which are equal to those of prose. I wanted to demonstrate how cinema is able to observe life, without interfering, crudely or obviously, with its continuity. For that is where I see the true poetic essence of cinema.”

Leading Russian film critic Maya Turovskaya has this final word about Stalker:

“Within a short time his film was to prove prophetic in the most literal sense of the word. Previously, the word "zone" had for Russians an association with the camps and Siberia; but in 1986 it was to acquire exactly the same meaning it has in the film, i.e. the site of a catastrophe. Suddenly, our television screens were filled with ruination caused not by any war and with landscapes more fantastic than any wonders of the silver screen: empty homes and gardens, and forests where no human foot would ever be allowed to tread. There was the frontier of the Zone, and there were the first – well, not exactly stalkers, but peasants stealing into the Zone to pick tomatoes or catch fish in the dead water, since the human imagination cannot encompass a danger that is intangible and invisible to the eye. And now the name of Chernobyl has become enmeshed with apocalyptic echoes and associations – including the star of Wormwood, falling to the ground.”

Essential Viewing: Ivan's Childhood [Buy], Andrei Rublev [Buy], Solaris [Buy], Mirror [Buy], Stalker [Buy], Nostalgia [Buy], The Sacrifice [Buy]

Extracts taken from: Sculpting In Time: Reflections on the Cinema by Andrey Tarkovsky, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair (Faber and Faber, 1989) and from Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry by Maya Turovskaya, translated by Nataaha Ward (Faber and Faber, 1989).