Reddit mentions of The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue

[Stalker](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film)

The argument I make for this being my top film choice is a rather economical one...I watch this film once every year and I carry it (the spirit, feeling) with me for months after each view. Each time I watch it, I appreciate something new or re-appreciate it all over again.

The film was shot 3 different times, with differing crews (using over 5,000 meter of film), with almost identical results...this points to a vision that was unrelenting. The fact that the core of the movie is ambiguous, creates a mystery that is compelling and grows upon repeat viewing.

One of the other reasons I really like Stalker, is from the wealth of apocrypha and literature dealing with the movie and production. The documentary "Rerberg i Tarkovsky. Obratnaya storona Stalkera", the definitive 'Tarkovsky on Tarkovsky' "Sculpting in Time", the beautiful "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", the scholarly tome "Andrei Tarkovskys Poetics of Cinema", and the upcoming work "Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room" by Geoff Dyer.

The story of Stalker and Roadside Picnic is long and complicated. Here's an attempt at simplifying it:

Initially, the authors — the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky — wrote a screenplay that was faithful to their own novel. Tarkovsky even filmed it, spending about a year on the outdoor scenes. But he was using a new kind of American film stock, Kodak 5247, which the processing lab was not familiar with, and the film was damaged beyond repair during processing. (I once read an article that claimed that this is why the opening scenes are in sepia; it's a remnant of the lab damage. Not sure if this is true.) This is one of the "lost works" of cinematic history.

Tarkovsky was at this point despondent, not just unhappy with the destruction of his footage, but also with the direction the film was taking, and with his cinematographer (Rerberg, who was critical of the film and the script), whom he fired shortly thereafter. While negotiating with the Soviet film board to get more time to reshoot the film, he had several workshops with the Strugatskys to try to develop a better screenplay. Eventually Boris gave up and flew back home, but Arkady persisted, and basically wrote Tarkovsky a short treatment that suggested reducing the entire film to a bare-bones, more philosophical story with nameless characters and very few overt scifi elements. He then encouraged Tarkovsky to go do his own thing.

This was the breakthrough that helped Tarkovsky find the direction and inspiration he wanted, and he used the treatment as the basis for a new screenplay that ended up having very little to do with the book. He wrote enthuastically to Arkady that for the first time as a director he had a screenplay he could call his own. (His previous films had all been written by others, or collaborations, and mostly adaptations.)

Eventually, Tarkovsky was able to negotiate with the film board to shoot a two-part film instead. They would pretend his first shoot, which had already been financed, was the "first part", and he received the necessary funding to shoot the second half.

The Strutgatskys, who were still credited, weren't very happy with the final film. It preserves almost none of the original plot. For example, the novel is told entirely from the perspective of Red Schuhart, the stalker; there's no "Writer" or "Professor". In the novel, he visits the Zone several times over the course of several years, retrieving artifacts that he sells on the black market, and the story is really about his gradual descent into bitter hopelessness.

Some things do remain. The film has an opening text about an alien invasion, which mirrors the opening of the book. There's the stalker, his wife and his daughter. The part about the stalker throwing nuts and bolts tied with scraps of cloth is explained in the book. The backstory about the stalker's mentor (called Hedgehog in the film, Burbridge in the novel) is also there, and forms the basis for the both the film's and the novel's moral theme. In the film, the protagonists are looking for a room, but in the film it's a golden sphere. In the novel, his daughter is also nicknamed Monkey, but it's because she's covered in fur, a result of being influenced by the Zone.

The novel is much more optimistic in nature. (The Strugatskys were generally quite hopeful about the future of mankind, even though they had to camouflage their criticisms of communism as scifi, and even publish some works abroad to avoid censorship.) In the book, Red is something of a loser; he's selfish, deeply cynical about humankind, but he's also filled with self-hate and regret about his family situation. His attempt at finding the sphere is resolved much more positively than in the film.

The relationship between Stalker and Roadside Picnic has parallels to other adaptations: Not too different from the relationship between Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, for example (although in the former's case, it's the book that is more minimalistic and abstract than the film). Two different works with rather different ideas and motives, but common themes. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep/Blade Runner is also a good example mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

For a more in-depth look into the process of filming Stalker, I recommend The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (Johnson and Petrie, 1994).