Cinematography Blog - Tarkovsky

Having tremendous respect for his films such as Solaris, The Mirror and Stalker, I have chosen to follow the style of cinematography seen in Stalker, one of Tarkovsky's more philosophical films - a film revolving around the most simple of concepts, a journey. And for the most part, that is all it is. For the ill-educated, that is all this film is.
It was at college, while working on my coursework about this film that I heard it referred to as "just a really boring film about a journey". They wanted more "action". They wanted "things to happen."

The true beauty of the film is not the narrative, adapted from the short novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, "Roadside Picnic", but from Alexander Knyazhinsky's elegant cinematography.

Alexander Knyazhinsky's cinematography in this film includes long, slow takes as opposed to the traditional use of a much more rapid montage, in a brown monochrome. The fact most of these wide, desolate shots include the characters' dialogue provides a feel of distance, sadness. Post-apocalyptic imagery that still retains beauty.

For my Cinematography project, I intend to try and replicate the feeling of danger, of fear and respect for the environments shot in, as seen in Stalker.

For roughly the first half of the film, the urban environment that the Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) lives in with his wife and disabled child is darkly lit, wet, drab - run down and decrepit. This whole section of the film is accompanied by a brown monochrome or sepia toning, indicative of the poverty, the lifestyle and political climate associated with the area surrounding the zone - miltaristic oppression, restricted travel (after all, it's an area of massive scientific/military interest, as well as being dangerous) and the Stalker makes a living off travelling (with those who have the money) to the centre of this zone.

After attracting military attention, barely escaping (a few minutes of fairly tense action, despite taking place over very few shots) the three men make their way into the zone by railroad, over a fantastic three minute scene, a journey shot unlike anything you'll see in cinema today, a slow, sombre transition from a to b as the camera follows their passage from urban, destroyed setting to the empty, alien rural zone, and from the darkness required for their infiltration, to light.



As soon as they've entered the zone, the visuals jump from monochromatic/sepia to full blown colour.
Granted, from the perspective of a film viewer in 2010, we've pretty much "seen everything" and a technique like this can seem "cheap" to some people, however, if you'd seen this type of filmmaking in the 1970's, it would definitely have been a treat.

Rather than there being any kind of visual threat on screen there is a lot of danger on a near psychological level the danger created through suspense, acting and cinematography - no visible dangers, just an air of unease, of fear. There are no visible dangers in the zone, hence how dangerous it is, you step foot in the wrong spot, and you fall victim to hideous gravitational anomalies. Yet, we're never really told this.

It's all achieved through fantastic cinematography, direction. The extreme lack of exposition leads to ambiguity as to the nature of The Zone.

The locations used within the film are beautiful, affecting the story brilliantly. Without these locations, the film would have been nowhere near as meaningful, as thought provoking as the film truly is. The fantastic location scouting did come at a cost, however, as the vicinity to a chemical plant is believed to have led to the director and some cast/crew's deaths in later years.

As a film that only includes 142 shots in just over 163 minutes (by comparison, the shower scene from Psycho is 3 minutes long and includes 50 cuts) the cinematography tells a lot more about the story than much of the dialogue, and a lot more is revealed through expressive acting, through cinematography, than it is through exposition. A perfect example of the film's visual storytelling is from the dream sequence, which, in one shot, pretty much sums up the past of the zone.




For my Cinematography project, I am aiming to try and recreate the visual style of Stalker over several shots, trying the slower style, and trying to create a short clip (roughly 2-5 minutes) that could possibly show a narrative, as Stalker does. This will mean I'll only be using around five shots, as the average shot within the film is one minute, the longest being four minutes as a continuous shot.

Updates to come.