77-Stalker - Director:Andrei Tarkovsky - Cast: Aleksandr Kajdanovsky, Alisa Frejndlikh, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko and Natasha Abramova.

"People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolizes, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolize anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his own self-respect, and his capacity to distinguish between what matters and what is merely passing"

"the hero [Stalker] 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"

"In more general terms, it is the theme of human dignity; of what that dignity is, and of how a man suffers if he has no self-respect."-“In Stalker I make some sort of complete statement: namely that human love alone is – miraculously – proof against the blunt assertion that there is no hope for the world.”

-Andrei Tarkovsky-

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"My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle.Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream."

-Ingmar Bergman-

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"The idea of a film always comes to me in a very ordinary, boring, manner, bit by bit, by rather banal phases. To recount it would only be a waste of time. There is really nothing fascinating, nothing poetic, about it. Ah, if only one could represent that moment like a sort of sudden illumination! In an interview Ingmar Bergman, if I remember correctly, told how the idea, or rather the image, of one of his films came to him suddenly, while observing a ray of light on the floor of a dark room. I don't know, evidently it happens. It has never happened to me. Naturally it occurs that certain images emerge suddenly, but then they change, perhaps inadvertently, as in a dream, and often they transform, vexingly, inexorably, into something unrecognizable and new. "

-Andrei Tarkovsky-

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"In general, I'm very afraid of these things and I always try to avoid them. And I don't like when someone then reminds me that in this or that case I did not act with complete independence. But now, recently, quotation is also starting to become interesting to me. Mirror, for example, has a scene, a shot, which could very well have been filmed by Bergman. I reflected on the opportuneness of filming the scene that way. Then I decided that it wasn't important. Oh yes, I thought, it will be a sort of homage that I make to him. It is the scene in which Terekhova sells her earrings and Larissa, the doctor's wife, tries them on and looks into the camera, as in a mirror. Terekhova's face, looking in the mirror, and behind her, Larissa's face, who moves, approaches the camera and tries on the earrings, gazing at her own image reflected in the shadows: I don't know why, it seemed to me that it was a scene that was very similar to something Bergman might film."

-Andrei Tarkovsky-

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"Perhaps even more than in 'Mirror', in 'Stalker' I had to make use of emotions, even memories, that are very personal. In Mirror there is the physical resemblance of the actors to real people, of the settings to real places. In Stalker there are more moments that evoke in me a sort of strange sense of nostalgia. Let's take the writer. It seems to me that the actor, Solonytsin, followed my indications very scrupulously: so that at times I recognize my own characteristics, my way of speaking, in a certain way of behaving, in a certain intonation of voice: even though the writer is a character who, in general, I don't like very much."

-Andrei Tarkovsky-

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"When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure - THE SERPENT'S EGG, THE TOUCH, FACE TO FACE and so on.Fellini, Kurosawa and Bunuel move in the same fields as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness. Melies was always there without having to think about it. He was a magician by profession. "

-Ingmar Bergman-

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"A director is not entitled to please anyone. He hasn’t the right to restrict himself in the process of his work for the sake of success, and if he does he will invariably pay the price; his plan and purpose, and their realization will no longer have the same meaning for him. ... It takes little enough to appreciate art: a sensitive, subtle suggestible soul, open to beauty and good, capable of aesthetic experience..."

- Andrei Tarkovsky -