Episode 136: Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER

Whose house?!  ARThouse!I said whose house?! ARThouse!After a long stint of Hollywood blockbusters and major franchises, the Nighthawks order something off the International Menu at the conceptual diner.Director Andrei Tarkovsky's, STALKER is a Soviet era Russian film about three characters wandering into a heavily guarded exclusion zone where some untold calamity has rendered the area allegedly uninhabitable. Stalkers are people who you can hire to ferry you in and out of the exclusion zone for a price.Why would anyone do this? Legend has it that a room, inside an abandoned building, in the heart of The Zone has the ability to grant the heart's desire of anyone who enters.A far cry from most modern filmmaking with high paced action and fast cuts, STALKER is an example of deliberate and effective long-fuse filmmaking. The shot length in Stalker averages out to under one shot per minute. It's a pensive and existential examination of art, science, faith, humanity, and so many other things...or is it?No. Really. We're not being intentionally incomplete. We don't know.