Stalker *** I am not sure if I really understood the film, but here is my view upon first viewing. This movie has a tangential (perhaps more than that) connection with Solyaris, another of Tarkovsky's movies. The main theme and the common point with the other film is the central character's approach to understanding life. Rather unwillingness to analyze the beauty of life and nature. Solyaris starts with an astronaut arguing that everything can be understood by scientific method. Later in that movie he gives up questioning it and embraces happiness even when he knows it is not real. In Stalker, two of the main characters are a scientist and a writer. In a way Tarkovsky takes the side of Stalker, the central character and attacks the pointlessness in analyzing life either through scientific means or by philosophy. In a great scene, his wife talks to the audience explaining beautifully that being in sorrow is not something awful. Perhaps the message is: Experience life as a miracle and do not deal with it in terms of academic knowledge. I have focussed a lot on the theme, some comments are necessary regarding the visual aspects of it. I don't know where he shot the scenes, but each frame is beautifully and thoughtfully constructed. One can again find the constant switching between BW, color and sepia. The sepia scenes have temporal significance, the BW ones again seem arbitrary or perhaps just to highlight the "Zone", a mysterious place within which most of the plot revolves.
