Russia through the eyes of Stravinsky, Tarkovsky and Dostoevsky
Dissident, dissonant, disturbing - three works with a global audience and resonance but all firmly rooted in Russia.
Stalker: Andrei Tarkovsky's final, defiant response to his Soviet oppressors
Western counterparts might routinely trump them in modern filmmaking stakes, but Russia once was a major cinematic contender.
Early efforts such as Battleship Potemkin and Man With a Movie Camera were groundbreaking, but as the Soviet Union started to come into power, the country's big-screen sensibilities languished into lethargy.
Fear and censorship ruled, and only one Russian director truly attempted to speak out: Andrei Tarkovsky, a deeply religious man who infused heart-wrenching spirituality into every frame of his films. He was quickly silenced, of course. Tarkovsky's allegorical 1966 masterpiece on 15th-century Russian monk Andrei Rublev was denied domestic release, so he turned to a then-insipid genre as a method of escaping the madness.
Stalker might pale in popularity to Tarkovsky's sci-fi success Solaris, but it certainly says more about the filmmaker's cinematic situation. Freely adapted from satirical novel Roadside Picnic, in a dystopian future, we follow a "stalker", a man with mental powers, who leads a writer and a professor into the fenced-off Zone, where a mysterious area called the Room is said to make all wishes come true.
For those living behind the Iron Curtain, the film's subtext was almost all too obvious. Beautifully bleak monochromatic images of ruined urban areas outside the fence, and lush green landscapes within. An emaciated, religious convict leads two godless intellectuals to a place that answered all their questions.