Stalker
Сталкер
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| Poster Origin : | Russia / USSR |
| Poster Size : | Russian / 15 x 22" |
| Poster Artist : | A Gorbov |
| Poster Year : | 1980 |
| Poster Version : | Re-Release |
| Film Origin : | Russia / USSR |
| Film Director : | Andrei Tarkovsky |
| Film Year : | 1979 |
In common with most Russian posters of this size, this is a no-frills affair with a sparse two-colour layout, cursory border text and cross-hatched line drawing. There is little here to distinguish Stalker from the typical run-of-the-mill Russian melodrama, but artist Gorbov does try to divulge something of the film’s profundity.
The yin-yang backdrop (half-black, half-white) hints at the film’s occasional Taoist philosophising, contrasting the grim oppression of the totalitarian world with the fantastic, heavenly promises of the forbidden zone. The great flash below the title may depict the meteorite impact, the scientist’s destructive weapon, or neither. For a film so elusive and infinitely suggestive the director would probably enjoy such an ambiguous device.
No doubt the Crown of Thorns is the outstanding (redeeming?) feature here; an iconic image from the film and a familiar symbolic reference, or so we are led to believe, but in the hands of the intangible Tarkovsky it could be just as much a ruse or a gag as any kind of explicit metaphor.