Capital Celluloid 2012 - Day 123: Wednesday May 2

Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979): Renoir Cinema, 7pm
This is a A Nos Amours film club event hosted by film makers Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts. The film is also screening at Curzon Richmond on Sunday May 6 at 11.30am. A Nos Amours presents a 35mm screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 metaphysical and moral quest Stalker, introduced by Geoff Dyer, author of the recently published book about the film,  ‘Zona’ described by J.Hoberman of the New York Times as an ‘at once audacious post-postmodernist memoir and après-DVD monograph’. 

Here is the Curzon introduction to the evening: Curzon Cinemas is proud to welcome A Nos Amours, a new collective founded by filmmakers Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts dedicated to programming over-looked, under-exposed or especially potent cinema. A Nos Amours invites filmmakers to advocate and present films that they admire or would like to see on a big screen. For this special event, A Nos Amours presents Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, bringing a 35mm print sourced from Russia especially for this screening. Author Geoff Dyer whose most recent book Zona about the film, will be joining us for an extended intro. To find out more about the collective please check anosamours.co.uk.

Chicago Reader review:
'Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 masterpiece, like his earlier Solaris, is a free and allegorical adaptation of an SF novel, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic. After a meteorite hits the earth, the region where it's fallen is believed to grant the wishes of those who enter and, sealed off by the authorities, can be penetrated only illegally and with special guides. One of them (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky), the stalker of the title, leads a writer and a professor through the grimiest industrial wasteland you've ever seen. What they find is pretty harsh and has none of the usual satisfactions of SF quests, but Tarkovsky regards their journey as a contemporary spiritual quest. His mise en scene is mesmerizing, and the final scene is breathtaking. Not an easy film, but almost certainly a great one.' Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here is a trailer/tribute.