Originally published in South China Morning Post, 6 June 2015
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.
But Stalker digs deeper, ironically because it's devoid of traditional meaning. By layering his film with contrasting levels of cinematic conventions, Tarkovsky created a work beyond pure philosophical reading - a minimalistic narrative set against visuals rife with symbolism and characters that border on the mundane.
It's a plot to make us want to return to its world again and again - but like the stalker's own Sisyphean relationship with the Zone, where the Room has no secret quality, there is no true reading of Stalker.
Tarkovsky was adamant about that as people sought to dissect him, once vaguely writing: "The Zone is a zone. It's life, and as he makes his way across it, man may break down or he may come through."
For a man who'd suffered through the oppression of the Soviet regime, whose religious beliefs were constantly questioned, whose art was forever stifled, it felt like a final response - a lifelong reaction to the power of symbolism and its effect on our understanding of the universe.
Rumours still persist that Tarkovsky was assassinated by the KGB for anti-Soviet propaganda.