Stalker

Andrei Tarkovsky shot this film twice. The Kodak 5247 stock used first was developed wrongly in Soviet laboratories and came back unusable, after which Tarkovsky dismissed his cinematographer Georgy Rerberg and remade nearly all of it with Alexander Knyazhinsky. The border of the Zone is drawn by stock, not effects. Scenes outside it are sepia and the interior is in colour, so the image announces the rule change. The settings were not built either: filming took place near Tallinn at two abandoned hydroelectric plants on the Jägala river. The whole film is assembled from 142 shots. The average shot runs over 1 minute and many last past 4, so what is asked of you is not following events but staying inside one frame for minutes at a time. That is where the difficulty sits. The source is the 1972 novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, though Tarkovsky said in 1979 that almost nothing survived of it beyond the words Stalker and Zone. The three men reach the threshold of the room said to grant wishes, sit outside in silence, and none goes in. A good fit if you take the refusal to enter that room as the argument rather than a missing finish. Not for anyone wanting an explanation of what the Zone is and how it works.