STALKER (1979)  is the ultimate road movie; a tour-de-force tracks the journey of three men as they search for their deepest desires and selves in a devastated future landscape. Patriarch of cinema Tarkovsky takes the notion of the journey and examines it, stretches it, makes it at once real and ethereal; reduced to its abstract components of space and time.

“…everything that changes is in time, but time itself does not change”

The cinematic itself is based on observation, time printed in factual forms and manifestations; the cinema image simply the observation of a phenomenon passing through time, to convey a concreteness and texture, a sense of change with time.  And what is a journey if not passage through space and time?  In STALKER, the colours of autumn leaves, moss-blanketed rocks, rust-riven train carriages and abandoned military tanks suggest gradual change, revealing the texture and condition of physical matter over time. Current time cannot be removed from the image – it ‘lives within time and time within it’, in each frame (Tarkovsky).

Long tracking scenes capture, as philosopher Gilles Deleuze has argued, ‘a little time in its pure state…everything that changes is in time, but time itself does not change’.  A six-minute scene in STALKER, focusing on the back of Writer’s head, documents the passing barren landscape of a journey along miles of disused train tracks. Nothing and yet everything happens. One cannot tell how much time has passed or is passing, as indistinct, hallucinatory landscapes blend together. A series of frozen snapshots melt into spatio-temporal continuity so that when the black-and-white image symbolically emerges into full colour upon entry into the Zone, the change is imperceptible – the exact moment of transformation simply one in a continuation of many.

… a time which is chronic but not chronological, paradoxically immeasurable and tangible …

As Geoff Dyer notes in his 2012 paean to the film, the journey is ‘within the finite but it is impossible to discern the length of finitude’, entering a time which is chronic but not chronological, paradoxically immeasurable and tangible. So the journey, the road, is for Tarkovsky not only the concrete or the physical, nor just the framing of locational progress, but the passage through the dimensions of space and time. STALKER, in its tracking of the self-discovery and dreamlike journey of its characters, travels deep into a realm of philosophical enquiry, and questions the very nature of space and that of time itself.