Yet any perfunctory assessment of the director’s second science-fiction effort (after 1972’s Solaris) inevitably raises doubts about the accuracy, if not the sincerity, of Tarkovsky’s bold assertion. In his book Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky states the following about Stalker’s futuristic setting The Zone, a mysterious place that was reportedly created by an asteroid and may contain otherworldly forces: “People have often asked me what The Zone is, and what it symbolizes…The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, it’s life.” Considering the general self-analytic insightfulness of the director’s writing, one is almost tempted to believe him.
