Three men ride a railway work car into the Zone, and for minutes the camera stays close on their heads, all in brown, the rails knocking under them. Then the car stops, and the next shot is green. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) has been a brown monochrome since it opened, and it turns to colour at the edge of the Zone, where the rules change.
He did some version of this in film after film. Andrei Rublev is black and white until its last minutes, when Rublev’s icons come up in colour. Solaris keeps dropping in and out of black and white. Mirror moves between colour, black and white and newsreel. So why does Tarkovsky switch between black and white and colour? The short answer is his own: colour on film struck him as too loud, and setting it against monochrome was how he rationed it, saving it for what a character feels. The production record adds a ruined first shoot for Stalker, and in Solaris the switch makes you share a man’s doubt about what is real.
The painting below hangs in the library of the space station in Solaris, Pieter Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow. Drag the line across it and give it Stalker’s brown.
Watch the fire outside the inn on the left. In colour it’s the warmest thing in a frozen painting. In sepia it’s a pale smudge, and the green ice on the ponds goes the same brown as everything else. Tarkovsky made that trade again and again, and he wrote down why.
What Tarkovsky said about colour
He was clear about it early. In December 1966, the year he finished Andrei Rublev, he told the interviewer Maria Chugunova, “At the moment, I don’t think colour film is anything more than a commercial gimmick.” His reason was how people actually look at things. “In everyday life we seldom pay any special attention to colour,” he said, while on a screen colour pushes itself at you the whole time. Then he gave a rule you can watch him use in the films that came after: “Isolated details can be in colour if that is what corresponds to the state of the character on the screen.” And right after it, “A similar effect is achieved in a film when coloured shots are inserted into black-and-white.” Asked about colour in his own film, he said, “We only used it in Rublov’s paintings.”
Sculpting in Time, the book about his craft that he was still revising when he died in 1986, says the same thing at more length. “One of the greatest difficulties in the graphic realisation of a film is, of course, colour,” the passage begins, and a film that leans on colour, he wrote, ends up with the appeal of a “luxuriously illustrated glossy magazine”. His fix is the one on screen.
“Perhaps the effect of colour should be neutralised by alternating colour and monochrome sequences, so that the impression made by the complete spectrum is spaced out, toned down.”
Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
And under all of it sits this sentence: “Strangely enough, even though the world is coloured, the black and white image comes closer to the psychological, naturalistic truth of art, based as it is on special properties of seeing as well as of hearing.” Moving between colour and monochrome was how he turned colour down and pointed it where he wanted your attention.
Why is Stalker sepia? The lost first shoot
The second answer is the production record, and for Stalker it is a story about lost footage.
Tarkovsky’s crew reached Tallinn on 28 May 1977, with Georgy Rerberg, who had shot Mirror, on camera. They shot only in the hours after sunset, on a new Kodak stock that was hard to get at the time. Then, in the words of the sound designer Vladimir Sharun, “The artesian well at Mosfilm broke down,” and the exposed film “sat unprocessed for 17 days.” The whole material for the first part “ended up on the scrap heap.”
The accounts of what went wrong differ. Arvo Iho, an Estonian cinematographer who watched the shoot as an intern, saw the footage on the editing table, “a very strange colour, interesting but strange, a kind of rust-brown”, soft in places and underexposed, and he says the Mosfilm lab was missing a chemical and broke its own processing order. Tarkovsky blamed Rerberg, Iho says, and the two stopped speaking. Sharun says Tarkovsky was certain the new Kodak had been stolen and swapped for an ordinary one, and he put it down himself to “the usual Russian sloppiness.”
Evgeny Tsymbal, who worked on the film and became in effect its second director, wrote a whole book about the shoot, and in Kommersant’s review of it the story turns the other way: Tarkovsky declared the first version a technical defect while studio officials argued everything could be seen, and the reshoots had nothing to do with the quality of the stock, because Tarkovsky was still finding his film. In Sharun’s telling, Rerberg walked out of the screening of the ruined footage, and Alexander Knyazhinsky shot the Stalker we have.
- May 1977The crew reaches Tallinn on 28 May. Georgy Rerberg, who shot Mirror, is behind the camera.
- Summer 1977They shoot only after sunset, in the two and a half hours a night with no direct sun, and retake many scenes five to eight times.
- The stockA new Kodak film, hard to get in those days, sent from West Berlin by Gambarov, who held the world distribution rights to Tarkovsky’s films.
- The labIn Sharun’s account Mosfilm’s artesian well breaks down and the exposed film waits seventeen days to be developed. Iho remembers a lab missing a chemical. The material for the first part is scrapped.
- The screeningIn Sharun’s telling, Rerberg walks out of the screening of the ruined footage and is not seen on the set again. Leonid Kalashnikov lasts two weeks.
- The reshootAlexander Knyazhinsky takes over. Boris Pavlyonok, deputy chairman of Goskino, remembers the decision: reshoot, with “something like 400 thousand roubles”.
- April 1978After the Meat Grinder scene Tarkovsky has a heart attack on 9 April and spends four weeks in hospital.
- Summer 1978The second summer in Tallinn. He knows now what film he is making, and scenes stop being shot five times over.
- 1979Stalker comes out, brown outside the Zone and in colour inside it.
The production story explains why Stalker was shot twice. The green of the Zone comes from somewhere else. Brown outside and colour inside is the rule Tarkovsky gave in 1966, colour set into black and white where it matches what the character feels, and the Zone is the place the whole film has been walking toward. Asked what the Zone stands for, Tarkovsky wrote that “the zone is a zone, it’s life”.
Why parts of Solaris are black and white
Seven years before Stalker, Solaris was already dropping out of colour. Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, flies to a space station orbiting an ocean planet and finds his dead wife, Hari, on board with him, made by the planet out of his memory of her. Whole stretches are in black and white, and Phillip Lopate, in his essay for the Criterion Collection, says “the alternation between color and monochromatic shots conveys something of this ontological instability”, the not knowing what’s real.
A common guess is that the crew ran short of colour stock. The record holds something stranger, an argument about the colour of the black and white itself. When Criterion prepared its 2002 edition, the man who shot Solaris, Vadim Yusov, “told us that the scenes were shot in black and white and that no additional blue tints had been added to the scenes in question,” and the DVD showed them in pure black and white. In 2011 Criterion brought out a new edition and wrote, “We now know that the black-and-white scenes in the film were meant to be tinted blue,” and tinted them. The stock disaster on the record is Stalker’s, seven years later. Tarkovsky’s switch had been a principle since 1966, and in Solaris it lands on the thing the whole film is about, a man who can’t tell what he remembers from what’s in front of him.
Bruegel in Solaris: The Hunters in the Snow
The station has a library, and its walls carry Bruegel’s cycle of the seasons, the panels he painted in 1565 for an Antwerp merchant’s dining room. One scene belongs to The Hunters in the Snow. Hari sits alone in the library in front of it, and the film breaks the painting into close-ups, the camera moving slowly over the pack of dogs at the hunters’ heels, the crows in the bare trees and the skaters on the frozen ponds. A woman made out of someone else’s memory is looking at Earth.
Bruegel stayed with Tarkovsky. In 1979 he told the screenwriter Tonino Guerra that shots in Mirror were made “to testify my love for Brueghel, my dependency on him, the profound mark that he has left in my life.” Scroll the painting, one beat at a time.
-
The whole winter
Painted in 1565 for a cycle of the seasons. The museum in Vienna that owns it says the point is the whole of it, a cold that never lets up.
-
The hunters
Three men coming home through the snow. One fox hangs from a spear, and that is about all they caught.
-
The dogs
The pack at their heels, heads down. The Solaris camera stops on them.
-
The fire
At the inn they are burning straw to singe a pig. It is the hottest colour in the painting.
-
The sign
The inn sign hangs crooked off a single hook.
-
The crows
Black birds in the bare trees and one gliding out over the valley. The camera finds these too.
-
The skaters
Tiny figures skating and playing on the frozen ponds, the green of the ice under them. The camera lingers here as well.
-
The mill
A woman carries brushwood over the bridge and the mill wheel hangs in ice.
Now go back up to the grade and drag it all the way to black and white. The painting holds up almost untouched, because Bruegel built it from dark shapes on snow. What goes is the fire, and the green of the ice.
Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son at the end of Solaris
At the end Kelvin is back at his father’s house. He sinks to his knees and holds his father, and then the camera slowly cranes away and the house, the garden and the two men are on a small island in the planet’s ocean. Donatas Banionis, who played Kelvin, named the painting behind the pose in a 2007 interview with Radio Svoboda: “Rembrandt, The Prodigal Son, at the end of the film, when I fall to my knees.”
Rembrandt painted The Return of the Prodigal Son late in his life, and it hangs in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. The museum’s own description says “the old man is blinded by tears as he forgives his son”, and that the whole thing “takes place in absolute silence and stillness.” Rembrandt holds that stillness with light: most of the canvas is dark, and the light falls on the father’s face and hands, the son’s head and back, and the man standing apart.
Put the light on the hands, then lift the fill. With the room lit, the hands are two more things in a busy painting, and with the dark back they’re what the whole canvas is about. Tarkovsky borrowed the pose and changed the house: Kelvin kneels at a home the planet built for him out of what he missed.
He came back to the image once more. Tarkovsky made Nostalghia in Italy in 1983, and wrote that he wanted to make a film “about Russian nostalgia”, “about the particular state of mind which assails Russians who are far from their native land.” He describes its last shot himself: “I bring the Russian house inside the Italian cathedral.” It is the ending of Solaris again, a man far from home and the house he misses set down inside a place that is not his.
Fire set against water runs through the images here: the straw burning beside the frozen ponds in the Bruegel on the station wall, the ocean around Kelvin’s last embrace, and the end of Nostalghia, where a man is asked to carry a lit candle across a mineral pool and finds it drained, and walks it anyway. The XPRMTS print The Truth Is So Clear puts the two in one figure: a body waist-deep in grey water, burning red and orange from the shoulders up, face lifted to a deep blue sky full of sparks, and as still as Kelvin on his knees.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Stalker in sepia?
Outside the Zone the film is a brown monochrome and inside it’s in colour, following the rule Tarkovsky gave in 1966: colour set into black and white where it matches what a character feels. The famous stock story belongs to the first shoot of 1977, which was scrapped and shot again.
Did Tarkovsky run out of colour film for Solaris?
No. The famous stock disaster is Stalker’s. Vadim Yusov, who shot Solaris, told Criterion in 2002 that its black-and-white scenes were shot in black and white with no tint added. In 2011 Criterion wrote, “We now know that the black-and-white scenes in the film were meant to be tinted blue,” and its new edition tints them.
What painting is in Solaris?
The library on the station carries Bruegel’s cycle of the seasons, and the film dwells on The Hunters in the Snow (1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). The ending takes its pose from Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son (Hermitage, St Petersburg).
Who was the cinematographer on Stalker?
Alexander Knyazhinsky shot the film as released. Georgy Rerberg shot the lost footage of 1977, and Leonid Kalashnikov came in between for two weeks.
Does Mirror switch between black and white and colour too?
Yes. Tarkovsky wrote that in Mirror he was interested in “shots of newsreel, dream, reality, hope, hypothesis and reminiscence all succeeding one another”, and the film moves between colour, black and white and archive footage to do it. Some of its winter shots, by his own account, were inspired by Bruegel.
Read next
- Why Dune: Part Two goes black and white, the infrared sun of Giedi Prime.
- The colour of Fallen Angels and Chungking Express, and the black and white that began as old film stock.
- The Star Gate in 2001, Kubrick’s space film, four years before Solaris, and how light became a corridor.
- Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, one small figure and the longing for what is out of reach.
References
- Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, University of Texas Press, edition with the chapter on The Sacrifice: pp. 135, 138–139, 193, 200, 202, 213.
- Andrei Tarkovsky interviewed by Maria Chugunova, To the Screen, 12 December 1966; English by Kitty Hunter-Blair in Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1991, pp. 356–358: nostalghia.com
- “A Conversation between Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra”, Panorama no. 676, 3 April 1979; English by David Stringari: nostalghia.com
- Stas Tyrkin, “In Stalker Tarkovsky foretold Chernobyl”, Komsomolskaya Pravda, 23 March 2001, with Vladimir Sharun and Boris Pavlyonok: nostalghia.com
- Arvo Iho interviewed by Radio Svoboda, 24 July 2018 (in Russian): svoboda.org
- Review of Evgeny Tsymbal, The Birth of Stalker, Kommersant Weekend no. 23, 8 July 2022 (in Russian): kommersant.ru
- Donatas Banionis on Solaris, Radio Svoboda, 4 April 2007 (in Russian): svoboda.org
- Phillip Lopate, “Solaris: Inner Space”, the Criterion Collection, 2002: criterion.com
- Criterion on the Solaris transfer and the black-and-white sequences, December 2002: nostalghia.com
- Criterion on the new Solaris edition, February 2011, quoted by CriterionCast: criterioncast.com
- Min Chen, “As Seen on ‘Solaris’: A 16th-Century Masterpiece in Space”, Artnet News, 17 May 2024: news.artnet.com
- Jackson Arn, “Bruegel as Cinema”, Art in America, 1 December 2020: artnews.com
- Kunsthistorisches Museum, Jäger im Schnee (Winter), Gemäldegalerie 1838: khm.at; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Harvesters, 19.164: metmuseum.org
- State Hermitage Museum, Return of the Prodigal Son, on Google Arts & Culture: artsandculture.google.com
- Wikipedia, “Nostalghia”, consulted November 2026: en.wikipedia.org
- Images: Kunsthistorisches Museum and State Hermitage Museum via Google Art Project, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.