In Stalker, Alexander Kaidanovsky makes the guide’s seriousness seem vulnerable. His work earns our admiration because the guide appears to need his faith, and gives us reason to worry about him.
Fi1m perspective
In Stalker (1979), the camera stays on Alexander Kaidanovsky’s face without making his guide any easier to know. He looks serious enough to trust, but the longer we look, the less settled that trust becomes. We were unsettled by those close-ups because Kaidanovsky lets us question the confidence of someone who seems to need his faith. We need not share it to be concerned for him. We warmly recommend the performance, even with the film’s demands on our patience.
His breakthrough was as Lemke in Nikita Mikhalkov’s At Home Among Strangers, a Stranger Among His Own (1974). The civil-war adventure belongs to an earlier phase, when Kaidanovsky was building a substantial body of Soviet screen work through the 1970s. He was an established screen actor by the time Stalker brought him international recognition. That earlier adventure work is worth keeping in mind when watching how little he needs to insist on his presence for Tarkovsky.
Tarkovsky’s contribution is to give us time to notice uncertainty without cutting away or settling what it means. Kaidanovsky makes the guide’s seriousness seem vulnerable, so faith becomes a concern for a particular person rather than simply a subject for discussion. We are left to weigh that vulnerability for ourselves, with the close-ups allowing us to inspect his face without promising that we will understand him. The talk sometimes grows heavy, and we would not pretend that having him in front of the camera makes every exchange absorbing. His performance works because there is someone to care about even when the words become hard going.
The later credits make it harder to treat one role as a complete account of his work. He made his directing debut with A Simple Death (1985), then played Philip Lombard in Ten Little Indians (1987), an adaptation of Agatha Christie. The films he directed included adaptations of Tolstoy stories, but we would not treat his work behind the camera as a key to this performance. The move behind the camera did not end his acting. Begin with Stalker, but give Kaidanovsky’s face at least as much attention as the speeches.
Biography
Alexander Kaidanovsky (also credited as Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy and similar spellings) was a Soviet and Russian actor and film director. He was born on 23 July 1946 in Rostov-on-Don and died on 3 December 1995 in Moscow.
Before acting he trained as a welder. He studied at the Rostov Theatre School and the Shchukin theatrical school in Moscow, graduating in 1969. He began his stage career that year at the Vakhtangov Theatre and later joined the Moscow Arts Theatre.
His film roles include Lemke in At Home Among Strangers, a Stranger Among His Own (1974) and the title character in Stalker (1979). He also directed A Simple Death (1985), which screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, and Just Death (1993).
