Join Us for Solyaris!
Solyaris (1972) is scheduled to screen at 5 p.m. on March 18 in HUMlab. There will be discussion after the film, accompanied by some light refreshments. All welcome!!!
Solyaris
SOLARIS (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union: 1972)
Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.
~ Ingmar Bergman
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (Russian: Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский) (April 4, 1932–December 29, 1986) was a Soviet and Russian filmmaker, writer, film editor, film theorist and opera director. He made only 7 feature films in his lifetime, 5 of them (Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1974) and Stalker (1979)) in the Soviet Union, before he departed in 1982 (a temporary departure which became a permanent “defection” in 1984) and produced his last two films (Nostalgia (1982) and The Sacrifice (1986)) in Italy and Sweden respectively. Despite the difficulties he had faced with the Soviet authorities, Tarkovsky’s films are today considered “seminal components of the Russian cultural identity”, “a sacred septateuch on a par with the masterpieces of Russia’s novelists and composers.”[1] At the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, Solaris won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury, the FIPRESCI prize and was nominated for the Palme d’Or.
Tarkovsky’s films are characterized by long, slow shots, pensive contemplation of grandiose themes (life, death, love, technology, homeland) and extended periods of stillness, often stretched to the point of breath-hold. In that sense, his films are not easy to watch and fidgeting is almost inevitable. Yet, given some time and patience, they can be utterly rewarding, even epiphanic: Tarkovsky writes of “the maze of possibilities” in cinema, which he searches “to be able to find myself, fully and independently, within it.” The word “profound” is overused; the intensities of Tarkovsky’s films are stirred in depths, where the tiniest ripple takes a while to spread and be discerned. One just has to give it time.
Solaris (plot summary)
The Solaris mission has established a base on a planet that appears to host some kind of intelligence, but the details are hazy and secret. When Fechner, one of the scientists on the base, disappears in mysterious circumstances, the protagonist, widowed psychologist Kris Kelvin, is sent to Solaris to check on the mental health of the three remaining scientists still working there. Saying farewell to his family—he burns all his papers and old photographs in a poignant bonfire—Kris travels to the space station, where he meets crew members Snaut and Sartorius, and learns that the third member, Gibarian, has committed suicide. There are strange apparitions on Solaris; it emerges that the space station has the ability to materialize the innermost thoughts. Things take a turn when Kris encounters his wife Hari, who died ten years ago, on Solaris. The film was re-made by Steven Soderburgh in 2002, starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone.
Themes/Issues
A few ideas to consider while watching the film:
Technology
As a movie screening in HUMlab, technology will be the primary theme in our discussion and consideration of the film.
Solaris is a loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel. Lem and Tarkovsky, however, were apparently in conflict with their philosophical treatment of technological romance, progress and power. In a February 2003 interview with Ivan Finotti, Lem acknowledges: “I definitely did not like Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Tarkovsky and I differed deeply in our perception of the novel.” Tarkovsky’s focus on the themes of guilt, betrayal, memory, knowledge and nature presents a rich counter-point to the rhetoric of technology in science-fiction films.
- How does Solaris present its perspective of “technological terrors”? In such a treatment of technology, how does Solaris differ from other science-fiction films? How does it broaden the boundaries of the genre?
- How is the future presented in the film? How is it imagined in terms of electronics, communication, biotechnologies etc?
- The 1960s-70s in the Soviet Union were marked by extensive urbanization, construction booms and technological development that led to ecological decline and alienation of individuals from their environment. How does Tarkovsky explore this in Solaris? How does he portray the aspirations of Soviet technophilia?
- How do the characters of Burton and Kris undercut the myth and idealisation of the aviation hero (cf Stalin era pilot heroes such as Chkalov, who was renowned for long-distance flying and polar aviation, and the re-imagining of the aviation hero in the context of Soviet space exploration programmes)?
- Note the portraits of Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (the father of Soviet aeronautics) during Burton’s meeting with the officials. In 1935, Tsiolkovsky developed a philosophy in which he believed the human brain was driven directly by cosmic energies. Does Tarkovsky reflect this philosophy in his film? What do the ideas of cosmic rhythms mean in space travel in Solaris?
- How do the two parallel constructions of Earth and Solaris compare?
- What is Hari? Machine? Cybernetic system? How does this reflect the techno-phobic sentiments of the film?
- How does Tarkovsky portray dualisms? The opposition of the real and imaginary, the material and spiritual?
Sculpting in Time/”Cinema is a Mosaic of Time”
Tarkovsky’s cinematic style is one of time—he sums up his filmmaking philosophy as “sculpting in time”:
What is the essence of the director’s work? We could define it as sculpting in time. Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and, inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is not part of it—so the film-maker, from a ‘lump of time’ made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image.
~ Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema
How does Tarkovsky use time in his film? What are the effects of each long shot—how does it translate into pressure and rhythm? What are the effects of using time in view of the film’s themes of memory, loss and life?
Water/Memory
What is the function of water on the planet Solaris? How may we link it to the nature of memory?
On earth, one tries to deal logically with memories – to theorise them (“they are ninogens”), or to deny them by literally burning their manifestations, as Kris stokes his bonfire of mementoes, notes, his thesis, his photographs of his wife. But on Solaris, memories return as ghosts, indestructible and literally deathless. The key, then, lies in the water which covers the ocean planet of Solaris – its flow, its flux, its drift and ebb… the perfect and delicate nature of water by which one goes along yet does not let go, complies yet remains sure. And only when Kris acknowledged its mystery rather than outright destruction (remember he wanted to “bombard the oceans with high-intensity laser beams”?!) did his hallucinations stop.
So, too, is the nature of memory back on earth at Kris’s father’s house. In the last shot of the film, the house is threatened to be engulfed by water (the thought shot through my mind: “this, too, shall pass into memory……”). The house of generations (Kris’s father built the house like his father’s house), its lives and loves and fathers and sons seem to dissolve into time, whose edges are lapped by water. Or the house could be an island, a refuge against raging floods, an oasis against oblivion, just as islands popped up in the waters of Solaris after Kris’s epiphany. Water, then, is no longer the key to understanding, but the shadowy darkness surrounding sunken treasure.[2]
[1] Robert Bird,
Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema, pp. 9-10.
[2] Section first written by Jenna P-S. Ng, August 2006.
