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RETHINKING A POPULAR GENRE: The Soviet film, Solaris, with all the conventions of previous sci-fi films, offers a cerebral work that explores the complex nature of everyday reality. In time, this concept would also be considered in commercial American cinema, most notably, The Matrix (1999). Courtesy: Mosfilm/Unit Four/Fox Lorber.
CREDITS
Mosfilm; Andrei Tarkovsky, dir.; Stanislaw Lem, novel; Tarkovsky, Fridrikh Gorenshteyn, scr.; Vyacheslav Tarasov, pro.; Eduard Artemev, Raisa Lukina, mus.; Vadim Yusov, cin.; Lyudmila Feyginova, Nina Marcus, ed.; Mikhail Romadin, prod. design; A. Klimenko, V. Sevostyanov, special cinematographic effects; 167 min.; Color/B&W; 2.35:1.
CAST
Donatas Banionis (Kris Kelvin); Natalya Bondarchuk (Khari); Jüri Järvet (Dr. Snaut); Vladislav Dvorzhetskiy (Berton); Nikolay Grinko (Kelvin’s Father); Anatoliy Solonitsyn (Dr. Sartorius); Olga Barnet (Kelvin’s Mother); Vitalik Kerdimun (Berton’s Son); Olga Kizilova (Gribaryan’s “She-guest”); Tatyana Malykh (Kelvin’s Niece).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
Man is the one who renders science moral or immoral.
KELVIN, EXPRESSING THE CENTRAL THEME
BACKGROUND
As originally expressed in Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel by the same name, Solaris offers a variation on the old adage about the inability to see the forest for the trees. Earthlings peer down at Solaris, a planet as blue as their own, hoping to discover some form of life on its oceanic surface, then communicate with it. What they fail to grasp is that the evolution of a life force occurred so differently on this orb that when earthlings study the planet’s surface, they cannot identify “life” even when staring directly at it. The ocean is a living thing, as intent upon studying these visitors as they are interested in it. To control the earthlings, and render them harmless, the ocean causes each to experience hallucinations about long-repressed betrayals, real or perceived, that now obsess the space travelers.
THE PLOT
For some time, a space station launched from Earth has circled the planet Solaris without determining if there is any life force below. Worse, those assigned to the station have grown lethargic. A psychologist, Kelvin, is to be sent to analyze the crewmembers. Before departing, Kelvin is visited by Berton, a former space pilot whose reputation was ruined when he returned from Solaris claiming to have seen an immense child who could not have existed. Berton confides to Kelvin that the supposed fantasy looked like the baby of a lost scientist he had hoped to locate. Though Kelvin gives this little credence, he begins to notice, once he’s on the station, people who could not possibly be there. Then he wakes from a troubled sleep to find his wife Khari beside him, though the despondent woman had earlier taken her own life.
THE FILM
To approximate the “meditative” aspect of Lem’s novel, Andrei Tarkovsky shot his movie in a minimalist style. Though he included images of the space station that convey the genre’s technical aspect, most frames are kept purposefully simple, whether in the whiteness of the station’s corridors or the rich green life on Earth. The screenplay by Tarkovsky and Fridrikh Gorenshteyn opts for a stream-of-consciousness style that leaves little doubt that this is an art film. At nearly three hours long, the film moves very slowly, forcing the viewer to accept the story as steeped in philosophy. Along the way, the audience glimpses paintings by old masters, the most prominent being Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565). The inclusion of such works represents the director’s desire to connect the still-emergent art of cinema with more established and accepted art forms. This had also been the motivation for Stanley Kubrick’s featuring of classical music in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
THEME
“Astrobiology” underpins the story. The idea, among some scientific thinkers and dramatized by Lem, concerns the very concept of life itself: attempting to discover precise situations that will allow for the origination of this force in any area of the cosmos, as well as the determining factors that cause life to then develop in a specific situation. Sci-fi works based on the concept (this film being the most famous) steer away from the idea of outer space creatures that resemble earthlings or are monstrous variations on the human race. Here scientists must free themselves from all prejudicial notions and from their limited perceptions, if that is humanly possible, to grasp that an ocean can not only contain life forces but also be one, with an intelligence, a personality, and even a morality of its own.
TRIVIA
An earlier film, Solyaris, directed by Boris Nirenburg and Lidiya Ishimbayeva appeared on Russian TV in 1968. Its popularity led to the making of Tarkovsky’s more ambitious version, which won the Grand Prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.
The image of the child as described in the film so resembles the child that we see in the closing moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey that many sci-fi fans assumed this to be an homage to Kubrick. Surprisingly, Tarkovsky had not seen that classic before beginning work on his own movie, though he finally caught up with it in . . . 2001.