Andrei Tarkovsky belongs to that handful of filmmakers (Dreyer, Bresson, Vigo, Tati) who, with a small, concentrated body of work, created a universe. Though he made only seven features, thwarted by Soviet censors and then by cancer, each honored his ambition to crash through the surface of ordinary life and find a larger spiritual meaning: to heal modern art’s secular fragmentation by infusing it with metaphysical dimension. To that end he rejected Eisensteinian montage and developed a demanding, long-take aesthetic, which he thought better able to reveal the deeper truths underlying the ephemeral, performing moment.
Since Tarkovsky is often portrayed as a lonely, martyred genius, we’d do well to place him in a wider context, as the most renowned of an astonishing generation—Larisa Shepitko, Alexei German, Andrei Konchalovsky, Sergei Parajanov, Otar Iosseliani—which effected a dazzling, short-lived renaissance of Soviet cinema. All had censorship problems. In the early 1970s, Tarkovsky, unable to get approval for a script which was considered too personal-obscurantist, proposed a film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Solaris, thinking it stood a better chance of being green-lighted by the commissars, as science fiction seemed more “objective” and accessible to the masses.
His hunch paid off: Solaris took the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Tarkovsky had arrived on the world stage with his most straightforward, accessible work. While hardly a conventional film, Solaris is less long-take driven, and stands as a fulcrum in Tarkovsky’s career: behind him was his impressive debut, Ivan’s Childhood, and his first epic masterpiece, Andrei Rublev; ahead of him lay The Mirror (brilliantly experimental and, yes, personal-obscurantist), Stalker (a great, somber, difficult work), and finally, two intransigent, lyrical, meditative pictures he made in exile, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice. He died shortly after completing this last film, in 1986, at age fifty-four.
We know that Tarkovsky had seen Kubrick’s 2001 and disliked it as cold and sterile. The media played up the Cold War angle of the Soviet director’s determination to make an “anti-2001,” and certainly Tarkovsky used more intensely individual characters and a more passionate human drama at the center than Kubrick. Still, hindsight allows us to observe that the two masterworks are more cousins than opposites. Both set up their narratives in a leisurely, languid manner, spending considerable time tracking around the space set; both employed a widescreen mise-en-scène approach that drew on superior art direction; and both generated an air of mystery that invited countless explanations.
Unlike 2001, however, Solaris is saturated in grief, which grips the film even before it leaves Earth. In this moody prelude, we see the protagonist, a space psychologist named Kris Kelvin, staring at underwater reeds as though they were a drowned woman’s tresses. Played by the stolid Donatas Banionis, a Russian Glenn Ford with five o’clock shadow and a shock of prematurely white hair, Kris looks forever traumatized, slowed by some unspeakable sorrow. His father and aunt worry about his torpor, chide him for his plodding, bookkeeper-like manner. He is about to take off the next day for a mission to the space station Solaris, a once-thriving project which has gone amiss: it will be his job to determine whether or not to close down the research station. In preparation, he watches a video from a scientific conference (allowing Tarkovsky to satirize bureaucratic stodginess) about the troubles on Solaris.
Humans seem in thrall to machinery and TV images, cut off from the nature surrounding them (underwater reeds, a thoroughbred horse, a farm dog). In his haunting shots of freeways, Tarkovsky disdains showing any but contemporary cars, just as Godard did with the buildings in Alphaville: Why bother clothing the present world in sci-fi garb, when the estranging future has already arrived?
At Solaris, Kris finds a shabby space station, deserted except for two preoccupied if not deranged scientists, Snaut and Sartorius. A colleague Kris had expected to meet has already committed suicide, leaving him a taped message warning of hallucinated Guests who have “something to do with conscience.” Sure enough, Kris’ dead wife Hari materializes at his side, offering the devoted tenderness for which he is starved. Kris, panicking, shoves her into a space capsule and fires it off; but Hari II is not slow in arriving. As played by the lovely Natalya Bondarchuk, this “eternal feminine” is the opposite of a femme fatale: all clinging fidelity and frightened vulnerability. We learn that the real Hari had committed suicide with a poison Kris had unthinkingly left behind when he left her. The hallucinated Hari II, fearing Kris does not love her, takes liquid oxygen and kills herself as well. By the time Hari III appears, Kris will do anything to redeem himself.
Solaris helped initiate a genre that has become an art-house staple: the drama of grief and partial recovery. Watching this 169-minute work is like catching a fever, with night sweats and eventual cooling brow. Tarkovsky’s experiments with pacing, to “find Time within Time,” as he put it, has his camera track up to the sleeping Kris, dilating the moment, so that we enter his dream. As in Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to fall asleep is to risk a succubus’ visit. However, this time the danger comes not from any harm she may do the hero. True horror is in having to watch someone you love destroy herself. The film that Solaris most resembles thematically is not 2001, but Hitchcock’s Vertigo: the inability of the male to protect the female, the multiple disguises or “resurrections” of the loved one, the inevitability of repeating past mistakes.
The real power of the film comes from the anguish of Kris’ reawakened love for Hari—his willingness to do anything to hold onto her, even knowing she isn’t real. (Like Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, this is a story about falling in love with ghosts). The alternation between color and black and white conveys something of this ontological instability, while the jittery camera explorations over shelves and walls suggest a seizure. Hari wonders aloud if she has epilepsy, and later we see her body horrifically jerking at the threshold between being and non-being. A gorgeous, serene floating sequence, when Kris and Hari lose gravity, offers another stylized representation of this transcendence borderline.
Meanwhile, Tarkovsky peppers the dialogue with heady arguments about reality, identity, humanity, and sympathy, buttressed by references to civilization’s linchpins-Bach, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Brueghel, Luther, and Cervantes. The Soviet censors, who demanded that the filmmaker “remove the concept of God,” may have been mollified by the absence of the G-word; but Tarkovsky took the standard science-fiction theme of spacemen establishing “contact” with other forms of intelligence, and elevated it implicitly to Contact with Divinity (the planet’s ocean, granted sentient powers.)
Both the Eastern European Lem and Tarkovsky were critical of what they saw as Western science fiction’s shallowness, and wanted to invest the form with intellectual and emotional depth. Tarkovsky took much directly from Lem’s book, but he also expanded, reordered, and beclouded it. As it happened, Lem did not much care for Tarkovsky’s elliptical reworking of his material, and now looks forward to a remake by Steven Soderbergh. No matter. Just as Tarkovsky sought to reverse Kubrick and ended up extending him, so Soderbergh’s version cannot help but honor his majestic predecessor. Such would be a fitting, if Freudian, coda to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which concludes with the claustrophobic concavities of the space station yielding to the rain-sodden beauty of this island earth, and the returning Kris embracing his father’s knees.
1972
166 min
Color
2.35:1
Categories: Film Essays
2 Comments
Sat 28 Nov at 08:45 AM
Stuart Taylor
Please, oh please Criterion can you work your magic on “Stalker” and re-issue this magnificent movie?
The Artificial Eye edition is v poor on modern screens and flickers terribly.
Thanks
Fri 12 Mar at 10:41 PM
A Wedlake
I agree with Stuart. I’m on your site specifically to see if you had released Stalker since the last time I visited. Nada. Please!
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