“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” (Kilgore Trout)
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Kelvin is a psychologist sent to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris, which in a startling pre-biblical way is covered by a raging, formless sea. Something has gone awry on this scientific mission, and Kelvin is tasked with investigating the crew before blasting the planet’s surface with one last radiation scan and shutting everything down. But Kelvin finds the space station largely deserted and in disrepair. Two scientists remain, the third having killed himself before Kelvin’s arrival. The sense of emotional crisis that has stalled exploration of Solaris weighs heavily on the pipes, coils, and braces of the station, its long and looping hallways providing a fitting environment for Tarkovsky’s tiring pace.
But we eventually discover with Kelvin that Solaris is not just a giant hunk of inexplicable matter, but some sort of being. To communicate with the humans that have encountered it, Solaris is able to explore their memories and mold their fear and shame into human forms. The scientists had become constantly shadowed by their figures – a dwarf for one, a little girl for another, for others these figures were less discernable. It becomes clear that Solaris itself is the reason the mission has devolved, and the planet begins to interact with Kelvin in the form of his dead wife, who had committed suicide after their marriage crumbled. Nonplussed, Kelvin jettisons her away from the station in a pod, but she appears again in the station. In various ways she dies and disappears, only to resurrect again and again. Over time Kelvin adapts to this incarnation of his memory and attempts to deal with the trauma of his past through Solaris’ uncertified copy of his wife.
After she does finally depart, Kelvin prepares to return to earth. Curiously, one of the remaining scientists points out that solid land is beginning to form in clumps on Solaris’ liquid surface. The film then appears to move back, it would seem, to images from the beginning of the film during Kelvin’s last day on earth. He appears next to his house. Next to his dog and the pond just down the slope of his lawn. He looks through a window and sees his father there, in a torrent of rain falling inside the house. The rain is pelting books, tables, saucers and teacups. A mist begins to rise from his father. At a door behind the house, Kelvin embraces his father, and the camera pans outward until we see this cottage and pond on an island adrift on Solaris’ roiling sea.
There is much more here to mention. There are the quiet scientists and their companions, the scatter of organic imagery throughout a film very science-fiction in scope, the movement of Kelvin not just through his past but Tarkovsky’s carefully crafted landscape of the future. But despite the ambiguity of the film and its conclusion, Solaris is actually quite simple. It is a film about grief and guilt. Solaris leads us directly to that final image of Kelvin adrift in the terrible language of trauma, which in the cosmic imagery of the film, is ultimately a form of exile.
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“Wherever you go, there you are.” (Buckaroo Banzai)
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And I think we can push this even further, into the genre within which Tarkovsky was working. While Solaris is about Kelvin’s encounter, vividly recast in the odd material of Solaris’ percolating islands, it is also about the scientists he has come to investigate. The film envisions a near future in which man has technologically progressed to the extent that we can finally travel out there into space and observe telescoped mists face to face. And it turns out that we were right, that space really is full of mysteries that demand exploration and explanation. There is more out there than the mere stuff of Earth. But Solaris is a story about what happens when we actually get there. What do we find? We find a mirror.
We find a realization that our effort to make our way out there into the bright edge of space is not something born out of a Verne or Kipling-like spirit of discovery, a masculine effort to climb cosmic mountains simply because they are there. “To boldly go…” and all that. Solaris actively contradicts this idea, implying that what we are really looking for in space is validation, confirmation, and perhaps even material evidence that there is something meaningful about our history. Perhaps NASA has been playing an existential shell game with us all along. Man’s lengthy journey into the cosmos is actually a journey into our collective self, an unwitting blunder into the quietest corners of our helplessness. If the final sequence of 2001 is to be believed, this is a journey that may lead to an elevation of our species-bound consciousness. But if Solaris is to be believed, it is one that will ultimately lead, like Kelvin, to a discovery of our own exile.
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“Never be certain of anything. It’s a sign of weakness.” (Doctor Who)
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Believe it or not, all of the above is simply an intro to some comments I wanted to make in response to Rosenbaum’s review of this film. In his 1990 review of the film, which is stacked with lovely screengrabs, he makes a few interesting comments:
“Another level of ambiguity is introduced by the film’s periodic shifts between color and black and white… Whether the reasons behind them are conceptual or arbitrary, they have the overall effect of intensifying the private and esoteric aspects of Tarkovsky’s style — aspects that are clearly related to his spirituality… To me at least, the notion of spirituality in film has always been more than a little suspect. Filmmakers as diverse as Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Leo McCarey, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, and Michael Snow are frequently praised for their allegedly “transcendental” styles though it seems more appropriate to value them for qualities that suggest the opposites of spirituality and transcendence: the brute materiality of the worlds of Mizoguchi and Renoir, the physicality of McCarey and Ozu, the carnality in Bresson and Dreyer, the skepticism of Rossellini, the relentless mechanisms of Snow. If ‘pure’ transcendence is what one is after, I’m afraid that even the more bogus spirituality of Disney, De Mille, and Spielberg may come closer to the mark.”
There are a lot of oppositions in this reasoning. Spirituality and transcendence vs. materiality and physicality. Tarkovksy’s transcendence vs. the “pure” transcendence of Spielberg and Disney. But the basic problem with Rosenbaum’s thinking here, which leads to these hardly tenable oppositions, is that he is does not comprehend raw material as a medium of transcendence. What Tarkovsky invites us to do in his cinema is something sacramental, something akin to what Fr. Himes called “sacramental beholding.” We are asked to perceive the presence of God in history through the bare physicality of his scripts. Balloons take flight, horses tumble down staircases, wheels creak on iron rails, water shudders through windows. In and among all this raw material we begin to encounter the possibility of transcendence, which for Tarkovsky is the possibility of locating our experience of life within something Grander than the sum of its parts.
In films like Solaris, the paradox of transcendence and material dissolves. In fact, I think that Tarkovksy has taken Lem’s novel as a suggestion that we cannot talk about transcendence in any other terms than material images of its possibility. To steal a term from David Dark, cinema expands the talkaboutability of transcendence in a very particular way. I am not simply talking about a movement in which images are used as a way to subjectivize our day to day experience of life as a collection of physical experiences. But I think what we see in Solaris is a movement in which our actual memories, our experiences of particular places and people, are rearranged in such a way that they begin to tell us a different story. For Tarkovsky this is an historical process that involves reciting the physical elements of our past. In Solaris, this process is simply writ large, which is why the film ends where it does – immersed in these simple elements of Kelvin’s past. Or future.
“But when we come to a spiritual filmmaker like Tarkovsky, the question of acceptance or rejection becomes a bit more complicated. I have to confess that, in his thinking about spiritual and holy matters, Tarkovsky often strikes me as pretentious, egocentric, and downright offensive… Yet because he is a passionate, critical thinker about the world we live in and a poetic filmmaker whose images and sounds have the ring of truth, I find it impossible to dismiss him. Even when his films irritate or infuriate me, they teach me something in spite of my objections.”
Great. Then may we get infuriated as often as possible.