Solaris 9781838713690, 9781844578054

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Acknowledgments This book could not have been written without the love, support, help, friendship, encouragement, tolerance, patience and commentary, often sarcastic, of Andrew M. Butler, Istvan CsicseryRonay, Jr., Paweł Frelik (who always delivers), Andrea Gibbons, Kathrina Glitre, Roger Luckhurst, China Miéville, Greg ‘Waterworld is a remake of Solaris’ Tuck, Sherryl Vint, Rhys Williams and, of course, Billy. Blame them. Thanks also to Thee Faction for the soundtrack, and to Jenna Steventon, Sophie Contento and Chantal Latchford for all their editorial support.

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Introduction By rights, I should not like Tarkovsky. This realisation has taken a mere three decades to percolate. Over time, his obsession with his father, and his rather different obsession with his mother, have become every bit as tiresome as anything in Spielberg’s Oedipal playbook. And if there were always bits in Tarkovsky’s films that left me a bit uncomfortable, his book, Sculpting in Time (1987), and some of his interviews are even more discomfiting. His films’ idiosyncratic temporalities, elusive images and narrative ellipses grant a certain leeway, but his words are much less ambiguous. They reveal a misogynist, an elitist, a particularly Russian kind of Blut und Boden nationalist, who was always hidden there in plain sight. If that were not bad enough, he also bangs on constantly about spirituality and the soul, and insists there is no room for politics in art, despite all the politics in his art. Like I said, there is no way I should like Tarkovsky. And yet. I remember that Sunday afternoon in November 1982. Channel 4, less than three weeks old, broadcast Solaris as part of an international film season. I nabbed my brother’s twelve-inch blackand-white portable and sat down to watch. I was fourteen. My palate was already too jaded for that summer’s Tron or, worse yet to come, that winter’s E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial. I had spent the month since my birthday reading and re-reading the tie-in paperback of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), mulling over the differences between it and Ridley Scott’s just-released Blade Runner, and the previous afternoon puzzling over Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1961), which I had found in my local public library. Such were my hilariously awkward, autodidactic teens.

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And while Lem’s novel did help me make some sense of Tarkovsky’s film, it did not prepare me for it. Solaris did things I did not know films could do. From the opening shots of plant tendrils wafting in streaming water, I was mesmerised. Being hooked on Tarkovsky was no mean feat back then, especially for a penniless, geeky, working-class kid in a provincial forces town. Even after the video-nasty ban, it was harder to see anything by Tarkovsky than it was to pick up a copy of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), the other film I first saw mid-teens that continues to astonish me. This is not an irreverent comparison. In September 1979, Tarkovsky watched Lucio Fulci’s Zombi II in a cinema in Rome,2 and when he first visited London the following year, he was less interested in Mon oncle d’Amérique than The Exterminator.3 Perhaps he knew there would be other opportunities to see something as respectable as the new Alain Resnais film, but figured it might be his only chance to see the post-Vietnam American psyche splayed out in some brutal grindhouse trash. (Sadly, James Glickenhaus’s vigilante flick, wanting to be both sleazy and slick, fails twice over. There is nothing in it or the rest of his really rather dull oeuvre – or Fulci’s or, maddeningly, Hooper’s – to match the cinematic smarts of Chain Saw Massacre.) This sense of grabbing hold of a fleeting possibility was, for me, part of Tarkovksy’s appeal. Not only were his films different, they were elusive – far more so than The Exterminator, its poster slowly fading in every video store window in the UK – and that extra layer of obscurity really mattered. It still does. Once this book was commissioned, my first quite ridiculous move was to track down recordings by a Hungarian prog-rock/space-rock band called Solaris. And the one-track album Solaris recorded by Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann’s under the name Mirror. And Photek’s album Solaris. And VIR’s EP that features a track called ‘Solaris’,4 and albums by Buck-Tick and Failure for the same reason (I drew the much-needed line at Elliot Minor.) But it was all disappointingly easy.

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Unearned. Like watching Tarkovsky’s films, so widely available these days, now feels. Tarkovsky insisted that children understood his films,5 a view that must have confounded western critics confronted by his ‘most difficult’ film, Mirror (1975). Western reviewers struggled with its complex structure, its jumps between historical periods and slippages between levels of reality, and subtitling that omitted character names (compounding the confusion over Margarita Terekhova’s double role as the young Alexei’s mother and the adult Alexei’s wife). However, Sculpting in Time recounts numerous responses from ordinary Russian viewers, some critical and others baffled, but many who experienced profound and moving resonances: ‘My childhood was like that … I felt for the first time in my life that I was not alone’; ‘everyone who spoke said, “The film is about me.” ’6 Tarkovsky repeatedly returns to a pantheon of composers (Bach, Beethoven, Pergolesi, Purcell), of artists (Brueghel, Dürer, Leonardo, Rembrandt and Andrei Rublev, whose ‘Trinity’ is glimpsed in Solaris), of poets, authors and playwrights (especially his own father, Arseny, but also Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante and Pushkin, whose death-mask also appears in Solaris). These high-cultural references appeal to certain kinds of cultural capital, rewarding viewers who recognise and thus can puzzle over their possible meanings; at the same time, Tarkovsky’s frequently autobiographical material positions him among such luminaries. Arguably, this is why his films have typically been received in terms he helped to establish, as serious and significant works of art, with cinephiles and arthouse denizens, critics and theorists, artists and philosophers tending to emphasise his unique style and metaphysical, even spiritual, concerns. But it is not the only reason. In the Cold War west, there was political value and romantic appeal in championing an artist struggling against a potentially lethal Soviet bureaucracy – even if Tarkovsky did not suffer the overt persecution faced by Sergei Parajanov, the several-times-imprisoned director of The Colour of Pomegranates (1968), whose films were frequently sabotaged

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or suppressed. At the same time, if there were any leftists still sympathetic to the USSR’s ‘actually existing socialism’, a Soviet artist of Tarkovsky’s calibre was a handy rebuke to debased capitalist cinema. Such a figure might also provide a bulwark against pesky post-structuralists proclaiming the death of the author. It is rare to see Tarkovsky’s films treated as genre movies, to see Ivan’s Childhood (1962) discussed as a war movie, Andrei Rublev (1966) as a historical biopic, or Solaris, Stalker (1979) and The Sacrifice (1986) as science fiction (sf). Such denials of genre result from the hierarchies of taste developed and partly shared by cinephile culture and an emerging film studies, including the privileging of: art films over commercial movies; auteurs over metteurs en scène; auteurs over genres; some genres over others; and varieties of realism over spectacle, excess and fantasy. While masculine-coded genres – Westerns, crime – generally benefited from these cultural prejudices, sf did not. Committed to the fantastic and the spectacular, it was also often targeted at juvenile, adolescent and mass audiences. Consequently, many ‘auteurist’ sf films of this period – Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and Week End (1967), François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) and Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) – have been relatively neglected or seen their generic affiliations suppressed. A similar cultural politics shaped sf studies in the 1960s and 1970s, likewise elaborating upon fan discourses, which cast fantasy and horror as sf’s lowbrow, irrational opposites, and privileged prose fiction over all other media forms. In 1979, Darko Suvin called fantasy ‘a subliterature of mystification’, and claimed that ‘lumping’ it together with sf is not just ‘a grave disservice’ but a ‘rampantly socio-pathological phenomenon’.7 In 1980, sf-writer-turnedliterature-professor James Gunn started his essay on how to teach sf film by asserting that ‘there are virtually no good films that are also good science fiction’.8 And no one really objected. While sf studies has, like film studies, become more selfreflexive about the strategic contingency of these formative

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hierarchical oppositions, it has not entirely abandoned them. For example, when Peter Swirski, one of Lem’s leading Anglophone advocates, compares the two Solaris films to their source, he has only superlatives for the novel, but is rather ambivalent about Tarkovsky’s film, suggesting that its shortcomings are a consequence of omitting Lem’s thematically central chapters. He contemptuously dismisses Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 adaptation as a meagre travesty – not of the novel, of which it is utterly unworthy, but of Tarkovsky’s film.9 His ranking of Lem over Tarkovsky might seem peculiar to the cineaste, but in it we can see widespread overlapping prejudices about the superiority of older, language-based media to newer, audiovisual ones. It also reflects a tendency to mistake precedence for originality. There are particular, idiosyncratic and relatively unique qualities to Lem’s development of his sf materials, but his novel does also seem like a mash-up of other – equally generic, equally particular – texts, such as Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud (1957) and the miniseries A for Andromeda (1961). So, then, faced with the first of Tarkovsky’s sf films, what is to be done? In the 1920s, the Bolshevik semiotician V.N. Vološinov asked whether humans are the architects of language or just its temporary inhabitants. This book will place Solaris in the indeterminate conceptual space such a conundrum creates. Borrowing Lem’s term for a designer/engineer, it will treat Tarkovsky as the Konstruktor of a film, but simultaneously and equally as the tenant of a genre, opening up the film to this often wished-away context so that our experience and understanding of it might be enriched.

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1 Sf, Tarkovsky and Lem In Tempo di Viaggio (1980), Tarkovsky’s documentary about preparing to make Nostalgia (1983), he is asked, ‘Is science fiction a world you feel passionate about, or is it a way to escape reality?’ His reply – ‘I don’t like science fiction, as I don’t like to escape life’ – identifies the genre with a specific inherent quality. However, when he makes sf films he makes this supposedly essential nature disappear just by not ‘think[ing] of them as science fiction’. Furthermore, for him, ‘genre in cinema always indicates a commercial movie’ and although he is not opposed to ‘popularity’, he is ‘against commercial movies’. Elsewhere he states I can’t, like Spielberg, make a film for the general public – I’d be mortified if I discovered I could. If you want to reach a general audience, you have to make films like Star Wars and Superman, which have nothing to do with art.10

A similarly impoverished view of genre and naive belief in the auteur’s magical powers are shared by those critics who treat Tarkovsky’s films as if they ‘transcend’ genre, often displaying profound ignorance of genre films in the process. (Dip into Zona, Geoff Dyer’s book about Stalker, for an almost camp performance of critical incomprehension in the face of genre; his befuddlement when confronted by horror or sf or romantic comedy is very nearly endearing.) Tarkovsky goes on to dismiss Solaris as ‘not so good, because [he] could not escape from the genre, from the fantastic details’, unlike Stalker, in which he ‘managed to get rid of all “science fiction” signs completely’ (provided one ignores the opening exposition, aspects of the setting and dialogue, and the closing act of telekinesis). The Sacrifice is even more successful in suppressing its sciencefictionality, which is only ever suggested by sounds and oneiric

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images signalling an imminent nuclear apocalypse. However, as these traces suggest, genre is not so easy to escape. Indeed, it might be better understood not as a quality possessed by a film, or a pigeonhole into which the film can be slotted, but as a discursive phenomenon, a fluid, continually shape-shifting and ultimately irresolvable product of claims made at different times for different reasons in different contexts by different people with differing degrees of influence. The director is just one of them. ‘Anyway’, Tarkovksy concludes, ‘I am not a fan’ of sf. He would always speak highly of Lem – ‘I like his works very much. I read them whenever I can, everything I can, I read and I like his prose’11 – but often disparage the genre, even though he was clearly conversant with fantasy traditions, including sf. This is unsurprising, given the significance to Russian culture of nauchnaia fantastika or ‘scientific fantasy’ through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: ‘much more than a by-product of the consciousness that science and technology had become the primary driving forces of modern life’, it ‘evolved into an important participant in the formation of that consciousness’.12 Moreover, the Khrushchev de-Stalinisation ‘thaw’, from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, witnessed a boom in sf translations, including Lem, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Sheckley. Among Tarkovsky’s unfilmed scripts are Hoffmanniana, a film about E. T. A. Hoffmann incorporating fantastical elements derived from his fiction, and an adaptation of Alexander Beliaev’s Ariel (1941). He wrote an original sf radio play, The White Crow, that also went unproduced, and contemplated adaptations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (written 1928–40) and Ivan Yefremov’s Razor’s Edge (1963). His diaries discuss Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, H. G. Wells, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (written 1925), Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), as well as Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977). He hated Yevgeny

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Zamyatin’s We (1924), calling it ‘feeble and pretentious … a nasty little book’, but considered Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943) a ‘novel of genius’.13 He was sufficiently ‘indignant’ at the bowdlerisation of Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which ‘breaks off before the end’, that he complained to the publisher.14 In 1982, he came up with an idea for an sf screenplay, partly inspired by Lem’s Return from the Stars (1961), About someone landing on another planet, where he can’t understand anything of the atmosphere of this other civilization. … The activities of other beings, what they look like, the objects, the phenomena – everything. What an absurd notion! The embodiment of the absurd! Very frightening at the same time. The point is to create a new real world in a kind of agnostic sense. Perhaps I should do it as a kind of hypercommercial gesture.15

Quite why he considered this a money-making proposition is unclear. It is unlikely that such an effect could be achieved without the performances becoming unspeakably mannered, since every alien word and gesture would simultaneously have to signify an inner coherence and occlude its specific meaning. The varieties of sf narrative primarily concerned with this kind of encounter – utopias, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), which demonstrate the superiority of an alternative way of life; satires, such as Gwyneth Jones’s Aleutian trilogy (1991–7), in which aliens bring terrestrial absurdities into sharp focus; planetary romances, in which the world is a puzzle to be solved, as in Eleanor Arnason’s A Woman of the Iron People (1991) – are rare among cinematic sf. Tarkovsky’s variant seems unlikely to have succeeded when David Lynch’s rather straightforward Dune (1984) was widely considered ‘incomprehensible’.16 The fact that Tarkovsky entertained this idea at all, however fleetingly, suggests two things. With Solaris and Stalker his most commercially successful films, he thought of sf as a safe option, and he valued the genre’s potential for staging the encounter with an

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otherness that both demands and defies interpretation. However, his sense of this encounter is a long way from Lem’s materialist rationality. Writing in 1970, Tarkovsky sounds closer to the more metaphysically inclined Dick: By virtue of the infinite laws, or the laws of infinity that lie beyond what we can reach, God cannot but exist. For man, who is unable to grasp the essence of what lies beyond, the unknown – the unknowable – is GOD. And in a moral sense, God is love. … Where there is no morality, ethical precepts hold sway – bankrupt and worthless. Where morality exists there is no call for precepts.17

Why, then, was Tarkovsky drawn to Lem? Born in 1921 Lwów, which was then in Poland, Lem was first published in the mid-1940s, and wrote prolifically until his 2006 death, but abandoned fiction in the late 1980s. He has been translated into forty languages, selling over 27 million books, and is rumoured to have been considered as a Nobel Prize nominee. In the

US poster

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1950s, he generally wrote utopian space adventures, often concerned with discovering and communicating with alien life, such as Astronauci (1951) and Oblok Magellana (1954), both of which were made into films – Kurt Maetzig’s Der schweigende Stern (1959) and Jindrich Polák’s Ikarie XB-1 (1963), butchered and dubbed by US distributors as First Spaceship on Venus and Voyage to the End of the Universe. Lem also wrote a series of satirical short stories featuring the philosophical slapstick adventures of Ijon Tichy, whose wanderings through space and, occasionally, time frequently trap him in absurd social systems. (Another series of short stories, written between the late 1950s and early 1970s, follows the rather ordinary and unheroic Pirx – cadet, pilot and eventually spaceship captain – through a series of extraordinary situations as Earth slowly colonises the Solar System; ‘The Inquest’ (1968) was adapted as Marek Piestrak’s Test pilota Pirxa (1978).) The 1960s saw a major shift of emphasis from communicating with the alien to the discovery – in Solaris and The Invincible (1964) – that man is not the measure of the universe. The last traces of utopianism disappeared as Lem’s concern with contemporary sociopolitical realities grew. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961) offers a Kafka-esque take on the irrational logics of the Cold War, while His Master’s Voice (1968) depicts escalating militarism as the most probable response to a message from outer space. The 1970s were a more experimental period. A Perfect Vacuum (1971) collects reviews of nonexistent works of fiction, beginning with a review of a very slightly different version of A Perfect Vacuum, and Imaginary Magnitude (1973) contains introductions to nonexistent scholarly works. His final, despairing novels, Fiasco (1986) and Peace on Earth (1987), return to space, but only to demonstrate that there is no guarantee humans will survive our irrational economic, social and political systems. On the surface, this all sounds like unpromising material for Tarkovksy, but a clue to its appeal can be found in his description of a pair of Lem’s novels. Eden (1959), which follows the crew of a crash-landed spaceship, combines a Robinsonade with a planetary

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romance. Originating in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1874), the Robinsonade describes the efforts of castaways to build a new life from salvage and local resources, while also often seeking a way home. The planetary romance, derived from such colonial adventure sf as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (1912) and The Land That Time Forgot (1918), concerns the attempt to make sense of an alien environment by interrogating mysteriously interconnected physical, biological and social phenomena. Eden, however, refuses to offer clues for the reader to solve, instead demonstrating that terrestrial preconceptions unavoidably produce misinterpretations. Return from the Stars reiterates this point: an astronaut returns from a mission that lasted a decade subjectively but, because of relativistic timedilation effects, 127 years have passed at home, making Earth the alien planet. Of these novels, Tarkovsky says, respectively the expedition encounter[s] a reality, the developmental laws of which they cannot comprehend. These laws slip away from understanding, like thoughts just forgotten. The air is filled with guesses and analogies … [Lem] describes what it is the people see, while not understanding what it means. … The astronaut walks through the city and doesn’t understand anything. … we don’t understand anything either. … These emotionally tense pieces express, for me, the quintessence of the author’s personal experience projected into the future.18

This resonates with Tarkovsky’s films, which repeatedly present the viewer with meaning-laden images whose meanings are elusive. Just as Tarkovksy publicly decried sf, some writers disavow the genre. Whenever Margaret Atwood publishes an sf novel, she brandishes an incredibly crude caricature of the genre so as to distinguish it from her own ‘speculative fiction’. Similarly, Ronald D. Moore claimed that the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (2003–9) was not sf but ‘a drama [that] just happens to be in a science fiction context’,19 a promotional line obligingly repeated by journalists for

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half a decade, helping the series to reach audiences of ‘quality’ drama who would not normally watch sf.20 In Eden, Lem integrates disavowals into the novel itself. When the explorers are confronted with an impassable organic wall, the Doctor, who read sf as a child, says that According to the stories I read … a hole belching fire ought to open up in this damned wall now, and out come a being with three arms and one leg. Under his arm he has an interstellar telecommunicator, or he’s telepathic and tells us that he represents a highly developed but deranged civilization—.21

No such thing happens. The Doctor later notes how ‘curious’ it is that ‘there are no tentacles on Eden. … In all the science fiction I ever read, other planets are full of tentacles out to strangle you’.22 ‘The Twentieth Voyage’ (1971) is even more dismissive. Ijon Tichy is appointed as General Director of a project using time travel to regulate, clean up, straighten out, adjust and perfect human history. However, his staff pursue unsanctioned side projects, causing all manner of chaotic changes to history (ironically, creating history as we know it). Tichy punishes these troublemakers by stranding them in the past, but cannot prevent them using their knowledge of the future for material gain. To reduce their potentially catastrophic influence, Tichy also sends back writers who will bury the prognostications of these rogue pseudo-futurologists ‘by turning out all sorts of rubbish … called “Science Fiction”’.23 Lem’s disdain for sf is not restricted to snide asides. His ‘Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case – With Exceptions’ (1973/1991) asks why ‘the lion’s share’ of (primarily American) sf continues to be ‘so bad’.24 He criticises Asimov for confusing ‘the relation of supply and demand’ with ‘literary merit’, and others for taking such ‘special care … to include those qualities that maximize sales’ without considering ‘the immanent quality of the work itself’.25 He bemoans the ‘sacrifice’ of ‘basic values’, such as ‘empirical knowledge, logic, and causality’, ‘to the momentary stage effect’, and describes sf as a kitsch ‘product

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prechewed’ for readers averse to complex cognition or affect and incapable of distinguishing the ‘brightest … from the plodding grinds’.26 So far, so Frankfurt School, but for Lem this is a tragedy because sf is about mankind’s destiny, … the meaning of life in the cosmos, … the rise and fall of thousand-year-old civilizations: it brings forth a deluge of answers for the key questions of every reasoning being [but] in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it fulfils its task with stupidity. It always promises too much, and it almost never keeps its word. … It comes from a whorehouse but it wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored.27

His ‘Philip K. Dick: A Visionary among the Charlatans’ (1975) adopts a similar tone: American sf ‘lays claim to occupy the pinnacle of art and thought’, then ‘fends off accusations of primitivism by pleading its entertainment character and then, once such accusations have been silenced, renews it overweening claims’.28 Whatever the gulf between their worldviews, temperamentally Tarkovsky and Lem seem like close kin.

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2 Solarises Let us begin with Lem’s novel. Sixteen months from Earth, en route elsewhere, the Prometheus sends a shuttle carrying Kris Kelvin to an outpost on a distant world. Discovered more than a century earlier, Solaris has only one life form, the ocean of metamorphic plasma that covers its surface and somehow regulates the planet’s otherwise dangerously unstable orbit around twin stars. A hundred years of scientific study has seen an immense proliferation of hypotheses, theories and controversies, but little definite knowledge about and no meaningful communication with the 700 billion-ton gelatinous alien. (Lem devotes several rather lengthy passages to the vast and inconclusive history of Solaristics.) Kelvin arrives to discover that Gibarian, one of the remaining crew of three, has committed suicide. Scared and disoriented, Snow cryptically warns him of others aboard the station. They started to appear after he and Sartorius, without authorisation, bombarded the ocean with X-rays. Kelvin cannot shake the feeling he is being watched. A giant negress stalks the corridors, and there seems to be a massive unruly child behind the closed door of Sartorius’s lab. Are they hallucinations? Is Kelvin still on the Prometheus, imagining it all? He wakes to find his wife, Rheya, in his room.29 Only she is still nineteen, the age she was when she killed herself a decade ago. When they split up, he ignored her suicide threats, packed his bags and left. She looks exactly as she did, even down to the hypodermic scar on her arm, when a few days later he found her corpse. She is confused. There are gaps in her memory. She can, however, recall someone she never knew, a man Kelvin met three years after her death. She possesses – or is occasionally possessed by – immense strength. She drinks scalding hot water. Sleeping pills have no effect on her. Oddly, her dress has no fastenings and must be cut off. She will not let Kelvin

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out of her sight. He tricks her into boarding a rocket so he can lock her inside for a couple of hours, but when she starts to smash her way out, he launches it into orbit. Inevitably, a second Rheya appears next day. Her dress has the same flaw, but this time she cuts herself out of it. When Kelvin leaves her in his room, she rips through the door. Before he can tend her wounds, they heal themselves. Sartorius comes up with two plans. Since the visitors only arrive when the crew are asleep, he postulates that the ocean plucks memories and desires from their sleeping minds and manifests them in physical form. Therefore, if they broadcast an encephalogram of a waking mind at the ocean, it will understand what torment the visitors represent and stop sending them. At the same time, if the visitors are constructed of neutrinos rather than atoms, as Kelvin suspects, it should be possible to generate a negative neutrino field that eradicates them. Kelvin, who is falling in love with Rheya, or maybe just feels guilty over his wife’s death, is not keen on either plan. He reluctantly goes along with the former so as to forestall the latter. Rheya, devastated by the discovery that she is actually a copy of Rheya, kills herself by drinking liquid oxygen. She recovers. Kelvin’s encephalogram is broadcast. A fortnight passes. The ocean begins to change. Another three weeks pass. Kelvin wakes to find Rheya has gone, destroyed at her own request by the device Un dress

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Snow and Sartorius created. Bereft, Kelvin has no idea what to do. Loath to leave Solaris without actually setting foot on its surface, Kelvin ventures to the shore. He holds out his hand to the ocean. It returns the gesture. But there is no contact. No communication. Just two aliens, each uncomprehending of the other. After five years of fighting to get Andrei Rublev released, and with his proposal for the film that would eventually become Mirror rejected, Tarkovsky turned to sf. It was a ‘light genre aimed primarily at the youth market, and therefore … not taken so seriously by Goskino’,30 the State Committee for Cinematography that oversaw the USSR’s three dozen or so studios. His was not the first adaptation of Lem’s novel. In 1968, Lidiya Ishimbayeva and Boris Nirenburg made a black-and-white, two-part version for Soviet television, remaining relatively close to Lem’s structure and concerns, although they lacked the resources to depict the ocean (or even leave the studio). In October of that year, Tarkovsky, with Lem’s consent, proposed a film version to Mosfilm. A Polish coproduction was considered – the first Lem adaptation, Der schweigende Stern, had been made by Film Polski and East Germany’s DEFA (Deutsche Film AG) – but quickly abandoned. Tarkovsky planned to adapt the novel with Andrei Konchalovsky. They had co-written The Steamroller and the Violin Back from the dead, again

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(1960) and Andrei Rublev and revised Ivan’s Childhood together; Tarkovksy also worked uncredited on Konchalovksy’s scripts for his Pervyy uchitel (1965), Shukhrat Abbasov’s Tashkent – gorod khlebny (1968), Shaken Ajmano’s Konets atamana (1973) and Tolomush Okeyev’s Lyutyy (1974). When they disagreed on how to approach Solaris, Tarkovsky turned to novelist Friedrich Gorenstein, who had also worked on the Pervyy uchitel screenplay and scripted an adaptation of his existentialist A House with a Tower (1964) for Tarkovsky (they later collaborated on Ariel, which also went unproduced). Their first draft, completed by June 1969, was mostly set on Earth. Kelvin, guilty about how he treated his first wife, Hari, leaves his second wife, Maria, to go to Solaris, where he encounters a simulacrum of Hari. He ‘attempts to come to terms with their relationship, and clear his conscience. In the process, he “humanizes” her, but invariably repeats the betrayals of his past. Finally, forgiven and redeemed, he returns to Maria.’31 Mosfilm was unsatisfied with the conversion of the novel into a relationship drama, and Lem was appalled. Tarkovsky later claimed ‘we prepared another script which I hoped we would be able to quietly drop during shooting. But we didn’t succeed.’32 Goskino approved a RUB1,850,000 budget for Tarkovsky’s first colour film, but repeatedly slashed it, eventually to RUB900,000. Casting started in May 1970. Tarkovsky considered Bibi Andersson for the female lead and – intriguingly, given the first draft and final film – his ex-wife, Irma Rausch, who physically resembled his mother. (In the middle of making Andrei Rublev, he left Rausch for Larisa Kizilova, who went on to be assistant director on Solaris, Mirror, Stalker and Nostalgia and played the doctor’s wife in Mirror. They married and their son Andrei was born while Solaris was in pre-production.) Ultimately, the role went to Natalya Bondarchuk, the daughter of actress Inna Makarova and writerdirector Sergei Bondarchuk (who would later prevent Nostalgia receiving the Palme d’Or). As Kelvin, Tarkovsky cast Donatas Banionis, the nearest thing to a star he ever worked with, but found

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him difficult to direct since he could not ‘work without knowing the whys and wherefores’ or ‘play anything spontaneously from within himself’.33 The first scenes were shot in March 1971. ‘One-Take Tarkovsky’ usually spent a lot of time rehearsing so as to avoid wasting film, especially when working with Kodak colour stock, which was harder to obtain but superior to Soviet-produced colour stock. Even so, he ran out of colour film at least twice, in July and September, forcing him to shoot some scenes in black and white. (While Mirror’s alternations between colour and black-and-white follow a relatively clear pattern, in Solaris it seems primarily to have been a matter of contingency.) Cinematographer Vadim Yusov had worked with Tarkovsky on Ivan’s Childhood and Andrei Rublev, but now they argued constantly. Tarkovksy wanted to use a 50.75 or 50.80mm lens to emphasise the characters, but Yusov insisted on 35mm to show off Mikhail Romadin’s remarkable and immense space-station set.34 Tarkvosky and Yusov would not work together again. After a much-delayed autumn shoot in Tokyo, and at least one scene – Kelvin finding Gibarian’s body (Sos Sargsyan) – being shot at Mosfilm in early December, Solaris was submitted to the studio on 30 December 1971. Thirty-five significant – if contradictory and rather vague – changes were requested. Some were about thwarted genre expectations, especially the film’s refusal of technoutopianism. It also lacked a clear view of ‘the earth of the future’ and clarity concerning its ‘form of society … Socialism, Communism or Capitalism’. There was no depiction of spaceflight or clear sense of duration, and the alien world was left unexplained. Some requested the removal of ‘the concept of God’ and ‘the concept of Christianity’, another that the end ‘be made more realistic’ so as to make it ‘clear that [Kelvin] has completed his mission’. Not only did science not triumph, the message seemed to be ‘There’s no point in humanity dragging its shit from one end of the galaxy to the other.’35

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Tarkovsky considered the list of alterations an attempt to provoke him. He made some minor cuts – from a version that is rumoured to have been over three hours long36 – and Solaris debuted in Moscow on 5 February 1972 before receiving a wide, Category One release on 20 March. Tarkovsky was furious that the premiere was ‘at the Peace, not at the October or the Russia, but the Peace. The bosses don’t consider my film good enough for the best screens.’37 Claiming to be ill, he did not attend. Having just heard that the still unreleased Andrei Rublev had won a fourth major international award, he wrote of the premiere: ‘They say Solaris was well-received. There were no empty seats and no one walked out. In fact at the end somebody even shouted, “Long live Tarkovsky!” We’ll have to see what’s going to happen.’38 And promptly turned to the film that would become Mirror. Screened at Cannes on 13 May, Solaris was not greeted as rapturously as his previous two films, but nonetheless won the Special Jury Prize. (Tarkovsky had a poor opinion of the other films he saw there, describing their ‘low … standard’ as combining ‘highly professional’ but ‘utterly commercial’, all of it ‘done with such an eye to the audience, with such a desire to please’.)39 It also won the BFI award for film of the year, but fared rather poorly in the US, where it was dubbed into English and cut by over half an hour. While Tarkovksy considered Solaris ‘less cryptic’ and ‘more harmonious’, ‘purposeful’ and ‘graceful’ than Andrei Rublev, the same diary entry reveals a certain ambivalence: ‘Not that there’s any comparison’ between the films; Solaris is ‘finished and done with and that’s that’.40 It quickly became his least favourite of his films.41 In 2002, James Cameron produced and Steven Soderbergh wrote and directed a $47-million remake of Solaris, starring George Clooney. Soderbergh returned to the novel – ‘the Lem book, which was full of so many ideas that you could probably make a handful of films from it, was the seed’42 – and included material Tarkovsky omitted, including a ghostly visit from Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur). However, he could not, and perhaps did not want to, escape

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Tarkovsky’s influence.43 This is not surprising. Adaptations are often treated in terms of how faithfully they transpose or translate the source – usually perceived as a fixed and original text, the meaning of which is clear and uncontested – into another medium. This romantic view is hopelessly inadequate for understanding the production of cultural commodities, and tends instead merely to reinforce a politics of taste. As Sarah Cardwell argues It would be better to view adaptation as the gradual development of a ‘metatext’. This view recognizes that a later adaptation may draw upon any earlier adaptations, as well as upon the primary source text. Subsequent adaptations can be regarded as points on a continuum, as part of the extended development of a singular, infinite meta-text … constantly growing and developing, being retold, reinterpreted and reassessed.44

Soderbergh’s suggestion that ‘Tarkovsky generated a sequoia’ from Lem’s novel while ‘we were sort of trying to make a little bonsai’45 has been taken as an appropriate display of modesty before a cinematic giant. It is more ambiguous than that, however, perhaps implying that where Tarkovsky sculpted something monumental, Soderbergh finely crafted something delicate and intense.46 There is one other version worth noting. Solaris Station (2011) is a fan edit of Tarkovsky’s film, described as a ‘revision … that removes the most extraneous and patience taxing sequences, and gives a moderate boost to the pacing of other scenes, but stays true to the full emotional journey of the main characters and meditative tone’.47 By cutting thirty-seven minutes from the film, fan editor Brumous ‘reduce[s] tortuously dull sequences, overextended takes, distracting digressions, and pretentious philosophizing’, ‘focus[es] the story on Solaris Station and the psychology of alien contact’, ‘lessen[s] the attention on minor characters’ and ‘offer[s] a more refined and entertaining version that appeals to a wider audience’, while nonetheless ‘respect[ing] the artistic vision, the character development and the languorous and reflective tone’.48

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Surely, though, a fan edit of a Tarkovsky movie should extend it, ensuring that even less happens over an even longer passage of time? And, one might uncharitably add, if the point is to so completely miss the point, shouldn’t there be a fan edit of Soderbergh’s Solaris, which just replaces it with Tarkovsky’s film?

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3 Tarkovsky’s Solaris Opening titles Houselights go down, credits roll. White Cyrillic text seems to glow against the pitch-black backdrop. For three whole minutes. Thirty seconds of actors’ names scrolling up the screen, and then the film’s title and crew credits fade in and out, one after another, in the centre of the screen. There is something very deliberate about this darkness. It takes us deeper than the mere dimming of an auditorium. Accompanied by Bach’s Chorale Prelude in F Minor, a plea for a divine infusion of faith in a time of despair, it quietens us. The sacramental organ music ministers. It slows our pace, prepares us. Sound and vision transport us into another world. The Cyrillic characters have a similar affect on monolingual me. They look so familiar, like Roman characters with just a bit of a twist, I think I might be able to pick out some words or meanings, but they are so self-evidently different as to be completely unreadable. Cyrillic script is over a thousand years old, but I first encountered it in Bolshevik agitprop and images of rockets, satellites and probes, of Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, so it always recalls the Revolution’s (lost) utopian horizon and the (now past) futurity of the Soviet space programme. It is visibly both ancient and modern – in a way that Roman script can never look to someone who has always lived inside it – and it is somehow science-fictional: a dialectics of the known and the unknown, of self and other.49 Floating weeds We are in another world, but nothing about it is clear. We are elsewhere and elsewhen, somewhere unknown; we are adrift. The first three shots, each from a high angle, last for ninety seconds, but tell us nothing. A stream runs by. Submarine plant life

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Opening shots

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wafts with the currents. A man in a blue jacket silently watches. The only sound is the faintest lapping of water. In the first shot, water flows rapidly from top right to bottom left; a leaf floating on the surface races across the frame and out of shot, the panning camera unable to keep up with it. In the second, the water is almost still; the gentlest current bears an inconsequential leaf fragment from left to right. The camera tilts down across the surface – plants grow out of the water and into the air, contrasting textures – and upwards, revealing the man, who stands almost motionless as he looks to his right, then back almost directly at the camera, and then down to his left. The third shot, which like the first is perhaps but not definitively from his viewpoint, returns to submerged plant life. A slow zoom down and in pushes the barely glimpsed reflection of the sky from the bottom edge of the frame. Tendrils, moving with languid grace, fill the screen. The leisurely pace, and the absence of something with which to identify, extends the effect of the credits, adjusting our temporality and embodiment, lulling us into a fictional world. Despite the colour and camera mobility, the near-silence, the shot durations and the (illusory) sense of observing unstaged reality return us to the origins of cinema, to the Lumières’ actualités. The virtual eventlessness of each shot emphasises the extent to which stories are constructions, that they reduce the matter of real life – vastly complex, overdetermined, non-linear – to more or less explicable causal chains. Tarkovsky said that ‘film is like a river’.50 It should not be driven by ‘the desire to see things from closer up’ or to ‘hurry’ the spectator, as in classical continuity or analytical editing, nor should it be concerned with Eisenstein’s dialectical collision of images/ideas; instead, shots should accumulate, not in isolation but as ‘the sum’ of all the preceding ones.51 Here, the swiftly moving leaf is rendered even more consequential by the camera’s apparent lack of interest in the leaf fragment. The man – soon we will discover he is Kelvin – seems to become the subject of the second shot, but he is likewise discarded by the camera in favour of more plant life. He is insignificant compared to this vegetable world.

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The open-endedness of Tarkovsky’s editing – its orientation towards the future but relative lack of subordination to a narrative goal, its creation of suspension rather than suspense – always used to make me anxious. But gradually such images – of water running over something, or of things viewed beneath running water – became familiar, recalling the paintbrushes washed in the river in Andrei Rublev or the submerged religious imagery in Stalker’s Zone. Later, aware of Tarkovsky’s admiration for Mizoguchi Kenji and Kurosawa Akira, I would ponder his silence about Ozu Yasujiro, whose A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) and Floating Weeds (1959) remake are structured, like so many of Tarkovsky’s films, around the relationship between an estranged father and son. Both films include scenes in which luminous rain falls between characters standing under shelter on opposite sides of an alleyway, and falls behind characters in front of large open windows; in the latter film, blossoms inexplicably fall indoors; in the former, rain does (although, in a most un-Tarkovskyian manner, it is unambiguously attributed to holes in the roof). But all this cinephilia is distracting. It is too comfortable, reassuring. Besides, lately something weird has started to happen. Somehow, the plants, especially in the third shot, have always seemed too alive, as if they exist outside of human space-time, inhabiting a not-precisely Edenic realm from whose grace we have fallen. Now, as the camera zooms in, I see not just tendrils there, but tentacles. Not among the weeds – the weeds themselves become tentacular. The mysterious powerful wind that springs up in Mirror to blow through the long grass and, later, more ominously, through the trees, and then again, with menace and dread, in Stalker, is transposed into a different element here, given near-visibility in this liquid form. Tarkovsky generally depicts nature as ‘simply a flow that absorbs the human gaze’, but ‘sometimes it eerily seems to be returning it’.52 As if whatever deity inheres in the world is cold and

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dark and ancient. Monstrous, and devastatingly indifferent to us. Despite the colours, the textures, the endlessly varied play of light on rippling water, there is no consolation to be found in the opening shots of Solaris. There is only desolation. When naughty prankster Lars von Trier dedicated his cabin-inthe-woods horror movie, Antichrist (2009), to Tarkovsky, it was not just another gag to shock the bourgeois cineaste. He was on to something. Suspension Chris Marker’s A Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (2000) contrasts a ‘naive American’ cinematography, which tends to shoot from a slight low angle so as to set its figures against an expansive Solaris/Antichrist

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sky, ripe with ideological connotations, with Tarkovsky’s preference to shoot from ‘slightly above the characters, who are rooted in the landscape’. While the American ‘contemplates the sky’, Tarkovksy ‘settles in the sky and contemplates the Earth’. In this and other traits – long takes, long lateral tracking shots – one can see Mizoguchi’s influence being put to particular ends. As Robert Bird notes, ‘the sky keeps the earthly forms and dwellings submerged in the conditions of their appearance and, at the same time, on the verge of their disappearance back into the natural flows’ of the world and time.53 The film’s fourth shot cranes upwards from giant burdock leaves to position Kelvin, surrounded by waist-high vegetation. On either side, prickly heads of burdock seem ready to disperse into the air; in the background, mist hangs low; the ground beneath his feet is moist, waterlogged. Tarkovksy claimed ‘I never see the mud, I only see the earth mixed with water, the mire from which things grow’,54 and Kelvin, like the plants around him, is suspended between water, earth and air. The camera continues to rise, diminishing him, even as he wanders off into the background, shrinking in size, and out of the frame. It is still not certain that we will follow him. The next shot is dominated, centre frame, by a large old willow; the camera pans to the right to follow Kelvin’s passage in the distant background, obscured for much of the shot. He wanders into and across the foreground of the next two shots, but the camera seems equally, if not more, interested in the lake around which he is walking, in a child’s balloon floating above it, in the dacha on the other shore. A bridled horse trots past. Kelvin washes his hands in the lake, and turns as a car pulls up. In what initially appears to be the film’s first genuine reverse shot, we see a distant bridge, above which, partially obscured by trees, the sky is visible for the first time. It is hazy, featureless. The driver and a child step out of the car, are greeted by someone on foot, and then Kelvin wanders into the foreground, watching them. In typical Tarkovsky fashion, we are made to revise our understanding of the shot.

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(In the very next sequence, Kelvin’s father will look out of the dacha into a rainstorm; there is an implied reverse shot of children and a dog in the rain, who then run away from the camera and towards the dacha). The openings of Dick’s novels give an overwhelming sense of the author confronted by a blank page, needing to write, to conjure up a new world, to pay the bills. The words – and the world – come tumbling out, a manic, improvisatory, termite art. They are nothing like the start of a Tarkovsky movie, except that they both begin by producing destabilising uncertainty about what precisely is about to unfold and, as it does unfold, a continuing anxiety as to its status and meaning. Subject suspended

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Tarkovsky’s films stutter into being, Mirror self-reflexively. Ignat (Ignat Daniltsev) turns on the television and watches a hypnotist curing a boy of his speech impediment. She says ‘You will speak loudly and clearly, freely and easily, unafraid of your voice and your speech’, and his first clear utterance is ‘I can speak.’ The credits roll over a blank screen, accompanied by another Bach prelude, ‘Das alte Jahr vergangen ist’. This sequence is usually read metaphorically, as Tarkovksy proclaiming a new freedom to create. His liberation into artistic production echoes the conclusion of Mizoguchi’s Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), a film in which, like Andrei Rublev, the eponymous artist is not exactly the protagonist. In its closing minutes, Utamaro (Bandô Minosuke), sentenced to fifty days in handcuffs because his illustrations offended the Shogunate, is confronted by a situation so terrible that all he can think to do is draw. In a scene often understood to comment on the social constraints impeding the artist, particularly the censorship and restrictions imposed under the American military occupation of Japan,55 Utamaro quakes in anguish, strains against the straps binding his wrists, tears of frustration in his eyes. That night fades into a later day. Utamaro’s cuffs are removed. His friends bring out sake to celebrate, but he turns away, calling for ink and paint. Picture after picture after picture cascades from his brush. There is another kind of stutter at the start of Mirror, as the film creates and moves between different diegetic levels, wrongfooting the viewer about the precise nature of the filmic world and its relation to our own. In Solaris, it is a slow stutter. There is no clumsy Dickian sense of being impelled into a chaotic, paranoid world, nor the creative fervour of Mizoguchi’s triumphant conclusion, just a careful accumulation of shots, each in its way beautiful. As the opening credits alter our embodiment and perception, so Tarkovsky’s reluctant selection of subject and gradual development of incident moves us from a recorded world being displayed into one in which characters and narrative emerge from its elements.

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Dacha The sequence in and around the dacha is laden with information, much of which will only become clear retrospectively, and some of which will not. The dacha is bright and airy. Through lighting, the décor (white walls, pale wood) and interior shots organised around a large open window and a wide open doorway, Tarkovsky emphasises its permeability. This openness to the world contrasts with the birdcage hanging in front of the window, a self-enclosed environment proleptic of the Solaris station, which seems endlessly to circle back on itself. When a storm breaks, Kelvin’s father (Nikolai Grinko) needs only one short step to get inside the dacha and out of the rain; but the rain continues to pour, luminous, inches from him.

Permeable structures

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In contrast, Kelvin stands in the rain, getting soaked as he contemplates the remains of a meal on the dacha’s terrace: a teacup filling to the brim, discarded plums, a wasp crawling over an apple core. The storm ends. As the final drops fall from overhanging trees, the surface of the lake becomes calm once more. (All this water is important.) The sequence is about returns. Every morning, Kelvin goes for a walk, forbidden by his father to come back for at least an hour. Berton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) visits Kelvin’s father for the first time in ages, bringing with him the recording of the hearing he faced on his return from Solaris years previously. The dacha itself is a return, built by Kelvin’s father in imitation of Kelvin’s great-grandfather’s house. Amid all these returns, there is a first encounter. When Berton’s young son (Vitalik Kerdimun) wanders off to play, he meets a young girl who is never identified and whose presence is never explained.56 As she responds to the boy’s ‘hello’, dipping slightly in a sardonic half-curtsy, the camera moves in on her face. Her eyes betray curiosity, as if she is considering what exactly to do with him. Or, perhaps, what to do with him this time. Berton’s testimony Kelvin and his aunt, Anna (Tamara Ogorodnikova), watch Berton’s recording on a large, wall-mounted screen, while he hovers nervously about the room. It is in black-and-white, perhaps to emphasise that it Mysterious girl

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is from the past of the film’s present moment. Apart from Kelvin’s name and some vague reference to studying Solaris, it is the film’s first use of material from Lem57 and, although much compressed relies heavily on his wording. The hearing takes place at the end of a long broad corridor. Its deep perspective and variously disposed occupants recall the spacestation corridor in 2001 where Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) is waylaid by concerned Soviet scientists, but lacks its upward curve, emphasising the earthliness of the setting. Sometimes the hearing seems to be happening in a conference room decorated with pictures of cosmonauts, sometimes merely in an improvised space at an airport’s boarding gate. Spatial relations are further destabilised by Terrestrial and orbital

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cutting between the recording, in which characters often address the camera (and thus diegetic and extradiegetic viewers) more or less directly, and the audience in the dacha, who several times look almost directly back at the camera. The viewer is knotted into this uncertain, shifting space-time imbroglio. The commander of Berton’s expedition recounts how radiobiologist Vishyakov and physicist Fekhner failed to return from an exploratory flight over Solaris’s ocean. Thick fog hampered the search. Only Berton continued looking for the missing men, eventually returning in a state of shock. Subsequently, he refused to leave the station or even look out of the window, and from the clinic wrote a report describing what he had witnessed, believing it would revolutionise Solaristics. Descending close to the ocean, he had found himself flying blind in an unusual fog, ‘colloidal and viscous’ – that is, not intermediate between liquid and gas, but between liquid and solid. Eventually, he comes to clear air, a circular space several hundred metres’ wide. Below him, the waves still. The ocean becomes transparent. A ‘yellow sludge’ masses beneath its surface. Glistening, vitreous tendrils emerge into the air. The ocean bubbles and hardens like ‘molasses’. The sludge takes on various shapes and forms. Struggling to stay aloft, Berton looks away, and the next time he looks down, there is a sort of garden … shrubs, hedges, acacia trees, little paths. Everything was made of the same substance … plaster, but life-sized. Then everything began to crack and break. Yellow sludge poured out of the fissures. Everything began to boil and harden and foam appeared.

Lem’s Solaris is deeply connected to the American sf for which he expressed such vigorous distaste, full of resonances and allusions. His description of this simulacral terrestrial scene recalls Ray Bradbury’s ‘Mars Is Heaven’ (1948), in which an expedition to Mars discovers a perfect reproduction of the small midwestern town in which the commander grew up. It is inhabited by the crew’s loved

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ones, including those long dead. The commander’s grandparents explain that they were reborn there, without explanation, after their terrestrial deaths. This idyll, however, is an illusion and a trap. Shapeshifting Martians, having lulled the potential invaders, kill them all. Neither Lem nor Tarkovsky opt for such a melodramatic outcome, but both hint at something sinister behind the ocean’s appearances. Tarkovsky’s Berton intermittently filmed what he saw, but his footage – shown in colour, despite appearing in the black-andwhite recording – has captured only views of a placid sea, of haze and mist, of clouds, all seen from a much greater altitude than that at which he was flying. Instead of 2001’s climactic headlong rush through fields of light and over alien landscapes, there is just peaceful silent floating. No haranguing spectacle overwhelms with its demand for awe; instead, we are invited, once more, to contemplation. Unlike Contact (1997), in which evidence of the protagonist’s encounter with an alien intelligence is suppressed, there is no sense of state intervention. Like Berton, the hearing is genuinely baffled by his footage and, as in Lem’s novel, begin to speculate that the planet’s ‘biomagnetic current’ – itself ‘a gigantic cerebral system, … capable of thought’ – somehow affected him. Berton continues his testimony. He spots what he thinks is Fekhner, treading water, but on drawing closer discovers that it is a Berton’s testimony

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blue-eyed, dark-haired human child, naked and slippery, like a newborn infant. Only it is four metres tall. Despite Professor Messenger’s (Georgy Teykh) dissenting opinion, the hearing refuses to accept the experienced pilot’s testimony – after all, he has no scientific training – and pronounces that he was suffering from hallucinations and depression, made worse by an ‘inflammation of the associative zone of the cerebral cortex’. The montage sheets give the full name of this disgraced pilot, now a laughing-stock, as Henri Berton. Lem, who describes at length the many bizarre forms the colloidal ocean throws up, calls him André Berton, just a single transposition of letters away from the founder of surrealism. The mother and the horse For nearly a third of a minute, the camera slowly zooms in on the framed black-and-white photograph of an unidentified woman, until the wall on which it is mounted disappears from view, and finishes just before the picture frame disappears. (Much, much later, it will be revealed that she is Kelvin’s mother). Outside, in the garden, the mysterious girl and Berton’s son, who appears to have removed his shirt, run and play. Elliptical conversation hints that the relationship between Kelvin and his father is a difficult one. Cut to the boy, his shirt restored, fleeing with the dog from an outhouse. The girl has disappeared (she will not be seen again). Loud whinnying bridges into the next shot: a horse, unbridled, imposing. Anna leads Berton’s son by the hand back to the makeshift stable in the garage, the dog trotting alongside, barking. The boy is not just scared of the horse, he has no idea what it is. For Tarkovsky, discussing Andrei Rublev, ‘the horse symbolizes life … when I see a horse, it seems to me that I have life itself before me’.58 But Anna’s attempt to reassure Berton’s son of the horse’s beauty and gentleness cannot contain its lively otherness; like the floating weeds, and the mysterious girl, it too is undeniably present, yet also somehow alien.

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This scene evokes Freud’s case study in which ‘Little Hans’ fears being bitten by a white horse. Freud concludes that, for Hans, ‘the horse was always an image of the pleasure of movement’, but that ‘this pleasure … includes the impulse towards coitus’ – with, inevitably, his own mother.59 Confronted with evidence of sexual difference in the female’s lack of a penis, castration anxiety intervenes and ‘the horse is elevated to a symbol of terror’, a figure of punitive paternal authority.60 In Barbara Creed’s reassessment of the case, which eschews Freud’s patriarchal perspective and thus draws attention to important details he ignored or suppressed, the terrifying horse takes on a different significance. It symbolises not the father but the phallic, and thus potentially castrating, mother.61 Castration anxiety

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Roland Barthes describes a photograph as a simultaneous act of murder and memorialisation: it fatally stops time and thus always involves ‘the return of the dead’.62 In a similar vein, Christian Metz argues that a photograph derives its sense of ‘authority’ from its ‘immobility and silence’, which are not only ‘objective aspects of death’ but also ‘its main symbols, they figure it’.63 Whereas ‘Film gives back to the dead a semblance of life, a fragile semblance but one immediately strengthened by the wishful thinking of the viewer’, the photograph, because of its stillness, ‘maintains the memory of the dead as being dead’.64 This contrast between media is emphasised by the film’s zoom into the silent, unmoving photograph, accompanied by the voice of Kelvin’s offscreen father. (Garrett Stewart questions Metz’s distinction in terms that anticipate the rest of the film: ‘what is this “semblance of life” [produced by film] but a form of nonlife, another mode of death, a phantasmal perpetuation, wrested from and spun out of its own time into another’?)65 Such observations about the collision of medium specificities when a film displays a photograph easily fold back into a psychoanalytic reading of the film. The still image of Kelvin’s mother resembles the phallic threat to masculinity posed by the Medusa’s severed head, and perhaps also recalls the Sphinx, who is destroyed once her riddle is solved by the probing Oedipus. But we are in danger of stalling here. (Indeed, it is at around this point in the film that Kelvin says Solaristics is at an ‘impasse’ because of ‘irresponsible daydreaming’.) In Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), the source of Tarkovsky’s recurring image of wind blowing through vegetation, the horse is initially aligned with oxen in opposition to the tractor. Together, these beasts signify the rural backwardness that is to be swept away by collective, revolutionary modernity, the symbol and agent of which is the ‘the communist steel horse’ that tears down fences and archaic property relations, bringing prosperity to all. However, through some strange alchemy, just as the tractor represents the futurity of the radicalised peasantry so, by the end of

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Earth (1930): tradition and modernity create each other

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the film, wild horses betoken the will of the people, roused by the landowning class’s murderous actions to throw off the shackles of feudalism and superstition. In this context, Berton’s son’s ignorance and fear of horses signals the extent of his separation from nature and tradition (which are not merely the opposites of modernity, but its retrospective and often reified product). Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nauchnaia fantastika and Euro-American sf developed different relationships to sovremennost’ or modernity. As Anindita Banerjee notes, given ‘the actual state of modernization in Russia’, sf compensated for the uneven distribution of a rather sparse modernity, ‘registering possibilities rather than making predictions’.66 New consumer technologies and the approaching futures they implied – often not the things themselves, but images of and narratives about them – became ‘grand metaphors of overcoming the nation’s backwardness’.67 In Solaris, the horse’s presence inverts this process, inserting a living being associated with the premodern world into this supposedly futuristic tale and thereby refuting – or at least recognising the combined and uneven nature of – its modernity. A similar ambivalence can be found in Anglophone sf. In Neuromancer (1984), for example, William Gibson sketches in a terminal modernity endlessly propped up by the short-term solutions, quick fixes and other problematic innovations that spring from its unfolding processes: ‘Hey, Christ,’ the Finn said, taking Case’s arm, ‘looka that.’ He pointed. It’s a horse, man. You ever see a horse?’ Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a place that sold birds and monkeys. The thing’s legs had been worn black and hairless by decades of passing hands. ‘Saw one in Maryland once,’ the Finn said, ‘and that was a good three years after the pandemic. There’s Arabs still trying to code ’em up from the DNA, but they always croak.’ The animal’s brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as they passed.68

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Here, unfamiliarity with horses is part of a strategy to build a complex fictional world through density of implication. Alluding to the commerce in artificial copies of extinct animals in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner, it contributes to an uneasy feeling that some kind of diffuse, overdetermined apocalypse has swept the world, albeit without anyone actually twigging that the game is over. Although other species – birds, monkeys – remain unharmed, Finn’s matter-of-fact tone and Case’s apparent indifference about the species-specific virus that killed off all the horses suggests that such catastrophes are relatively commonplace. Genetic engineering has advanced, but with badly skewed priorities: the ‘Arabs’ are presumably more concerned with horse-racing – the scene takes place in Istanbul, home to the ruins of the Hippodrome – than with replenishing the biosphere. Tarkvosky does not really do this kind of sf world-building. The motorway A shift of focus makes the world briefly wobble, seem irreal. Berton and Kelvin rehearse tired, habitual arguments about poetic and pragmatic worldviews, about heart and mind, about science and morality, and about Kelvin’s mission to either shut down the Solaris station or intensify the research efforts by bombarding the ocean with heavy radiation. Berton storms off, argues with Kelvin’s father, who in turn upbraids an indifferent Kelvin for treating Berton so poorly. The lake is motionless, a perfect mirror for the overhanging trees. It is not easy to tell where objects end and reflections begin. Dusk falls. Anna watches a documentary about the Solaris station (designed for a crew of eighty-five, it now houses only astrobiologist Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn), cyberneticist Snaut (Jüri Järvet) and physiologist Gibarian). A video call from Berton interrupts. He left without mentioning that the child he saw on Solaris turned out, except for its height, to be ‘identical’ to Fekhner’s orphaned son. Standing in the doorway, Kelvin overhears.

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There follows a five-minute sequence, sometimes in black-andwhite, sometimes in muted colour, of Berton driving into the city, up over elevated motorway sections that curve through the air, perilously close at times to grim-looking apartment buildings, and down through tunnels. Sometimes the camera adopts the viewpoint of the car, racing headlong. Sometimes it is in the car with the pensive Berton and the restless boy. Traffic overtakes. Lanes merge. Father and son do not speak. Kubrick’s 2001 is composed of sequences in which there is either music or speech, but never both. Tarkovsky also eschewed musical accompaniment, favouring a soundspace in which dialogue unfolds ‘free of musical investment’, and in which ‘sound episodes’ appear as ‘extraordinary events’.69 He felt that ‘the world as transformed by cinema and the world as transformed by music are parallel and in conflict with each other’, and that instrumental music thus possessed too much autonomy, resisting dissolution ‘into the film to the point where it becomes an organic part of it’.70 He preferred to select those sounds that would allow the world to express itself – as in the stillness that surrounds the dacha, intermittently punctuated by bird calls, the sound of rain, a dog’s bark – and to use electronic music because it was readily ‘absorbed’ into the non-musical soundscape, ‘remain[ing] indistinct, like the voice of nature, of vague intimations … like somebody breathing’.71 The motorway’s ‘permanent drone of traffic’ is enhanced by Eduard Artemev’s cacophonous score, which uses: ‘synthetic rather than acoustic sounds, with individual, filtered timbres counterpointed to create a variety of tone-colors active within the soundscape’; ‘sawtooth waves’ with a ‘harsh, brittle effect’; ‘an intrusive, high-frequency’ with ‘an ear-piercing timbre’; ‘sets of ascending arpeggios, descending glissandi that call to mind … laserguns; ‘a “solar wind” effect’; ‘clouds of indistinguishable “cocktail party” chatter’.72 Sometimes it sounds as if heavy plant machinery is starting up, sometimes as if a jet is taking off. There is a constant

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Motorway

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roar, noisy and grubby and industrial. It is impossible to distinguish between naturalistic sounds, sound effects and score. In the first shot of the sequence, the Tokyo Tower rises up in the distance like a rocketship or a radio antenna pointing to the stars. In a pair of later shots consisting of superimposed footage taken from a high angle after night has fallen, the lights of countless vehicles interweave at impossible intersections; some of them vanish. This is not Trantor, the rational city-world of galactic governance in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (1942–51), but something closer to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a future city that seems to extend indefinitely and from which escape is impossible, or to the urban abysses of Moebius’ bandes dessinées, or to the metrocosms of J. G. Ballard’s ‘The Concentration City’ (1957) and Paul Di Filippo’s ‘A Year in the Linear City’ (2002). Only here, the interweaving of urban arteries has become so dense as to disrupt space-time, opening wormholes into which vehicles disappear. Clarke’s 2001 describes the Stargate as the ‘Grand Central Station of the Galaxy’,73 as if such a pretty BeauxArts edifice could express the transcendent. In contrast, Tarkovsky – who often seems to decry brutal, deracinated, concrete modernity in favour of the ‘natural’ and the ‘traditional’ that are dialectically conjured into being by the modernity to which they are thus cast in opposition – conjures a vast and sublime Spaghetti Junction. Earlier drafts of the screenplay called for urban futurism: ‘children moving by means of jet-propelled belts, and a 204-floor building where [K]ris lives’; ‘a city of sky-scrapers, … of vehicles which ceaselessly glide, float and fly, and great numbers of people’; ‘a sense of strict order, of everything seemingly directed from a single centre’.74 Tarkovsky hoped to film at Expo ’70, held in Osaka from March to September 1970. He presumably intended to depict his city of the future by using the Metabolist architecture of Tange Kenzoˉ, Kikutake Kiyonori and Kurokawa Kisho showcased at the exposition,75 but bureaucratic delays meant he was unable to get to Japan until a year after the World’s Fair closed.76 So he had to make do with a dozen or so shots of the motorway weaving through

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Tokyo’s Akasaka and Iikura districts.77 The motorway sequence is every bit as memorable as Jean-Luc Godard’s raucous never-ending tracking shot alongside a traffic jam in Week End, but less effective than Alphaville in generating futurity from found architecture. However, Alphaville’s stylised interiors mean it now looks like the unattainable future of a lost past; in contrast, Solaris’s city looks like the endless perpetuation of a dismal present. And while Kelvin does not drive to Solaris in a Ford Galaxie, the ceaseless clamour of Berton’s journey does seem to substitute in for his journey to another world. But first we return to the dacha. It is twilight. Kelvin burns old papers on a bonfire. Conversation is stilted, the lake placid. Anna, unspeaking, mops tears from her eyes with the edge of her shawl. Smoke curls and billows. Kelvin has decided to take an old film recording to Solaris with him. The camera tracks out and turns away from a photograph of a woman. She has darker hair than the women in the other photograph, and she too is, for the time being, unexplained. There is a mournful stillness to it all. Kelvin is merely waiting for it to be time to leave. Flight to Solaris A starfield. Snatches of dialogue with mission control, taken from the opening page of Lem’s novel. A circle of light, or a swirling bubble, Other woman

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emerges from the centre of the screen. A close-up of Kelvin’s eyes, surrounded by darkness. The camera tracks back. The image rocks from side to side, almost rotating in one direction and then in the other. Patterns of light saturate the image. Artemev’s electronic notquite-music/not-quite-sound-effects imply a turbulent hurtling through the cosmos. The close-up of Kelvin stabilises, the camera tracks back further. There is a vague suggestion of a cockpit. Through the window, a haze of vapour parts and suspended above the ocean is the Solaris station. Slowly, it gets bigger. One of its lights flares repeatedly, dazzling Kelvin, as his spaceship descends. A rapid vertical plummet. Superstructural pylons race up the screen. Darkness. This is Kelvin’s flight to Solaris in its entirety. Ishimbayeva and Nirenburg’s television version opens with a pre-title montage of industrial interiors – a dark gantry, banks of electronic equipment, a large circular light, video monitors – and a pensive Kelvin apparently already on the Solaris station. According to his voiceover, 487 days into its flight, the Prometheus launched a shuttle to the Solaris station. A television studio control room then stands in for the flight deck of the Prometheus as Kelvin’s shuttle – stock footage of a missile launch – is dispatched. After the opening credits, his actual journey is depicted with a close-up of his face, accompanied by voiceover musings and radio chatter with the station. Soderbergh’s version is the shortest in duration but the most visually spectacular – quite astonishingly beautiful effects work is perfectly matched by Cliff Martinez’s orchestral ambient score, bubbling with unconventional percussion – and its depiction of docking manoeuvres is precisely the kind of particularity of detail Tarkovsky eschewed. In contrast to these other versions, Tarkovsky’s gesture towards what an audience might expect of an sf film78 is delightfully perfunctory, caught between the aspiration to rise above, to transcend, and the gravitational attraction of the Earth, of memory and history. Both Ivan’s Childhood and Andrei Rublev begin with

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Solaris station: Tarkovsky vs Soderbergh

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images of flight, the latter a desperate ascent in a primitive balloon that then crashes, perhaps fatally to the ground; Mirror includes newsreel footage of the 1934 Osoaviakhim-1 balloon ascent, which set a new altitude record of 22,000 metres but also ended in disaster, killing all three crew. The walls of the dacha are decorated with lithographs of early balloons, at least one of which will reappear on the Solaris station. The impossibility of unbounded ascent is comically emphasised when Kelvin arrives on the Solaris station. The first thing he does is trip over his own bootlaces.79 Solaris station Tarkovksy’s depiction of space travel most closely resembles the funky, minimalist spaceship at the start of The Brother from Another Planet (1984). However, while John Sayles relishes getting away with doing so very little, Tarkovsky begrudges having to do even this much. He is just fundamentally not interested in imagining a future world. For Andrei Rublev’s medieval setting, Tarkovsky insisted on avoiding ‘historical stylization’ and ‘historical details’ because they ‘divide the attention of the viewer’ when it is enough just ‘to convince him that the action really takes place in the fifteenth century’: ‘neutral set decorations, neutral (yet convincing) costumes, the landscapes, the modern language – all this will help us to talk about the most essential aspects, without distracting the audience’;80 ‘Nothing should impede perception, or distract’ the viewer, who should ‘not notice anything exotic’.81 Tarkovsky’s representation of the future takes the same tack. While many sf ‘filmmakers force the viewer to examine the details of the material structure of the future’, he wants his viewers to be ‘unaware of any … exoticism of technology’.82 He eliminated as much technological hardware from Solaris as he could, and downplayed the rest. He thought a moonlanding scene should not be a spectacular display of something the viewer has never seen, as in Kubrick’s 2001, but a commonplace, everyday event. So when Kelvin’s ship docks with the station, we see

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neither the complex procedurals such a manoeuvre would involve nor any images of the two vessels coming together. Instead, a pair of spotlights on a corrugated wall light up the darkness, steam is sucked into a metal grille in the floor – a detail taken from Lem – and Kelvin, who has already disembarked, wanders into shot across scorched floor tiles. The cavernous landing bay is unremarkable, well used. A grubby yellow pipe, easily as tall as Kelvin, curves around the edge of the chamber; silver pipes rise up from it and out of shot. Every bit as mundane as Kubrick’s spotless vision of space travel as an extension of business-class air travel,83 Tarkovsky’s grungy look somehow keeps it from seeming so banal. Both aesthetics could be considered failures, refusals even, of imagination, but neither is particularly concerned with futurological Spectacular mundane: Kubrick vs Tarkovsky

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prognosis. After all, sf is never about the future; it is always about right now. Kubrick, building on a tradition of comic infernos that includes Zamyatin’s We and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug (1928), uses design to satirise the alienation, dehumanisation and sheer unutterable blandness of corporate culture, whereas Tarkovsky wants to keep his viewers grounded. Thus, Kelvin’s string vest might look a little unusual, but it does not function like, for example, the mesh-tops worn by SHADO’s submariners in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO (1970–1). It is not part of a broader design principle – including detachable sleeves and leggings, Nehru collars and purple wigs – intended to imply a fashionable and bountiful pop future of marvellous adventures fighting aliens and going shopping.84 Resolutely ordinary, it is just a string vest. The Solaris station is a mess. Bunched cables run along the walls, as if the construction budget ran out before the purchase order for electrical conduits was approved. Exposed wires spark. The floor is strewn with litter and discarded equipment. Metal floors and walls have all lost their sheen, if they ever had one. Thick reds and yellows and scuffed silver contrast sharply with the greens and browns of Earth. Fronds of paper suspended over vents so that the recirculating air rustles them like leaves are a dismal reminder of the Earth they have left behind. This unhomeliness only grows when we see the crew’s quarters. Snaut’s room is lined with shelves full of clunky electronic devices, all knobs and dials and oscilloscopes. Framed butterflies, pinned for display, remind the viewer – who has seen a similar display in the dacha – of the cosmic gulf between Solaris and Earth. In Gibarian’s room, furniture has been overturned in a struggle or a desperate search. The walls are a horrible dull brown. His numerous pictures of horses and terrestrial scenes reek of desperation and – like the drawings with which Hannibal Lecter decorates his windowless, subterranean cell – do little to make the room more bearable. They remind us that Gibarian is dead and that whatever special meaning they held died with him.

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Vest aesthetics: Tarkovsky vs the Andersons

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Grungy future

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THX 1138 and Star Wars: changing looks

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Kelvin selects an off-white room with mismatched furniture. It has the superficial cleanliness and deep-down grubbiness of a secondrate motel. The arched side of the bed looks inexpertly thrown together with hardboard, and books – evidence of a previous occupant – fill the shelves beneath the wall-mounted screen. The curve of the walls and of a chairback, and the off-centre round window onto the black void outside the station, exaggerate the effect of the wide lens to the point of barrel distortion. Each item in the frame appears to be set well apart from the others, a disconnectedness that extends to Kelvin as he ambles into shot. It is a room that, despite its three chairs, speaks of isolation. Tarkovsky’s approach to sf costuming and décor contributed to a now dominant aesthetic that rejects camp extravagance. For example, while the futuristic denizens of the Doctor Who (1963–89) universe frequently affected quite fabulous costumes, courtesy of such designers as June Hudson and Amy Roberts, no matter how far into the future the rebooted Doctor Who (2005–) ventures, human

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characters still wear low-key versions of contemporary fashion. The battered interior of the Solaris station signals an important shift in imagining futurity. From David Butler’s Just Imagine (1930) and William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come (1936), through Star Trek (1966–9) and 2001 to Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain (1971) and George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971), sf’s futurity-evoking high-tech environments tended to be orderly and immaculate, and increasingly dystopian (with the possible exception of the Star Trek franchise, although the Federation can easily be read against the grain as a tyrannical Borg collective that just plain deludes itself). With Solaris, Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) and John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974), the look of the future began to change, to become more beat-up and more likely to break down. In Star Wars (1977), the spaceships of the evil Amerikan Empire are cutting edge and pristine, while the countercultural kids of the Rebel Alliance make do, jerry-rigging battered old equipment that somehow betokens a better future for the galaxy. In Alien (1979), the Nostromo is a cluttered workspace, strewn with personal belongings and trash; in Blade Runner, future LA is a monstrous accumulation of structures and artefacts about to decay and collapse, if they have not already done so. Tarkovsksy, amplified especially by Ridley Scott, set the tone of sf’s visual design for the ensuing decades. Mysteries and unease The Solaris station’s desuetude conveys more than a scientific programme past its heyday. It also signals malaise, a wrongness. To begin with, Tarkovsky establishes an air of mystery and ill ease conventionally enough. Kelvin expects to be greeted, possibly even briefed, on his arrival, but there is no one there to meet him. Snaut and Sartorius do not seem able to talk freely and, even when they do, missing information makes their meaning opaque. A piece of broken glass falls to the floor, seemingly without cause. Some objects, such as a child’s ball, are out of place, the presence of others – fresh fruit, flowers – is inexplicable. White-coated Sartorius disappears

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from sight as soon as he is glimpsed. The cadaverous Snaut and the film’s second mysterious girl are sensed or seen through the crack of an open door; the girl and the dwarf Sartorius keeps locked in his laboratory go unexplained. Others figures are present but unseen. Who sings in German to Snaut while twanging some kind of electromouth-harp? Who lurks in the hammock in Snaut’s quarters? Are they the same person? Are they responsible for the fresh injuries the cyberneticist bears whenever he reappears? When Kelvin first leaves Snaut’s room, a human ear is visible above the edge of the hammock, but Snaut closes the door before Kelvin – or we – can really take it in. On Gibarian’s door, there is a child’s drawing, a thickened red matchstick man with a blue leash around his neck. The torn paper is smudged with something yellow (a similar mucilage stains Sartorius’s coat). Under the picture is the word or chelovek, which means ‘man’ or person’ or ‘human being’, but the final letter is reversed. Its meaning is more of a conundrum than Redrum ever was. At intervals around the curved space between the station’s outer wall, its round windows overlooking the ocean, and the inner wall, behind which Sartorius’s laboratory is located, there are a number of strangely off-kilter rectangular columns. Dotted among them are what seem to be overinflated yellow balloons, stretched to the point where they almost lose their colour, but they are not the same shape as the balloon from the dacha and they look too solid, like pieces of a Chelovek

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giant chemistry set. The columns look more like vending machines than monoliths, but there is something not right about them. No objects are ever reflected in their metallic exteriors, and surface details that look like they might be reflections have no like-shaped objects nearby to reflect. The columns seem to angle out into some other space. A suppressed Escher-like topography. Portals into weird, non-Euclidean dimensions. Tarkovsky repeatedly disrupts any secure sense of space. When Snaut gestures to silence the singing in German, his upraised arm covers his face just as the word ‘Snaut’ is heard on the soundtrack, and for a moment it is unclear who said it (the next shot shows Kelvin outside the room). In the long single take of Kelvin’s second visit to Snaut, the two men circle around the circular room, the camera roaming with them. Although they occasionally share the frame, the two-shots are really just bridges as the camera switches several times from following one character to following the other. Eventually, it turns away from Snaut and comes to rest on Kelvin, who cannot logically be where the camera finds him; then, as he leaves the room, Snaut is not where the camera left him but sitting in a chair with its back to us. Similarly, after Hari’s suicide attempt, a single take shows Kelvin alone in his bed, her shawl draped like an angel’s wing over the other pillow. The camera follows him as he rolls away from it, and then as he rolls back, revealing Hari sleeping Portals

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peacefully alongside him, her shawl nowhere to be seen. Earlier, when Kelvin locked himself in his room to watch the second half of Gibarian’s message, the film switched from colour to black-andwhite, so as to match the recording. It is as if the two men occupy the same time and space and mode of being. Gibarian expresses concern about Sartorius and Snaut trying to get into his room. Moments later, there is hammering on the door, and the viewer is, like Kelvin, momentarily confused: are the scientists demanding entry to Kelvin’s room, or is the ruckus on the recording? Tarkovsky’s camerawork adds to the discomfort by implying the presence of an unseen watcher. As the newly arrived Kelvin steps from the landing bay, the camera, positioned at the opposite end of a narrow corridor, judders slightly then glides towards him as he makes his way forward between the stacks of equipment lining the walls. It stops before they can collide, and then backs away from him. Later, when Kelvin first spies the girl, the film cuts to a shot in which the camera, located down a narrow corridor at right angles to the main corridor, hastily tracks back as the girl, momentarily visible at the intersection, pauses and turns to see if he is following her. Whatever this presence is, it holds back, remains hidden, while it probes, tests, considers. When Kelvin first listens to Gibarian’s message, he hears something moving outside the room and throws himself against the

Other mysterious girl

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door to keep out whatever is there. Spooked, he ejects the tape. The camera tracks slowly back away from him as he turns, expecting to see something in the room. He pauses by the door. The camera approaches him again. He glances around, and the camera zooms in on the pitch-black porthole opposite him until it fills the screen. There is an ominous rumble, but it is unclear whether Artemev’s scoring is a diegetic noise. The darkness outside is impenetrable. Something lurks at the threshold of this reality: something like the thing that walks Hill House alone in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963); or like the antimatter Anti-God of John Carpenter’s pulp gem, Prince of Darkness (1987); or like the ancient creature bound within The Keep (1983), Michael Mann’s pile of unintentionally camp tosh. No wonder Gibarian left instructions to bury him on Earth, ‘in the ground, with the worms’.85 Ironically, while Tarkovsky strives to suppress the sciencefictionality of Solaris, another generic tendency emerges – the haunted-house story. Long concerned with the psychosexual repressions involved in the formation of families, such material is repeatedly played out in gothic fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). It is also a mainstay of supernatural horror films, such as The Uninvited (1944), The Innocents (1961), The Shining (1980) and Ju-on (2002).86 Because of sf’s gothic roots – Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or The Transformation, An American Tale (1798) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) have both been claimed as the genre’s founding text – hauntings and other manifestations of repressed material frequently crop up in the genre. For example, Monsters from the Id stalk Forbidden Planet (1956), and in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), a woman’s inchoate rage against patriarchy births murderous psychoplasmic infants. In Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972) teleplay, an archaic, prehuman power, recorded in ancient rock, manifests fatally in the

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present, while Bob Shaw’s Other Days, Other Eyes stories (1972) feature a material called ‘slow glass’, the atomic structure of which is so densely convoluted that light can take years to pass through it, bringing with it views of past events and long-dead people. In Event Horizon (1997), Paul W. S. Anderson’s gloriously bonkers remake of Solaris by way of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), an unspeakable entity invades our universe from some infernal elsewhere. The Solaris station, like many a gothic edifice, ramshackle mansion, hotel with a bloody history or suburban home built on an ancient burial ground, is a place where memories return in the form of phantoms. In such locations and in sf’s paraspatial equivalents – William Burroughs’s Interzone, the eponymous object of Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (1998), the zone of the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic (1972) and Tarkovsky’s Stalker – normal spatiotemporal, typographical, grammatical and/or narrative rules do not seem to apply. Maybe, then, the odd décor of the Solaris station is not just a rejection of the emphatic design typical of historical and sf movies. Perhaps all those artefacts that do not quite belong, that seem tied to a terrestrial past rather than the cosmic future, suggest another reality breaking through the surface of modernity, another repressed returning to remind us that history is continuity not a succession of radical ruptures.87 Visitors Mysterious figures started to appear on the Solaris station after the frustrated scientists bombarded the ocean with X-rays. As Berton’s testimony intimated, the ocean can pluck images from human minds and give them material form, and the yellow smudges on the chelovek picture and Sartorius’s coat suggest these visitors are formed from the sludge he saw. Testing the visitors’ blood – a notion taken from Lem, who perhaps half-remembered it from John W. Campbell, Jr’s ‘Who Goes There?’ (1938), upon which John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), which makes particularly spectacular use of it, is based – reveals that they are able to reconstitute themselves flawlessly. They are therefore

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effectively immortal. However, since they are made of neutrinos – very small, weakly interacting subatomic particles that thus pass through normal matter – rather than atoms, they can only remain stable and interact with normal matter because of a local energy field generated by Solaris. (Lem is insufficiently interested in human relationships to exploit the metaphorical potential of the neutrino, and Tarkovsky too uninterested in the science to recognise it.) Such human facsimiles are common in sf, from the automaton Olimpia in Hoffmann’s ‘Der Sandmann’ (1816) and the man-made creature in Frankenstein, whose ambiguous natures we are invited to ponder, to Metropolis’s robot-Maria and Dick’s sheep-dreaming androids, whose artificiality renders them not just non-human but inhuman. Lem seems to draw directly on Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) when Kelvin examines the visitors’ flesh; it is unblemished, infant-smooth, like the blank, generic pod-version of

Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Belicec blank

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Jack Belicec (King Donovan) that gradually takes on detail, waiting for him to fall asleep so it can replace him.88 (The ocean also waits for people to sleep before it constructs the visitors.) Although Don Siegel’s movie is often taken to be about communist subversion, it contains virtually nothing to support such a view. It is far more persuasive as a hysterical reaction to small-town and suburban conformity, to the emerging corporate culture of men in grey flannel suits, and to a postwar commodity culture that encouraged consumption of mechanically reproduced culture while heavily policing human desire. Like William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars (1953), a child’s nightmare of separation from suddenly cold and remote parents, Body Snatchers opens on to the Oedipal and sexual terrors – ‘I didn’t know the real meaning of fear until … until I’d kissed Becky’ – that underpin Kelvin’s relationship with his mother and Hari. Snaut tells Kelvin he is lucky the ocean sent him a duplicate of his dead wife: ‘After all, she’s a part of your past. What if it had been something you had never seen before but something you had thought or imagined?’ In Lem’s novel, the first visitor Kelvin sees appears as ‘a tall silhouette, barely distinguishable in the surrounding gloom’, and he is ‘frozen to the spot’ as a ‘giant Negress’ walks noiselessly towards him ‘with a smooth rolling gait’: I caught a gleam from the whites of her eyes and heard the soft slapping of her bare feet. She was wearing nothing but a yellow skirt of plaited straw; her enormous breasts swung freely and her black arms were as thick as thighs. … she did not give me as much as a glance. She went on her way, her grass skirt swinging rhythmically, resembling one of those steatopygous statues in anthropological museums. … Who was this monstrous Aphrodite?89

This unnamed woman’s inhuman size, monstrosity and semi-nudity, the emphasis on breasts and buttocks, the references to statuary, anthropology and museum displays evoke the Hottentot Venus and the race science and racial ideologies that were formed by and used

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to justify the late-Victorian Scramble for Africa. A curious figure, presumably intended to give some insight into Gibarian’s sexuality, she emerges as if from the unconscious of the text as a symptom of genre, a reminder that sf first developed in ‘precisely those [nations] that attempted to expand beyond their national borders in imperialist projects: Britain, France, Germany, Soviet Russia, Japan and the US’.90 Eastern bloc sf was not unaware of its colonial heritage, if not always as critical as Der schweigende Stern.91 A corrective, utopian effort adapted from Lem over a decade before Solaris, it is fastidious in its inclusion of Asian and African characters, albeit in minor roles still shaped by ethnic and gender hierarchies. Ivan Yefremov, one of the leading sf writers of the Soviet ‘thaw’, provides an even more intriguing example. His ‘Cor Serpentis’ (1958) is a direct rebuttal of one of American pulp sf’s most celebrated stories of encountering an alien species.92 In Murray Leinster’s ‘First Contact’ (1945), a human spaceship meets an alien spaceship in the depths of interstellar space, far from either of their homeworlds. Despite their vast biological differences, the crews collaborate in inventing a translation technology that enables them to communicate with each other. Both crews want to establish peaceful relations, technology exchanges and trade between worlds, but the aliens share the humans’ belief that, when two cultures meet, violent struggle inevitably follows as each tries to subordinate the other. (Leinster treats such conflict not as a product of human culture but as if it is a physical law of the universe.) In Yefremov’s response, interstellar explorers from the rational, humane communist utopia previously depicted in his groundbreaking Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale (1957) kill time while waiting to dock with the first alien spaceship ever encountered by reading Leinster’s story. They are outraged by its fundamental assumptions, including its ethnocentrism and American exceptionalism, and its projection of unsustainable and inherently violent capitalism into the Earth’s future and into the entire galaxy as if it were some kind of universal norm. For several pages, these

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socialist pacifists subject ‘First Contact’ to a damning ideology critique, then engage with the aliens on rather different terms. Solaris – in all its guises, and whatever else it might be – is a colonial adventure narrative about first contact with an alien world. Lem tends to suppress this aspect of his story, especially in contrast to Eden, his novel from just two years earlier. Of the three adaptations, only the one made for Soviet television retains the African giantess. Her massive shadow, emphasising wild and frizzy hair, looms on the corridor wall curving away from Kelvin (Vasili Lanovoy) before she disappears into Sartorius’s lab.93 Soderbergh replaces her with a copy of Gibarian’s son, Michael (Shane Skelton), and Sartorius with an African-American woman, Gordon (Viola Davis), onto whom is transposed the colonialist jingoism of Leinster’s characters. Terrified that the visitors might follow them to Earth, she urges Kelvin (George Clooney) not to assume that the ocean is ‘benign’: ‘Whatever it is, it’s not human, and I’m threatened by that. And I want to win, I want humans to win.’ Tarkovsky eschews overt references to colonialism, beyond the cowboy hat perched atop the anatomy dummy in the dacha and the colourful tribal mask in the station’s library. His version – with at most three people of colour, all of them in the background of the footage of Berton’s testimony – is a rather whitewashed affair. He replaces Lem’s African giantess with an equally troubling image. Gibarian’s visitor, a mysterious teenage girl, is first revealed in a gauzy soft focus. She is wearing an insubstantial, almost transparent, blue shirt, perhaps thrown over a swimming costume, her thighs naked. This troublingly eroticised dreamlike image becomes even more disturbing when one discovers that the actress is Tarkovksy’s stepdaughter, Olga Kizilova, who was twelve or thirteen years’ old at the time. Gibarian’s recorded message tells Kelvin that it ‘is not madness, it has something to do with conscience’. His meaning is unclear, but suggestive. Is he referring to the visitors in general or to the girl who haunts him? Is it her appearance or his suicide that is driven by his conscience? Is she a daughter he has left behind (if so,

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Kelvin knows nothing of her) or some other girl over whom he has reason to feel remorse? Is she, like the African giantess, a libidinal image, giving some clue to Gibarian’s sexuality? Beyond the recurring Oedipal imagery that surrounds Kelvin’s memories of his mother and wife, the film offers nothing to help us make sense of this mysterious girl. She leads Kelvin to the freezer where Gibarian’s corpse is laid out beneath a plastic sheet and then somehow disappears. Proof that the visitors can outlive those they visit, she is glimpsed just once more, then, like the girl at the dacha, vanishes from the film. Hari In Lem’s The Investigation (1959), the Chief Inspector asks ‘What if someone made a doll that could walk and talk …? And if he made a doll that could bleed? A doll that could experience unhappiness and death, what then?’94 Later, the detective leading the investigation semi-seriously postulates that the resurrection and disappearance of several corpses might be evidence of ‘“first contact” between Earth and a race of people from the stars’, with the dead bodies being reanimated by alien-designed microscopic organisms so as to act as probes, moving inconspicuously among humans, gathering information.95 The premise of an artificial woman investigating human culture can be found in sf films as varied as Derek Ford’s softcore The Sexplorer (1975), Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s feminist Teknolust (2002) and the Oscar-winning Her (2013), Spike Jonze’s interminably whiney hipster-bait. It is there in the lumbering Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), in the breathtakingly dumb Species movies (1995–2007) and their dreary arthouse knock-off, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2014). And, of course, in Solaris. After watching the second half of Gibarian’s message, Kelvin falls asleep on his bed. For almost a minute, the camera slowly tracks in and over his body, and then, accompanied by a low, almost subsonic rumble, the film switches to colour with a close-up of Hari’s brown hair. All the colours initially associated with her –

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the mustard, whites and browns of her dress96 and woollen shawl – recall the palette of the dacha scenes. She is disoriented, confused. She cannot find her shoes. She does not recognise herself in the blackand-white photograph Kelvin carries with him until she sees her reflection in the mirror. She thinks she has forgotten something. Her sleeve is torn, revealing a needle mark on her arm. When she tries to remove her dress she discovers the superficiality of the copy: it has laces with which to fasten it, but there is no actual opening. She will not let Kelvin out of her sight. He accuses her of being a child (which in a sense, new born, she is). He tricks her into boarding a rocket and launches her into space.97 Soon after, Snaut offers a veritable Cluedo list of ways to dispose of the visitors: ‘Narcotics, poisons, barbiturates … Don’t tell me you haven’t tried a rope or a hammer. Did you happen to throw the inkwell like Luther?’ The next morning, Hari is back. Rather, there is another Hari. She has some residual memory from the last iteration, because she knows to cut her dress open with scissors. She discards her shawl, not registering the identical one already lying there. When Kelvin sneaks out to conceal such evidence of the previous Hari, he closes the door behind him. There is a monstrous roaring noise – it might be extradiegetic, but it could as easily be a cry of inhuman anguish, deeper and more savage than the pod-people’s scream in Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – and Hari, unable Recognition

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to open the door, rips through it, gashing her arms on its jagged metal edges. She collapses, in slow motion, at Kelvin’s feet. In a single take, the camera follows him as he finds supplies with which to clean and bind her wounds, but when he returns they are already healing. Convinced of her ability to feel pain, and that this must mean something, he introduces her to the scientists as his ‘wife’. Sartorius mocks the meaninglessness of the ‘emotional contact’ he has established with her and thus with the ocean. As the film’s various photographs and video recordings suggest, the visitors are not the only ways in which memories and desires physically manifest. Steven Dillon emphasises this, arguing that The relationship between Kris and his dead, perfectly real wife [is] the archetypal relationship of the audience and screen at the cinema. There is photographic reality, sensual and emotional immersion, but also a concurrent knowledge that the reality is all along an artifice, a constructed hallucination. … Like cinema itself, she is a copy, a reproduction, an alien, a ghost.98

Kelvin shows Hari the film he brought from the dacha, a home movie in widescreen colour. A young Kelvin looks out over the valley Anna contemplated before his departure for Solaris, but here it is covered in snow. Against the white, his red trousers and red hat constitute the film’s most emphatic use of colour. There is a swing in the Break through

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Home movie

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foreground, and a small bonfire on the ground. Other footage is from the autumn, the trees turning from green to red. Kelvin’s father looks much younger, and his mother is about the same age as in the photograph; she smokes a cigarette and holds an ugly dog, an image under the influence of Leonardo’s ‘Woman with an Ermine’. There is another bonfire in the autumn scenes. Kelvin is older now. Hari, wearing the dress and the shawl in which her Solaris versions always appear, waves. Then, in medium shot, she turns to the camera. Her face is as enigmatic as his mother’s, but not as stern or disapproving or indifferent. She is hesitant, uncertain, but warm. Hari remembers that Kelvin’s mother ‘hated’ her and ‘kicked [her] out’. He tries to insist that his mother died before he met Hari, but he means this Hari, not the one from a decade ago whose memories she is beginning to share. He tells her ‘I went away, and we never saw each other again’ – it is unclear whether he is referring to Hari or his mother – and that when he was transferred to another city Hari did not want to accompany him. This conversation takes place in front of the bathroom mirror. The camera slowly tracks in until we can see only their reflections talking to each other. Afterwards, Hari hovers in front of the mirror, which is coated with condensation. To one side, water falls, like indoor rain, in front of a green wall. But it is only the shower. Hari fakes the ability to sleep. There is no sense of betrayal to her pretence, as when X (Willem Dafoe), the protagonist of Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel (1998), running frantically through his memory of events, imagines he has identified the moment when Sandii (Asia Argento) – her back to him, apparently asleep but her eyes wide open – crossed him. Instead, Hari’s deception evokes sympathy – she loves a man (but perhaps doubts the meaningfulness of these feelings) who will not tell her the truth. For that, she must rely on Sartorius, who fancies himself objective but is often merely cruel. ‘I’m not Hari,’ she tells Kelvin. ‘Hari is dead. She poisoned herself. I’m somebody else. … And her, the other one, what happened

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to her?’ He presumes she is referring to the original Hari, not the one he rocketed into space, and explains how after a blazing row she killed herself, using drugs he had brought home from work. He confesses to fearing the worst but staying away. He did not want to seem weak, to lose, if she did not mean her suicide threats. He saved face, but not his wife. ‘She probably sensed that I didn’t really love her,’ he explains, ‘but now I do’. Hari has plentiful antecedents in Russian literature, including the spectral women in Alexander Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’ (1833), Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ (1835), Mikhail Lermontov’s ‘Shtoss’ (1841) and Ivan Turgenev’s ‘The Phantoms’ (1864), and in sf, including the artificial women of Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Ève future (1886), Metropolis and Lester Del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy’ (1938). Commonly, male characters – and often their authors – attribute about as much individual agency to these figures as Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) mistakenly assume, in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), their female creation will possess. One of the most disturbing versions of this is Terence Fisher’s Four Sided Triangle (1953), based on William F. Temple’s 1939 novel. Wealthy heir, Robin Grant (John Van Eyssen), and penniless orphan, Bill Leggott (Stephen Murray), are research scientists who discover a method of duplicating matter. Unknown to each other, they are both in love with Lena Maitland (Barbara Payton). Having finally become a success, Bill is about to declare his feelings when she and Robin announce their engagement. Heartbroken, Bill hits upon a scheme to duplicate her. And she agrees! However, the newly created Helen is a perfect copy of Lena at the moment of duplication and thus also in love with Robin. Bill’s unwanted romancing, which only make her thwarted desires more unbearable, prompts her to attempt suicide. So he suggests wiping her brain. And she agrees! More recently, Natali’s Splice (2009) – in which Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) create a rapidly developing, ultimately humanoid, creature from animal and human DNA – runs through all the possible

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Bride of Frankenstein and Four Sided Triangle: subjects with agency

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Oedipal permutations of this troubled family relationship, including betrayal, attempted murder, psychological and physical abuse, incest, paedophilia and bestialism. While Solaris is not quite so melodramatically pronounced in its treatment of Hari, it certainly shares the often violent misogyny underlying these cultural traditions. Moreover, its depiction of Hari seems at times to match quite closely the view of women Tarkovsky voiced in his 1984 interview with Irena Brezna. For Lem, the situation posed by the visitors, especially Hari, is an opportunity to probe what is meant by identity. In his 1964 futurological-philosophical treatise Summa Technologiae, unavailable in English until 2013, Lem sets in motion two sciencefictional thought experiments – a man who has Mr Smith’s recorded identity overlaid on his own, and a man whose identity is completely replaced by that of Mr Smith, who died during the recording procedure – to distinguish between the continuity of existence and the immutability of personality as variable criteria that come into play when one considers which, if either, of these men is the ‘real’ Mr Smith.99 As this indicates, although Lem’s fiction draws upon the full panoply of sf tools and effects, it is typically driven by quite abstract scientific and philosophical concerns. Tarkovsky, however, responded to something rather different in Lem’s Solaris. Tarkovsky acknowledged that the novel is primarily concerned with ‘the human mind encountering the unknown’, but felt that the narrative through which this central idea is explored enabled it simultaneously to present ‘the problem of overcoming, of convictions, of moral transformation on the path of struggle within the limits of one’s own destiny’.100 For Tarkovsky, Solaris is about the moral leap of a human being in relation to new discoveries in scientific knowledge. And overcoming the obstacles on this path leads to the painful birth of a new morality. … Kelvin’s price is the face to face encounter with the materialization of his own conscience. But Kelvin doesn’t betray his moral position [and consequently rises] to a higher moral level.101

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This point is made most clearly in the library scene. Snaut argues that humanity is uninterested in the cosmos, and merely wants to extend Earth everywhere, replacing the radical otherness of the universe with mirrors for ourselves. Sartorius disagrees, insisting that ‘Man was created by nature so he could learn her ways. In his endless search for the truth, man is condemned to knowledge.’ Hari intervenes: of them all, Kelvin alone has ‘behaved humanely’ in the ‘inhuman conditions’ in which they find themselves. To refute her, all Sartorius – standing in front of a reproduction of the Venus de Milo – can do is berate: ‘You’re not a woman and you’re not a human being. … You’re just a reproduction … a copy, a matrix.’ She admits this but adds, ‘I am becoming a human being.’ She can already exist independently of Kelvin and ‘feel just as deeply as you’.102 However, when Hari attempts to drink a glass of water, she cannot. It might be that she is too overwrought, or that, as with her dress’s design flaw, the ocean has not completed her. (Spielberg borrows this idea in A.I. – Artificial Intelligence [2001], another film about a son obsessed with his mother, when the android David [Haley Joel Osment] attempts to eat dinner so as to prove he is as human and meaningful as his parent’s real son; not designed to consume food, he malfunctions.) Soon after, Kelvin finds Hari, herself a copy, brooding over a reproduction of Brueghel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’. Her viewpoint shots of details from the painting incorporate home-movie footage of the young Kelvin, as she, like Blade Runner’s photograph-clutching Rachel (Sean Young), internalises someone else’s externalised memories as her own. The station experiences a brief period of freefall, and Kelvin and Hari float together in the air. Although this moment prefigures the magical levitations of Mirror, Nostalgia and The Sacrifice, and recalls the soaring lovers of Marc Chagall’s ‘Au Dessus de la Ville’, ‘Les Amoureux aux Marguerites’, ‘The Lovers’ and ‘Three Candles’, it is oddly awkward, far from ecstatic.103 It feels too stilted for Tarkovsky’s celebration of love and morality, and might better illustrate Lem’s sense of a universe utterly indifferent to human values. Its failure to

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Freefalling: Solaris and The Mirror

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express reconciliation or romantic consummation is underscored by the next scene, which begins with a clatter and a crash. A metal flask falls to the deck. Hari has drunk liquid oxygen. Her corpse is frosted, grey-haired. Her frozen clothes – just Kelvin’s blue shirt – crinkle and crack as she starts to warm up in the recirculating air. Vapour begins to rise from the eroticised corpse. She is not the absurdly bosomed replacement fembot of Bryan Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975), but the shirt, now merely wet and thus transparent, reveals her naked breasts.104 She jolts, as if taking her first breath after drowning. Her body arches, contorts, as she returns to life, her eyes unfocused. Her almost machinic movements become more organic, more human. Dead again

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This resurrection is echoed in the fits experienced by the Stalker’s wife (Alisa Freyndlikh) and The Sacrifice’s Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), and also in the death of Blade Runner’s Pris (Daryl Hannah). Posed as a mannequin beneath a gossamer sheet, she lures Deckard (Harrison Ford) into approaching too closely. She bursts into violent action, almost killing him before he can shoot her. Her fatally wounded body spasms uncontrollably, thrashes noisily. The lighting strobes rapidly, reminding the viewer once more of film flickering through a projector, transforming inanimate images into the appearance of life, while – like Solaris – reducing a woman to an eroticised body, a deathly image. Lem had little use for women in his fiction, considering them ‘an unnecessary complication’: to bring women on board a spaceship … and not draw from this any narrative conclusions, whether sexual, erotic, emotional, or any other, would be a form of falsehood. It would not make sense to have the crew stay in isolation, like two convents, one male, the other female, would it? But if I have a certain narrative and cognitive design to execute, then an introduction of women can be inconvenient, and even contrary to my plan.105

He defends this position on the grounds of his ‘functional’ approach to literature: ‘if I need a female character then I will introduce one’.106 However, the only other example he offers is ‘The Mask’ (1976), in which the female protagonist ‘of wondrous beauty’ is actually ‘a kind of basilisk, monster, demon, embodied in an automated machine’107 – hardly a persuasive defence against charges of misogyny. Tarkovksy is no better. While he finds it ‘difficult to deny’ a woman’s subjectivity, he believes it should be subordinated to and dissolved into ‘the world of the man that [she] is involved with’.108 Her love for him should manifest as ‘self-sacrifice’, and such ‘total devotion to the man’ is the only way for women to ‘find their dignity’.109 Subscribing to the crudest of biological determinisms and sexual binaries, he insists that ‘the woman is totally different from the

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man’ and, because of her unique nature, she ‘can’t exist independently of the man’ without becoming ‘no longer natural’.110 It is perhaps significant, therefore, that, after Hari begins to demonstrate her independence from Kelvin, she is driven to kill herself. Twice. The second time in a manner that ensures she cannot return. At least Soderbergh’s Rheya (Natascha McElhone) gets to point out that she is only suicidal because that is how Kelvin remembers her. The dream Kelvin is sick, delirious, bedridden, feverishly recalling the dacha. Mirrored images, overlaid, make him look distant, as if he is separating out into multiple frail versions of himself. Hari nurses him, but she cannot be heard over the discordant soundtrack. Suddenly, she looks directly at the camera, and a dazzling ball of light – like a projector bulb – is superimposed over her face, and then floats away like a bubble. On the other side of the room, she removes her shawl, and the panning camera finds Kelvin’s mother completing the same gesture. She exits the frame, and is replaced by Hari, who crosses to the bathroom. The panning camera finds another Hari by the window, then another Hari, and then another, who looks directly at the camera as yet another Hari walks past. In black-and-white, Kelvin sits up, but the bed from which he rises is in the dacha, dotted with items from the station and much of it covered, like Gibarian’s corpse, in plastic sheeting. The switch from colour stock helps momentarily to confuse the identity of the woman he embraces – it is his mother, but thanks to her hair and dress she resembles Hari. They talk desultorily, but she seems a lot more human, more intimate, than she did in the home movie and the photograph. She talks like his mother, but looks young enough to be his daughter, or maybe his lover. In an oddly masturbatory gesture, she pours water over his dirty, perhaps bloody, arm and tenderly washes it. He weeps. She disappears into another room. The camera follows her into the darkness, pauses, tracks back out into Kelvin’s room on the station.

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He wakes calling Hari’s name, but she has gone for good, destroyed at her own request by a device Snaut and Sartorius built. Islands have started to form on the ocean. There will be no more visitors. Tarkovsky often blurs female characters together – wife and mother in Solaris and Mirror, wife and lover in Nostalgia and The Sacrifice – as if, like Don Quixote’s Dulcinea, their existence is ‘dependent on the state of mind of their male partners’.111 The tension between Hari and Kelvin’s mother, the banishment of the former by the latter, Kelvin’s failure to resist this maternal pressure or unambiguously to take his wife’s part – all these things led to Hari’s death. His dream multiplies Hari, confuses her with his mother, and returns us once more to these Oedipal tensions. Again, they are resolved with Hari’s death. Elsewhere, with rare, if unnoticed, insight into the masculinist egocentricity that governs his gender politics, Tarkovsky acknowledges that the reason we mourn is ‘not because we feel bad’ for those who have died ‘but because we feel bad for ourselves. Because we can no longer be forgiven.’112 Loving mother

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The dacha again, or not We descend through clouds, fly over the ocean. Kelvin, borrowing the final words of Lem’s novel, ponders. Should he return home to pick up life anew, as best he can? Should he remain on the station, among the things he shared with Hari, hoping for fresh contact with the ocean? Passive as ever, he decides ‘the only thing left’ for him ‘is to wait’, even though he does not ‘know what for – new miracles?’ In the light reflected from Solaris, a plant is growing in the tin he brought from Earth. Floating weeds. Kelvin looks at the lake, approaches it. The surface is frozen, water has become solid; in the distance, a suggestion of mist, of water turned to vapour. The dog runs towards him, past a smoking bonfire. Seen from inside the dacha, through a window on which condensation has formed, he approaches. Water is falling indoors. He peers through the window. Water falls on his father, and steam rises from him as he turns towards his son. They meet in the doorway. In a shot recalling Rembrandt’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’, Kelvin falls to his knees to embrace his father, just as earlier, in the library, he had clung to Hari. The camera cranes up past the treetops, through clouds, and up until the dacha looks more like a model of itself. (Spielberg borrows this shot, too, at the end of Minority Report [2002]). The camera continues to rise, climbing away, until it reveals that the dacha is on an island in the Solaris ocean. The soundtrack resonates discordantly. It is the sound of weird horror. The clangour of monstrous otherness. Divine indifference. Lem’s novel ends with Kelvin on Solaris, approaching the ocean. A wave enveloped my hand without touching it, so that a thin covering of ‘air’ separated my glove inside a cavity which had been fluid a moment previously, and now had a fleshy consistency. I raised my hand slowly, and …

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Homecoming

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an outcrop of the wave … rose at the same time, enfolding my hand in a translucent cyst with greenish reflections. I stood up, so as to raise my hand still higher, and the gelatinous substance stretched like a rope, but did not break. The main body of the wave remained motionless on the shore, surrounding my feet without touching them, like some strange beast patiently waiting for the experiment to finish.113

Is there mutual curiosity here, or just the impossibility of contact between utterly alien entities? Is Kelvin merely projecting human intentionality onto the cosmos? Soderbergh’s version reworks this image, changing its meaning. Kelvin, about to board an escape vessel with Gordon, imagines his life if he returns to Earth – a hollow semblance, haunted by the idea that he misremembered Rheya and everything else about their relationship, and thus lost their second chance. He decides to stay on the station. The copy of Gibarian’s son approaches, reaches out his hand, and Kelvin grasps it. He finds himself reunited forever with a simulacral Rheya on a simulacral Earth. But what is the meaning of Tarkovksy’s conclusion? As Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie ask: Has Kris really physically returned home, or is he still on Solaris, with the ocean compensating for his loss of Hari by giving him a different kind of emotional fulfilment? … Or is the scene largely metaphorical, providing the kind of imaginative reconciliation found so often at the end of Tarkovsky’s films, suggesting that Kris has at last learned to express, and accept, love and forgiveness? Another possibility … is to see his whole journey as purely subjective and interior.114

There is at least one other possibility. Tarkovsky several times suggested that Stalker’s Zone is ‘a product of the Stalker’s imagination’115 and, more bluntly, ‘the Zone doesn’t exist’.116 It does not seem unreasonable then to suggest that, in Solaris, despite the gravitational pull of its images, the Earth does

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not exist, either. The film starts with Kelvin emerging from some kind of stupor in the midst of a watery environment that is constantly suspended between states – solid, liquid, gas – and that is precisely where he ends up. The film offers no compelling reason, beyond narrative convention, to believe in the continuity of his existence. Like Hari, he repeatedly appears and disappears; he is there, and then not there, and then there again. Similarly, there is no reason to believe his fantasy that there is some world other than Solaris, a world called Earth. Like the characters in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht (1973) miniseries117 and Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998), he is epiphenomenal, just a virtual by-product of some other process. Or maybe not. Johnson and Petrie note that while Kelvin’s dream reveals much, it resolves nothing.118 The same is true of the film Tarkovsky made, and of the dream the ocean dreams.

Reaching out

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Notes 1 Aldo Tassone, ‘Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky (on Stalker)’, trans. Vasiliki Katsarou, in John Gianvito (ed.), Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), p. 55. 2 Andrei Tarkovsky, Time within Time: The Diaries 1979–1986, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 204. 3 Ian Christie, ‘The Long Road to Freedom’, Sight and Sound vol. 18 no. 1 (2008), p. 10. 4 The EP sheet notes: ‘“Solaris” is an interpretation of the film by Andrej Tarkovsky … and the description of asymmetriads found in the book upon which the movie is based. It is dedicated to the memory of Tarkovsky [and] Edward Artemiev.’ 5 Ian Christie, ‘Against Interpretation: An Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky’, in Gianvito, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 67. 6 Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), pp. 10–12. On the early critical reception of Mirror, see Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 131–6. 7 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 9. 8 James Gunn, ‘The Tinsel Screen: Science Fiction and the Movies’, in Jack Williamson (ed.), Teaching Science Fiction: Education for Tomorrow (Philadelphia, PA: Owlswick, 1980), p. 205.

9 See Peter Swirski, ‘Solaris! Solaris. Solaris?’, in Peter Swirski (ed.), The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), pp. 172–9. 10 Tony Mitchell, ‘Tarkovsky in Italy’, in Gianvito, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 75. 11 Jerzy Illg and Leonard Neuger, ‘“I’m Interested in the Problem of Inner Freedom …”’ at http://people.ucalgary. ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/ interview.html. 12 Anindita Banerjee, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), p. 2. 13 Tarkovsky, Time within Time, pp. 21, 23. 14 Ibid., p. 34. 15 Ibid., p. 306. 16 Roger Ebert, ‘Dune’ (1 January 1984), at http://www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/dune-1984. 17 Tarkovsky, Time within Time, p. 11. 18 Naum Abramov, ‘Dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on the Screen’, trans. Jake and Yulia Mahaffy, in Gianvito, Andrei Tarkovsky, pp. 35–6. 19 See http://www.exisle.net/mb/ index.php?/topic/24263-does-old-sci-fihave-a-future/. 20 See, for example, http://www.ew. com/ew/article/0,,1537626,00.html; http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/ BSG-FNL-return-3254550.php; or http://www.theguardian.com/culture/ 2009/mar/19/battlestar-galacticareview. 21 Stanisław Lem, Eden, trans. Marc E. Heine (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 37.

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22 Ibid., p. 194. 23 Stanisław Lem, ‘The Twentieth Voyage’, The Star Diaries, trans. Michael Kandel (New York: Avon, 1977), p. 185. 24 Stanisław Lem, ‘Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case – with Exceptions’, trans. Franz Rottensteiner, Microworlds (London: Mandarin, 1991 [1973]), p. 46. 25 Ibid., pp. 53, 60. 26 Ibid., pp. 72, 68, 96. 27 Ibid., p. 59. 28 Stanisław Lem, ‘Philip K. Dick: A Visionary among the Charlatans’, trans. Franz Rottensteiner, Microworlds, p. 107. Such views did not endear Lem to America’s sf establishment. In 1975, a well-known sf writer asked why someone so relentlessly critical of American sf had been awarded honorary membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) professional organisation. Three months later, the SFWA Forum reprinted Lem’s essay ‘Looking down on Science Fiction: A Novelist’s Choice for the World’s Worst Writing’. Outrage ensued. A technicality in the SFWA bye-laws was unearthed – by, it seems, that visionary among the charlatans – and Lem was stripped of a membership he no longer seemed to want. See ScienceFiction Studies nos 11, 12 and 13, at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/soldouts. htm. An admittedly ill Dick blamed Lem for the currency restrictions preventing the expatriation of Polish royalties for Ubik (1969), and worried it was a trick to lure him behind the Iron Curtain. In a letter to the FBI, Dick depicted Lem as ‘a total Party functionary’, or ‘a composite committee’, commanding a conspiracy

intent on using the Marxist criticism of Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin to take over sf and destroy ‘its free exchange of views and ideas’. Within a couple of weeks, Dick relented: Lem was merely some kind of inhuman psychotic. Paul Williams (ed.), The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1974 (Novato: Underwood-Miller, 1991), pp. 235–6, 256–7. 29 She is called Hari in the Polish original. 30 Johnson and Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 98. 31 Natasha Synessios, ‘Introduction’ to Solaris in Andrei Tarkovksy, Collected Screenplays, trans. William Powell and Natasha Synessios (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), pp. 130–1. 32 Christie, ‘Against Interpretation’, p. 66. 33 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 145. 34 Soon after arriving at Mosfilm, Kurosawa – who would soon direct Dersu Uzala (1975), a rather different kind of colonial adventure, for the studio – visited the set, accompanied by Sergei Bondarchuk. Even the director of the eight-hour, $100 million War and Peace (1966) was taken aback at the price tag (the equivalent of ¥600 million in Kurosawa’s account). Kurosawa reports that on a later visit, after previewing the finished film, he and Tarkovsky went out drinking vodka. The inebriated Tarkovsky sang the theme from Seven Samurai (1955) at the top of his voice, Kurosawa joining in with equal gusto. Kurosawa Akira, ‘Tarkovksy and Solaris’ at http://people.ucalgary.ca/ ~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/ Kurosawa_on_Solaris.html.

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35 Ibid., pp. 49–50. There was also an instruction to cut the scene in which Kelvin ‘is walking around with no trousers on’. 36 Apparently, the major cuts were ‘a conversation between Kris and his father that might have clarified the[ir] strained relationship’ and ‘a lengthy scene in the specially constructed “mirror room”’, some of which is included on the Criterion DVD. Johnson and Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 272. 37 Tarkovsky, Time within Time, p. 67. 38 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 39 Zbigniew Podgórzec, ‘Solaris, Lem, Fellini, and Polanski’ at http://people. ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/ TheTopics/On_Solaris_2.html. 40 Ibid., p. 53. 41 Natasha Synessios notes the ‘limited number of items on the film in his personal archive’ – just some ‘photographs’, ‘two work diaries’ and ‘the montage sheets’, but not even ‘the literary or shooting scripts’. Synessios, ‘Introduction’, p. 133. 42 Geoff Andrew, ‘Again, with 20% More Existential Grief’, Guardian (13 February 2003) at http://www. theguardian.com/film/2003/feb/13/ features.georgeclooney. 43 He had been rehearsing the material for some time; in his no-budget Schizopolis (1996), he plays multiple versions of the same character and his wife (played by Soderbergh’s ex-wife, Betsy Brantley) takes up with each of them in turn. 44 Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 25. 45 Andrew, ‘Again’, n.p. 46 Soderbergh’s version struggled to find an audience – the teaser trailer presented it as brooding sf, the main trailer as a romantic melodrama – and took less than $15 million in the US despite opening on 2,406 screens. Many were put off by its languid pace – an average shot length (ASL) of eleven seconds, when standard Hollywood ASLs were between two and five seconds. (Tarkovsky’s version has an ASL of twenty-eight seconds, with some shots lasting three or four minutes.) See Geoff King, Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 141–89. 47 See http://fanedit.org/ifdb/ component/content/article/79-faneditlistings/fanfix/604-solaris-station. 48 Ibid. 49 See also the short film about the Russian alphabet ‘ “ ” , 2014” at http://rutube.ru/video/ c5f21f8ec23fb8905b61baa87e87a095/. 50 Michael Ciment, Luda Schnitzer and Jean Schnitzer, ‘The Artist in Ancient Russia and the New USSR’, trans. Susana Rossberg, in Gianvito, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 19. 51 Ibid. 52 Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2008), p. 53. 53 Ibid., p. 55. 54 Ciment et al., ‘The Artist in Ancient Russia and the New USSR’, p. 26. 55 Western critics often understood Andrei Rublev in a similar manner, with

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Michael Ciment describing it, in ‘Dossier Positif, the French magazine that championed Tarkovsky from the early stages of his career’, as ‘a “transparent allegory” of [his] own situation in the Soviet Union’. Sean Martin, Andrei Tarkovsky (Harpenden: Kamera, 2011), p. 90. 56 The montage sheets call him ‘Dick’, and describe her as ‘the girl from next door’. Tarkovsky, Collected Screenplays, p. 135. 57 It reworks a partial account of Berton’s experience that Lem’s Kelvin reads in a supplement to the first Solaristics Annual, and curt passages from Berton’s log and transcripts of the Commission of Inquiry he finds in a collection of fringe Solaristics. 58 Ciment et al., ‘The Artist in Ancient Russia and the New USSR’, p. 25. 59 Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy [“Little Hans”]’, trans. Louise Adey Huish, ‘The Wolfman’ and Other Cases (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 113. 60 Ibid. 61 See Barbara Creed, The MonstrousFeminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 88–104. 62 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Flamingo, 1984), p. 9. 63 Christian Metz, ‘Photography and Fetish’, October no. 34 (1985), p. 83. 64 Ibid., p. 84. 65 Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 37.

66 Banerjee, We Modern People, pp. 10, 162. 67 Ibid., p. 14. 68 William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Grafton, 1986), pp. 112–13. 69 Julia Shpinitskaya, ‘Solaris by A. Tarkovsky: Music-Visual Troping, Paradigmatism, Cognitive Stereoscopy’, Transcultural Music Review no. 10 (2006) at http://www.redalyc.org/articulo. oa?id=82201016. 70 Shpinitskaya, ‘Solaris by A. Tarkovsky’, n.p. 71 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, pp. 159, 163. 72 Elizabeth Fairweather, ‘Andrey Tarkovsky: The Refrain of the Sonic Fingerprint’, in James Wierzbicki (ed.), Music, Sound and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 39. 73 Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (London: Arrow, 1968), p. 201. 74 Synessios, ‘Introduction’, pp. 131, 132. 75 The association of Japan with futurity is now commonplace, but for early nauchnaia fantastika eastward movement away from Europe offered an alternative route into modernity that ‘would simultaneously recover the lost roots of Russian identity and revitalize its prospects for the future’ (Banerjee, We Modern People, p. 31) – a sensibility complicated, if not exactly contradicted, by the 1905 defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. 76 Other sf film-makers were luckier. Expo ’70 is threatened with kaiju mayhem in Yuasa Noriaki’s Gamera tai Daimaju Jaiga (1970) and is the location for the climax of M. G. Ramachandran’s Ulagam Sutrum Valiban (1973). It also

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inspired the spaceship design in Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) and appears in Tsutsumi Yukihiko’s 20-seiki shônen trilogy (2008–9). 77 It is unclear whether the viewer is supposed to recognise Japan, but Tarkovsky is so uninterested in worldbuilding that it is unlikely he imagined the occasional kanji characters adorning buildings and signs implied geopolitical or cultural shifts. 78 ‘Have the flight to Solaris’ is one of the thirty-three changes demanded of his first cut. Tarkovsky, Time within Time, p. 50. 79 A lot of Tarkovksy’s characters stumble or trip – Andrei Rublev’s Boriska (Nikolai Burlyaev), Stalker’s Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn), Nostalgia’s Andrei (Oleg Yankovsky)and The Sacrifice’s Alexander (Erland Josephson) – while others levitate in Solaris, Mirror, Nostalgia and The Sacrifice. 80 Gideon Bachmann, ‘Encounter with Andrei Tarkovsky’, trans. Tanya Ott and Saskia Wagner, in Gianvito, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 9. 81 Ekran, ‘The Burning’, trans. Jake and Yulia Mahaffy, in Gianvito, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 14. 82 Abramov, ‘Dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on the Screen’, p. 36. 83 Tarkovsky argues that Kubrick’s approach ‘transforms the emotional foundation of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth’. Abramov, ‘Dialogue’, p. 36. 84 In the follow-up series, Space: 1999 (1975–7), costumes were the work of avant-garde fashion designer Rudi Gernreich.

85 Most first-contact films that imitate Solaris or 2001 – The Black Hole (1979), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Petlya Oriona (1982), The Abyss (1989), Sphere (1998), Mission to Mars (2000) – suffer from a deadening literalism. They need to explain every last thing, often with supposedly startling, but really just startlingly pedestrian, revelations. Grigor Kromanov’s ‘Hukkunud Alpinist’ Hotel (1979), adapted by the Strugatskys from their novel, and Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth (1985), succeed in maintaining a sublime ambiguity to encountering otherness, but only John Carpenter’s grotesquely sublime The Thing (1982) gets close to unlocking the terror of the immanent. 86 In Festen (1988), which pretends not to be a haunted-house story, is Snoot, the imaginary childhood friend of the abused Christian (Ulrich Thomsen), a subtitler’s mistranscription of Snaut? 87 Or perhaps, as J. Hoberman and Gideon Bachmann suggest, it is Mirror that is struggling to emerge. ‘Between Two Worlds’, in Gianvito, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 89. 88 The film is based on Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1955), which has a similar premise to Dick’s ‘The FatherThing’ (1954). 89 Stanisław Lem, Solaris, trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 31. 90 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, ‘Science Fiction and Empire’, Science Fiction Studies no. 90 (2003), p. 231. Cf. John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008) and

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Mark Bould, Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 146–95. 91 For example, in 1974, Albert Mkrtchyan and Leonid Popov adapted Zemlya Sannikova (1926), one of Vladimir Obruchev’s very popular, Verne-like lost-world novels. 92 1990, an album by Hungarian band Solaris, includes the track ‘A kigyó szíve’, which is a literal translation of Yefremov’s Latin title. 93 Although an unfortunate glimpse of her arm does not clarify whether she is played by an actor of colour, it does reveal that she is just regular sized, but lit strongly from a low angle. 94 Stanisław Lem, The Investigation, trans. Adele Milch (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. 46. 95 Ibid., p. 137. 96 The dress is inspired by Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, a reproduction of which appears in Mirror. 97 The rocket launch was filmed on the day Kurosawa visited the set. 98 Steven Dillon, The Solaris Effect: Art and Artifice in Contemporary American Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 8, 10. 99 Stanisław Lem, Summa Technologiae, trans. Joanna Zylinska (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 219–21. 100 Abramov, ‘Dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on the Screen’, p. 33. 101 Ibid. 102 If, by ‘you’, she means Sartorius specifically, it might not be that much of an accomplishment. However, this moves the film more deeply into

Dickian territory, where the capacity for empathy trumps species category as the true marker of the human. 103 This is in part a consequence of technological constraints. Banionis and Bondarchuk were seated on one crane with the camera mounted on another, both of them being operated by hand. The first crane had to be carefully managed so as not to obscure the background decoration, but at the same time, Yusov notes, ‘A certain dissonance (lack of parallelism) in the movements of both cranes was necessary’ – and this, too, needed careful coordination so as to keep the first crane from becoming visible (Hiroshi Takahashi, ‘To Understand the Essence of Creation’ at http://people. ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/ TheTopics/yusov.html). 104 Is this scene post-coital? Kelvin is just wearing a jacket over his underpants. 105 ‘Reflections on Literature, Philosophy, and Science’, in Peter Swirski (ed.), A Stanisław Lem Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 56. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Irena Brezna, ‘An Enemy of Symbolism’, trans. Zsuzsanna Pál, in Gianvito, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 106. 109 Ibid., p. 108. 110 Ibid., p. 110. 111 Nariman Skakov, The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), p. 89. Cervantes’ novel appears several times in the film.

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112 Tonino Guerra, ‘Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky’, trans. Deborah Theodore, in Gianvito, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 47. 113 Lem, Solaris, p. 212. 114 Johnson and Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 105. 115 Tassone, ‘Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky’, p. 61.

116 Laurence Cossé, ‘Portrait of a Filmmaker as a Monk-Poet’, in Gianvito, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 169. 117 Based, as is The Thirteenth Floor (1999), on Daniel F. Galouye’s Counterfeit World (1964). 118 Johnson and Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 19.

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CREDITS Solaris / [Solyaris] Soviet Union/1972 Director Andrei Tarkovsky Screenplay Fridrikh Gorenshteyn Andrei Tarkovsky Based on the novel ‘Solaris’ by Stanislaw Lem Director of Photography Vadim Yusov Editor Lyudmila Feyginova Art Director Mikhail Romadin Original Music Eduard Artemev Production Companies Mosfilm Artistic Association of Writers and Cinema Workers – Unit Four Production Manager Vyacheslav Tarasov Associate Director Yury Kushneryov Assistant Directors A. Ides Larisa Tarkovskaya Mariya Chugunova

Trainee Assistant Director N. Mann Script Editors N. Boyarova L. Lazarev Chief Lighting Technician E. Paramanov Camera Operator Evgeny Shvedov Assistant Camera Yuri Nevsky Vladimir Shmyga Still Photography Vadim Murashko Special Effects Mosfilm F/X Unit Special Effects Designer A. Klimenko Special Effects Camera V. Sevostyanov Set Decorators S. Gavrilov V. Prokofev Costume Designer Nelli Fomina Make-up Artist Vera Rudina Soundtrack ‘Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ’ (Choral Prelude in F Minor) by Johann Sebastian Bach Sound Semyon Litvinov

Laboratory Mosfilm Engineering Consultant Lev Lupichev Science Consultant I. Shklovsky uncredited Co-editor Nina Marcus Music Editor Raisa Lukina CAST Natalya Bondarchuk Hari Kelvin, Kris’s wife Donatas Banionis Kris Kelvin, psychologist Jüri Järvet Doctor Snaut, cybernetics Vladislav Dvorzhetsky Henri Berton, pilot Nikolai Grinko Nick Kelvin, Kris’s father Anatoli Solonitsyn Doctor Sartorius, astrobiologist Olga Barnet Kris’s mother Vitalik Kerdimun Henri Berton’s son Olga Kizilova Doctor Gibarian’s guest Tatyana Malykh Kris’s niece

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Aleksandr Misharin Shanakhan, commission chairman Bagrat Oganesyan Professor Tarkhe Tamara Ogorodnikova Anna, Kris’s aunt Sos Sargsyan Doctor Gibarian, physiologist Yulian Semyonov scientific symposium chairman V. Statsinsky young Kris Kelvin Valentina Sumenova Georgy Teykh Professor Messenger

uncredited Raimundas Banionis adolescent Kris Kelvin Artyom Karapetyan French scientist at symposium Production Details Filmed from March to October 1971 on location in Zvenigorod (Russia), Osaka, Akasaka & Tokyo (Japan) with interiors filmed at Mosfilm Studios (Moscow, Russia) 35mm (Sovscope), 2.35:1, colour and black & white, mono. Released in both 35mm and 70mm formats

Release Details Soviet premiere on 20 March 1972; general theatrical release on 5 February 1973. running time: 167 minutes UK theatrical release by VPS – Visual Programme Systems in May 1973. BBFC certificate: A (no cuts). running time: 166 minutes 13 seconds/14,960 feet US theatrical release by Magna Distribution Corporation on 6 October 1976. MPAA rating: PG. running time: 132 minutes Credits compiled by Julian Grainger