Friday, February 24, 2017
055 - Solaris, 1972, Soviet Union. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky.
I had a feeling this would end badly.
So says Kris Kelvin.
He is the psychologist sent up to the space station to find out what is going wrong with the cosmonauts. They have been up there for years, and they have made almost no progress. Meanwhile, they seem to be languishing in some kind of emotional languor.
And seeing things.
Years ago, space pilot Berton went up and saw what was going on. When he came back and described his findings to the oversight committee, the bureaucratically minded members dismissed him as having had hallucinations.
He insists he did not.
He shows film as evidence. It was foggy that day. They complain of seeing only clouds. They refuse to believe him. One member posits a theory but is overruled.
Berton saw people. Or maybe not people. Maybe apparitions of people. Or reproductions of people. Coming out of the planet's Ocean.
The Ocean is a brain.
It thinks.
It can sense your memories and reproduce them.
It can make them come to life and join you.
And never, ever leave.
This is the opposite of the sea of forgetfulness. In Christian theology, when God forgives you he places even the memory of your sin into the sea of forgetfulness. It is as though it has never happened. There is no record of it.
In the Solaris universe, the memory never goes away.
The Solaris Ocean is the sea of the memory of your guilt. It takes those memories and makes them come alive and live with you.
Yikes.
Berton warns Kelvin before the psychologist goes up to the station. But Kelvin does not believe him. Kelvin insults him.
They are at Kelvin's parents' house. Kelvin has been standing by the pond. Watching the tall grass ripple beneath the water. Allowing the ministrations of nature to refresh him. Ruminating while holding a metal box. I wonder what is inside it.
Now they are in the house. Berton shows footage of the hearing to Kelvin and his parents. Kelvin remains skeptical. He approaches science coldly. His father and Berton approach it with morality. His father reprimands him. Kelvin was rude to Berton.
And he did not heed the warning.
Too late now. Now we are on the space station. Kelvin has his own apparition. His ex-wife Hari.
She is not a real person.
But she wants to be.
When we watched World on a Wire (047, February 16), we listed other stories where a created thing wants to become a real person. Here is another one.
The real Hari committed suicide ten years ago. This Ocean-generated version thinks she is the real one. She does not understand that from which she has come. She wants Kelvin to love her.
He is spooked. He is with a ghost. He tries to get rid of her. He places her in a rocket and launches it from the space station.
She comes back. She hurts herself. She heals. She will kill herself. She will come back to life.
Dr. Sartorius will comment, "I can never get used to all these resurrections."
Imagine Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. No matter what he does, he wakes up again the next day. In his case it is the same day, repeated endlessly. Here, it is not the same day. It is the next day. But Hari wakes up again, never dying. Always reborn.
Dr. Sartorius should be familiar to you. He is played by the actor Anatoliy Solonitsyn. Solonitsyn played Andrei Rublev in yesterday's film of the same name. Solonitsyn has range. Tarkovsky is loyal.
And while we are at it, let us note Nikolay Grinko, another Tarkovsky regular. He played Gryaznov in Ivan's Childhood from two days ago, and he played Danill, one of the other painters, in yesterday's Andrei Rublev. Today he is Kris Kelvin's father. Not that he can help Kris. Kris has his own mind. Grinko would go on to play in Tarkovsky's next two films, The Mirror and Stalker.
Remember that languor from which the cosmonauts were languishing?
Well, it gets to Kris Kelvin too. He may be the psychologist, but he is also human, and he cannot escape the hold of this strange force.
He falls in love with Hari.
That is not good though. He is made of atoms. She is made of neutrinos. Miscegenation has run amok. What would their children look like? Some groups just should not come together.
Forgive the sarcasm. It really is a problem. She is after all not real, and she is haunting him.
Sartorius warns him, "The more she is with you the more human she will become."
Maybe that will solve it.
Maybe it will make things worse.
What will come of Kris Kelvin? Will he stay on board the space station to be with Hari? Will he return to Earth? Will he explore Solaris?
Or will he go home as a prodigal to his father?
To the memory of the father he ignored and left behind?
* * * * *
Every frame a Bruegel.
The space station above the planet Solaris is replete with art work. Those cosmonauts are connoisseurs. They have a Greek bust, a Venus de Milo, a butterfly collection (all of which mysteriously are also on display in the home of Kris Kelvin's father), and Bruegels, Bruegels everywhere.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, that is. With a specific focus on The Hunters in the Snow (1565, oil on wood).
Is this a commentary on father-son relationships? Does Pieter Bruegel the Younger come into play?
In painting, when you show only a part of a painting, like cropping it, boxing off one section to focus on that section alone, you call it a "detail."
The camera will slowly pan across the painting The Hunters in the Snow, creating literally in every frame a detail, a different detail in every frame, of this painting.
* * * * *
The 1970s and Science Fiction
In 1968 Stanley Kubrick released his classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Was that movie responsible for launching a decade of science fiction films? Was it already popular in the literature? Was it due to the advances in technology at the time? Was it the space race that culminated in man's landing on the moon on July 20, 1969?
Whatever it was, people had science fiction, and space travel in particular, on the brain.
Here is a list of science fiction films that came out during the decade of the 1970s. What other titles could be added to the list?
1968
2001: A Space Odyssey, UK/USA. Dir. Stanley Kubrick.
Planet of the Apes, USA. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner.
1970
Colossus: The Forbidden Project, USA. Dir. Joseph Sargent.
Crimes of the Future, Canada. Dir. David Cronenberg.
1971
The Andromeda Strain, USA. Dir. Robert Wise.
The Omega Man, USA. Dir. Boris Sagal.
THX 1138, USA. Dir. George Lucas.
1972
Solaris, Soviet Union, Russian. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky.
Slaughterhouse Five, USA. Dir. George Roy Hill.
Silent Running, USA. Dir. Douglas Trumbull.
1973
World on a Wire, Germany. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Soylent Green, USA. Dir. Richard Fleischer.
Fantastic Planet, France. Dir. Rene Laloux.
Sleeper, USA. Dir. Woody Allen.
Westworld, USA. Dir. Michael Crichton.
Idaho Transfer, USA. Dir. Peter Fonda.
1974
Zardoz, Ireland/USA. Dir. John Boorman.
The Terminal Man, USA. Dir. Mike Hodges.
Dark Star, USA. Dir. John Carpenter.
Phase Four, UK/USA. Dir. Saul Bass.
1975
The Stepford Wives, USA. Dir. Bryan Forbes.
Rollerball, UK/USA. Dir. Norman Jewison.
A Boy and His Dog, USA. Dir. L.Q. Jones.
1976
Logan's Run, USA. Dir. Michael Anderson.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, UK. Dir. Nicolas Roeg.
Futureworld, USA. Dir. Richard T. Heffron.
1977
Star Wars, USA. Dir. George Lucas.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, USA. Dir. Steven Spielberg.
Capricorn One, USA. Dir. Peter Hyams.
The Incredible Melting Man, USA. Dir. William Sachs.
1978
Superman, USA. Dir. Richard Donner.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, USA. Dir. Philip Kaufman.
1979
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, USA. Dir. Robert Wise.
Alien, USA. Dir. Ridley Scott.
Mad Max, Australia. Dir. George Miller.
Stalker, Soviet Union. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky.
Quintet, USA. Dir. Robert Altman.
The Black Hole, USA. Dir. Gary Nelson.
Starcrash, USA. Dir. Luigi Cozzi.
Time After Time, USA. Dir. Nicholas Meyer.
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