Solaris (1972 film)

Solaris
Soviet film poster
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Produced by Viacheslav Tarasov
Written by
Based on Solaris
by Stanisław Lem
Starring
Music by Eduard Artemyev
Cinematography Vadim Yusov
Edited by Lyudmila Feiginova
Distributed by Mosfilm
Release date
  • May 13, 1972 (1972-05-13) (Cannes)
  • March 20, 1972 (1972-03-20) (USSR)
Running time
 166 minutes[1]
Country Soviet Union
Language
  • Russian
  • German
Budget SUR 1,000,000[2] (about $829,000 in 1972 USD)

Solaris (Russian: Солярис, tr. Solyaris) is a 1972 Soviet science fiction film based on Stanisław Lem's novel of the same name published in 1961. The film was co-written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.[3][4] The film is a meditative psychological drama occurring mostly aboard a space station orbiting the fictional planet Solaris. The scientific mission has stalled because the skeleton crew of three scientists have fallen into separate emotional crises. Psychologist Kris Kelvin travels to the Solaris space station to evaluate the situation only to encounter the same mysterious phenomena as the others.

In loyalty to the novel's complex and slow-paced narrative, Tarkovsky wanted to bring a new emotional and intellectual depth to the genre, viewing most of western science fiction as shallow.[5] The ideas which Tarkovsky tried to express in this film are further developed in Stalker (1979).[6]

The critically successful Solaris features Natalya Bondarchuk (Hari), Donatas Banionis (Kris Kelvin), Jüri Järvet (Dr. Snaut), Vladislav Dvorzhetsky (Henri Berton), Nikolai Grinko (Kris Kelvin's Father), Olga Barnet (Kris Kelvin's Mother), Anatoli Solonitsyn (Dr. Sartorius), and Sos Sargsyan (Dr. Gibarian); the music is by Johann Sebastian Bach and Eduard Artemyev. At the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, it won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury, the FIPRESCI prize and was nominated for the Palme d'Or.[7] The film is often cited as one of the greatest science fiction films in the history of cinema.[8][9]

Plot

Psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is being sent on an interstellar journey to evaluate whether a decades old space station should continue to study the oceanic planet Solaris. He spends his last day on Earth with his elderly father (Nikolai Grinko) and retired pilot Berton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky). Years earlier, Berton had been part of an exploratory team at Solaris but was recalled when he described seeing a four-meter-tall child on the surface of the water. This was dismissed as a hallucination by a panel of scientists, but now that the remaining crew members are making similarly strange reports, Kris's skills are needed.

Upon his arrival at Solaris Station,[10][11] a scientific research station, none of the three remaining scientists bother to greet Kelvin, and he finds the space station in dangerous disarray. He soon learns that his friend among the scientists, Dr. Gibarian (Sos Sargsyan), has killed himself. The two surviving crewmen—Snaut and Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn)—are uncooperative and evasive. Kelvin catches fleeting glimpses of others aboard the station, who were not part of the original crew. He also finds that Gibarian left him a rambling, cryptic farewell video message, warning him about the station.

After a fitful sleep, Kelvin is shocked to find Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), his late wife, in his sleeping quarters. She is unaware of how she got there. Terrified by her presence, Kelvin launches the replica of his wife into outer space. Snaut explains that the "visitors" began appearing after the scientists conducted illegal nuclear experiments in a desperate attempt to understand the planet's nature.

That evening, Hari reappears in his quarters. This time Kelvin calmly accepts her and they fall asleep together in an embrace. Hari panics when Kelvin briefly leaves her alone in the room and injures herself. But before Kelvin can give first aid, her injuries spontaneously heal before his eyes. Sartorius and Snaut explain to Kelvin that Solaris created Hari from his memories of her. The Hari present among them, though not human, thinks and feels as though she were. Sartorius theorizes that the visitors are composed of "neutrino systems" but that it might still be possible to destroy them through use of a device known as "the annihilator". Later, Snaut proposes beaming Kelvin's brainwave patterns at Solaris in hopes that it will understand them and stop the disturbing apparitions.

In time, Hari becomes independent and is able to exist away from Kelvin's presence. She learns from Sartorius that the original Hari had committed suicide ten years earlier. Sartorius, Snaut, Kelvin and Hari gather together for a birthday party, which evolves into a philosophical argument, during which Sartorius reminds Hari that she is not real. Distressed, Hari kills herself again by drinking liquid oxygen, only to painfully resurrect after a few minutes. On the surface of Solaris, the ocean begins to swirl faster into a funnel.

Kelvin becomes ill and goes to sleep. He dreams of his mother as a young woman, tending to wounds on his body that spontaneously heal. When he awakens, Hari is gone; Snaut reads her farewell note, in which she describes how she petitioned the two scientists to destroy her. Snaut then tells Kelvin that since they broadcast Kelvin's brainwaves into Solaris, the visitors had stopped appearing and islands began forming on the planet surface. Kelvin debates whether or not to return to Earth or to remain with Solaris.

Kelvin meets with his father at their country home. It is later revealed to be on an island in the Solaris ocean.

Production

Writing

In 1968, the director Andrei Tarkovsky had two motives for cinematically adapting the Polish science fiction novel Solaris (1961) by Stanisław Lem: firstly, he admired Lem's work. Secondly, he needed work and money, because his previous film, Andrei Rublev (1966), had gone unreleased, and his screenplay, A White, White Day, had been rejected (even though in 1975 it would be realised as The Mirror). A film of a novel by Stanisław Lem, a popular and critically respected writer in the USSR, was a logical commercial and artistic choice.[12] Tarkovsky and Lem collaborated and remained in communication about the cinematic adaptation of the novel Solaris. With Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Tarkovsky co-wrote the first screenplay in the Summer of 1969; two-thirds of it occurred on Earth. The Mosfilm committee disliked it and Lem got furious over this unacceptably drastic alteration of his novel. The final screenplay yielded the shooting script which has less action on Earth, and Kelvin's marriage to his second wife, Maria, was deleted from the story.[12]

A detail of The Hunters in the Snow (1565), by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a thematic reference.

In the literary Solaris, Lem describes science's inadequacy in allowing humans to communicate with an alien life form, because certain forms, at least, of sentient extra-terrestrial life may operate well outside of human experience and understanding. In the cinematic Solaris, Tarkovsky concentrates upon Kelvin's feelings for his wife, Hari, and the impact of outer space exploration upon the human condition. Dr. Gibarian's monologue [from the novel's sixth chapter] is the highlight of the final library scene, wherein Snaut says, "We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors". Unlike the novel, which begins with psychologist Kris Kelvin's spaceflight, and occurs entirely on Solaris, the film shows Kelvin's visit to his parents' house in the country before leaving Earth for Solaris. The contrast establishes the worlds in which he lives – a vibrantly living Earth versus an austere, closed-in space station orbiting the planet Solaris – demonstrating and questioning space exploration's impact upon the human psyche.[13]

The set design of Solaris features paintings by the Old Masters. The interior of the space station is decorated with full reproductions of the 1565 painting cycle of The Months (The Hunters in the Snow, The Gloomy Day, The Hay Harvest, The Harvesters, and The Return of the Herd), by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and details of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and The Hunters in the Snow (1565). The scene of Kelvin kneeling before his father and the father embracing him alludes to The Return of the Prodigal Son (1669), by Rembrandt. The references and allusions are Tarkovsky's efforts to give the young art of cinema a historic perspective of centuries, to evoke the viewer's feeling that cinema is a mature art.[14]

The film references Tarkovsky's earlier 1966 film Andrei Rublev by having an icon by Andrei Rublev being placed in Kelvin's room.[15] It thus forms the second part, together with Tarkovsky's next film The Mirror which was made in 1975 and which references Andrei Rublev by having a poster of the film being hanged on a wall,[16] in a series of three films by Tarkovsky referencing Andrei Rublev.

The cast

Initially, Tarkovsky wanted his ex-wife, Irma Raush, as Hari. After meeting Swedish actress Bibi Andersson in June 1970, however, he decided that she was a better actress for the role. Wishing to work with Tarkovsky, Andersson accepted her salary in rubles. Nevertheless, Natalya Bondarchuk was ultimately cast as Hari. Tarkovsky had met her when they were students at the State Institute of Cinematography. It was she who had introduced the novel Solaris to him. Tarkovsky auditioned her in 1970 but decided she was too young for the part. He instead recommended her to director Larisa Shepitko who cast her in You and I. Half-a-year later, Tarkovsky screened that film and was so pleasantly surprised by her performance that he decided to cast Natalya Bondarchuk as Hari after all.[17]

Tarkovsky cast Lithuanian actor Donatas Banionis as Kris Kelvin, the Estonian actor Jüri Järvet as Dr. Snaut, the Russian actor Anatoly Solonitsyn as Dr. Sartorius, the Ukrainian actor Nikolai Grinko as Kelvin's father, and Olga Barnet as Kelvin's mother. Earlier, the director had worked with Solonitsyn, who had played Andrei Rublev (1966), and with Nikolai Grinko, who appeared in Andrei Rublev and Ivan's Childhood (1962). Tarkovsky thought Solonitsyn and Grinko would need extra directorial assistance.[18] After filming was almost completed, Tarkovsky rated actors and performances thus: Bondarchuk, Järvet, Solonitsyn, Banionis, Dvorzhetsky, and Grinko; he also wrote in his diary that “Natalya B. has outshone everybody”.[19]

Filming

In the summer of 1970, the USSR State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino SSSR) authorized the production of Solaris, with a length of 4,000 metres (13,123 ft), equivalent to a two-hour-twenty-minute running time. The exteriors were photographed at Zvenigorod, near Moscow; the interiors were photographed at the Mosfilm studios. The scenes of space pilot Berton driving through a city were photographed in Japan, in September and October 1971, at Akasaka and Iikura in Tokyo. The original plan was to film futuristic structures at the World Expo '70 but the trip was delayed. The shooting began in March 1971 with cinematographer Vadim Yusov who also photographed Tarkovky's previous films. They quarreled so much on this film that they ended up never working together again.[20][21] The first version of Solaris was completed in December 1971.

Solaris locale: Akasaka, Tokyo, the future city that space pilot Henri Berton traverses in his car.

The Earth, the sensual source of life, and the sterile space station orbiting the planet Solaris, are contrasted with lively images of underwater plants, fire, snow, rain and other natural phenomena. A similar contrast appears at story's end on Solaris with Kelvin's "Winter" visit to his father's house, featuring a frozen pond surrounded by bare trees. The dead scenery of this island on Solaris contrasts with the earlier, Summer pond scenes of long-bladed green grasses or ferns gently floating in the water current underneath blooming trees. The Solaris ocean was created with acetone, aluminium powder, and dyes.[22] Mikhail Romadin designed the space station as lived-in, beat-up and decrepit rather than shiny, neat and futuristic. The designer and director consulted with scientist and aerospace engineer Lupichev, who lent them a 1960s-era mainframe computer for set decoration. For some of the sequences, Romadin designed a mirror room which enabled the cameraman, Yusov, to hide within a mirrored sphere so as to be invisible in the finished film. Akira Kurosawa, who was visiting the Mosfilm studios just then, expressed admiration for the space station design.[23]

In January 1972, the State Committee for Cinematography requested editorial changes before releasing Solaris. These included a more realistic film with a clearer image of the future and deletion of allusions to God and Christianity. Tarkovsky successfully resisted such major changes, and after a few minor edits Solaris was approved for release in March 1972.[24]

Music

The soundtrack of Solaris features Johann Sebastian Bach's chorale prelude for organ, Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 639, played by Leonid Roizman, and an electronic score by Eduard Artemyev. The prelude is the central musical theme of Solaris. Tarkovsky initially wanted the film to be devoid of music and asked composer Artemyev to orchestrate ambient sounds as a musical score. The latter proposed subtly introducing orchestral music. In counterpoint to classical music as Earth's theme is fluid electronic music as the theme for the planet Solaris. The character of Hari has her own subtheme, a cantus firmus based upon J. S. Bach's music featuring Artemyev's composition atop it; it is heard at Hari's death and at story's end.[14]

Reception and legacy

Solaris premiered at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. In the USSR, the film premiered in the Mir film theater in Moscow on February 5, 1973. Tarkovsky did not consider the Mir cinema the best projection venue.[25] Despite the film's narrow release in only five film theaters in the USSR,[26] the film nevertheless sold 10.5 million tickets.[27] Unlike the vast majority of commercial and ideological films in the 1970s, Solaris was screened in the USSR in limited runs for 15 years without any breaks, giving it cult status . In the Eastern Bloc and in the West, Solaris premiered later. In the United States, a version of Solaris that was truncated by 30 minutes premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City on October 6, 1976.[28]

Although Stanisław Lem worked with Tarkovsky and Friedrich Gorenstein in developing the screenplay, Lem maintained that he "never really liked Tarkovsky's version" of his novel.[29] Tarkovsky wanted a film story based on the novel but artistically independent of its origin. However, Lem opposed any divergence of the screenplay from the novel. Lem went as far as to say that Tarkovsky made Crime and Punishment rather than Solaris, omitting epistemological and cognitive aspects of his book.[30] Tarkovsky claimed that Lem did not fully appreciate cinema and that he expected the film to merely illustrate the novel without creating an original cinematic piece. Tarkovsky's film is about the inner lives of its scientists as human beings. Lem's novel is about the conflicts of man's condition in nature and the nature of man in the universe. For Tarkovsky, Lem's exposition of that existential conflict was the starting point for describing the inner lives of the characters.[31]

In the autobiographical documentary Voyage in Time (1983), Tarkovsky says he viewed Solaris as an artistic failure because his film did not transcend genre as he believed his film Stalker (1979) did due to the required technological dialogue and special effects.[32] M. Galina in the 1997 article Identifying Fears called this film "one of the biggest events in the Soviet science fiction cinema" and one of the few works that does not seem anachronistic nowadays.[33]

A list of "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" compiled by Empire magazine in 2010 ranked Tarkovsky's Solaris at No. 68.[34] In 2002, Steven Soderbergh wrote and directed an American adaptation of Solaris, which starred George Clooney.

Salman Rushdie calls Solaris "a sci-fi masterpiece", and has urged that: "This exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious, this great examination of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love, needs to be seen as widely as possible before it's transformed by Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron into what they ludicrously threaten will be 2001 meets Last Tango in Paris. What, sex in space with floating butter? Tarkovsky must be turning over in his grave."[35]

Film critic Roger Ebert compared the 2011 film Another Earth with Solaris by noting that Another Earth "is as thought-provoking, in a less profound way, than Tarkovsky's Solaris, another film about a sort of parallel Earth."[36]

In an example of life imitating art, Natalya Bondarchuk (Hari) revealed in a 2010 interview that she fell in love with Tarkovsky during the filming of Solaris and, after their relationship ended, became suicidal. She claims her decision was partly influenced by her role as such a woman in the film Solaris.[37]

Adam Curtis's 2015 documentary film Bitter Lake includes scenes from this film. The metaphor is that just as the planet influences the cosmonauts who try to influence the planet, there have been cross influences among Afghanistan and its Soviet, American and British invaders.

The film was selected for screening as part of the Cannes Classics section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.[38]

The film also has a "Certified Fresh" rating of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 54 reviews with an average rating of 8.5 out of 10, with the consensus reading, "Solaris is a haunting, meditative film that uses sci-fi to raise complex questions about humanity and existence."[39]

Home media

Solaris was released on LaserDisc in Japan in 1986.[40]

On May 24, 2011, The Criterion Collection released Solaris on Blu-ray Disc.[5][41] The most noticeable difference from the previous 2002 Criterion DVD release[42] was that the blue and white tinted monochrome scenes from the film were restored.[43]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "SOLARIS (A)". British Board of Film Classification. 16 April 1973. Retrieved 21 March 2016.
  2. ↑ Staff. "Solaris (1972)". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved October 27, 2013.
  3. ↑ Lopate, Phillip. "Solaris: Inner Space". Criterion. Retrieved March 17, 2013.
  4. ↑ Le Cain, Maximilian. "Andrei Tarkovsky". Senses of Cinema. Retrieved March 17, 2013.
  5. 1 2 Lopate, Phillip. "Solaris". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved December 14, 2007.
  6. ↑ Solovyeva, O. N.; Oboturov A.B. (2002). "Genesis and a human in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky" (in Russian). Vologda State Pedagogical University. Retrieved May 7, 2010.
  7. ↑ "Festival de Cannes: Solaris". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved April 14, 2009.
  8. ↑ "Blade Runner tops scientist poll". BBC News. August 26, 2004. Archived from the original on August 4, 2012. Retrieved July 3, 2012.
  9. ↑ "Top 10 sci-fi films". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on August 4, 2012. Retrieved July 3, 2012.
  10. ↑ Lem, Stanislaw (1961). Solaris (ebook – 2011 English translation). Solaris Bill Johnston (translator). Retrieved July 28, 2013.
  11. ↑ Lem, Stanislaw; Tarkovsky, Andrei (1972). "Solaris – 1972 (film script – English subtitle times => "00:31:52,985" + "00:44:05,350" – [zipped SRT-file])". Solaris (1972 film). Retrieved July 28, 2013.
  12. 1 2 Tarkovsky, Andrei; edited by William Powell (1999). Collected Screenplays. London: Faber & Faber.
  13. ↑ Lem, Stanisław (November 2002). Solaris. Harvest Books. ISBN 978-0-15-602760-1.
  14. 1 2 Artemyev, Eduard. Eduard Artemyev Interview (DVD). Criterion Collection.
  15. ↑ Jones, Jonathan (February 12, 2005). "Out of this world". The Guardian. Retrieved August 18, 2014.
  16. ↑ Cairns, David (July 16, 2011). "Mirror". Electric Sheep. Retrieved August 18, 2014.
  17. ↑ Bondarchuk, Natalya. Natalya Bondarchuk Interview (DVD). Criterion Collection.
  18. ↑ Tarkovsky, Andrei; transl. by Kitty Hunter-Blair (1991). Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986. Calcutta: Seagull Books. pp. 5–6 (June 13, June 15 & July 11, 1970). ISBN 81-7046-083-2.
  19. ↑ Tarkovsky, Andrei; transl. by Kitty Hunter-Blair (1991). Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986. Calcutta: Seagull Books. pp. 44–45 (December 4, 1970). ISBN 81-7046-083-2.
  20. ↑ Tarkovsky, Andrei; transl. by Kitty Hunter-Blair (1991). Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986. Calcutta: Seagull Books. pp. 38–39 (July 12 & August 10, 1970). ISBN 81-7046-083-2.
  21. ↑ Yuji, Kikutake. "Solaris locations in Akasaka and Iikura, Tokyo". Retrieved January 15, 2008.
  22. ↑ Yusov, Vadim. Vadim Yusov Interview (DVD). Criterion Collection.
  23. ↑ Romadin, Mikhail. Mikhail Romadin Interview (DVD). Criterion Collection.
  24. ↑ Tarkovsky, Andrei; transl. by Kitty Hunter-Blair (1991). Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986. Calcutta: Seagull Books. pp. 49–55 (January 12 & March 31, 1972). ISBN 81-7046-083-2.
  25. ↑ Tarkovsky, Andrei; translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair (1991). Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986. Calcutta: Seagull Books. pp. 67–70 (January 29, 1973). ISBN 81-7046-083-2.
  26. ↑ Trondsen, Trond. "The Movie Posters: Solaris". Retrieved September 3, 2018.
  27. ↑ Segida, Miroslava; Sergei Zemlianukhin (1996). Domashniaia sinemateka: Otechestvennoe kino 1918–1996 (in Russian). Dubl-D.
  28. ↑ Eder, Richard (October 7, 1976). "Movie Review: Solaris (1972)". The New York Times.
  29. ↑ Lem, Stanisław. "Solaris". Retrieved January 14, 2008.
  30. ↑ S.Beres'. Rozmowy ze Stanislawem Lemem, Krakow, WL, 1987, s.133–135.
  31. ↑ Illg, Jerzy; Leonard Neuger (1987). "Z Andriejem Tarkowskim rozmawiają Jerzy Illg, Leonard Neuger (The Illg_Neuger Tarkovsky Interview (1985))". Res Publica. Warsaw. 1: 137–160. Archived from the original on January 16, 2008. Retrieved January 16, 2008.
  32. ↑ Tarkovsky, Andrei. Voyage in Time (DVD). Facets.
  33. ↑ Galina, M. S. (1997). "Strangers among us. Identifying fears" (PDF). Social Sciences and Modernity (in Russian). ecsocman.edu.ru. p. 160. Retrieved May 7, 2010.
  34. ↑ "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema". Empire.
  35. ↑ Rushdie, Salman. Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002. New York: Random House, 2002, p. 335.
  36. ↑ Ebert, Roger (July 27, 2011). "Another Earth (PG-13)". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved February 11, 2012.
  37. ↑ Pleshakova, Anastasia (March 31, 2010). "Natalya Bondarchuk: "After an affair with Tarkovsky I baptized"". Komsomolskaya Pravda. Retrieved July 25, 2014.
  38. ↑ "Cannes Classics 2016". Cannes Film Festival. 20 April 2016. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
  39. ↑ Solaris at Rotten Tomatoes
  40. ↑ "14 Posters: Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) - Dinca". August 4, 2010.
  41. ↑ "Solaris Blu-ray".
  42. ↑ "Solaris DVD – FAQ".
  43. ↑ Gallagher, Ryan (February 13, 2011). "Criterion Announces New Solaris DVD & Blu-ray For May 2011, Selling Current Stock At 65% Off".

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