Directed by …Andrei Tarkovsky
Writing credits…Fridrikh Gorenshtein …Andrei Tarkovsky
The Solaris mission has established an orbiting base above a planet covered by water that appears to host some kind of intelligence, but the details are hazy and very secret. Kris is sent out to try and find out what is out there and whether to keep the mission or cancel He finds the station run-down and the two remaining scientists cold and secretive. When he also encounters his wife who has been dead for seven years, he has to come to terms with the baffling nature of the alien intelligence.
Natalya Bondarchuk....Khari
Donatas Banionis....Kris Kelvin
Jüri Järvet....Dr. Snauth
Vladislav Dvorzhetsky....Berton
Nikolai Grinko....Kelvin’s father
Anatoli Solonitsyn....Dr. Sartorius
Sos Sarkisyan....Dr. Gibaryan (as S. Sarkisyan)
Olga Barnet....Mother (as O. Barnet)
rest of cast listed alphabetically
Vitalik Kerdimun (as V. Kerdimun)
Olga Kizilova (as O. Kizilova)
Tatyana Malykh
Aleksandr Misharin (as A. Misharin)
Bagrat Oganesyan (as B. Oganesyan)
Tamara Ogorodnikova....Aunt Anna
Yulian Semyonov....Chairman at scientific conference) (as Yu. Semyonov)
V. Statsinsky
Valentina Sumenova (as V. Sumenova)
Georgi Tejkh (as G. Tejkh)
Directed by
Andrei Tarkovsky
Writing credits…Fridrikh Gorenshtein
Stanislaw Lem…(novel Solaris)
Andrei Tarkovsky
Produced by
Viacheslav Tarasov....producer
Original music by….Eduard Artemyev
Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov (uncredited)
Non-original music by Johann Sebastian Bach
(from “Chorale prelude in F minor”)
Cinematography by…Vadim Yusov
Film Editing by…Lyudmila Feiginova
Production Design by…Mikhail Romadin
Costume Design by…Yelena Fomina (as Nelli Fomina)
Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Maria Chugunova....third assistant director (uncredited)
A. Ides....assistant director
Yuri Kushneryov....assistant director
Larisa Tarkovskaya....assistant director
Other crew
V. Murashko....photographer
E. Paramanov....chief lighting technician
E. Shvedov....camera operator
Production Companies
Creative Unit of Writers & Cinema workers
Mosfilm [ru]
Unit Four
Solaris is controlled and released by the Russian Cinema
Council. The British Artificial Eye release contains exactly the same discs;
with the very pronounced copy write flash ‘Not to be sold in territories of
the former USSR’
After going back to the past with the war film Ivan's Childhood (1962) and the
medieval epic Andrei Rublev (1966), Andrei Tarkovsky's third feature Solaris
(1972) looked forward into the future, producing what would be his last film to
fit within a clearly recognisable generic format (his last four features Mirror,
Stalker, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice would be altogether more inward-looking
and personal).
Solaris is often linked with 2001: A Space Odyssey, though this is more out of
convenience than anything else, as comparisons are somewhat superficial when
examined closely. True, they're both long, slow, unusually serious and
philosophical sci-fi films made by major auteur directors who had never tackled
the genre before, both based on work by important sci-fi writers (Arthur C
Clarke, Stanislaw Lem), and both achieve impressive effects on what were
surprisingly large budgets given their challenging form and subject, but 2001
has a self-consciously cosmic ant’s-nest view of humanity, while Solaris
focuses very much on individual memories and emotions.
This is underlined in the opening scenes, which serve both to set up the basic
situation and, rather more importantly in retrospect, to establish a bedrock of
memories that psychologist Chris Kelvin (Donatas Banionas) can draw on once
he’s ensconced on the space station that is the setting for the rest of the
film. Tarkovsky shoots his home life with his customary attention to tactile
detail, with seemingly banal elements later given massive emotional and
existential force once the action has shifted to the sterile space station - the
rustle of torn strips of paper in a ventilation shaft is a poor substitute for
wind on leaves.
Stanislaw Lem and fans of his novel were highly critical of these scenes (which
don’t appear in the book) and on a first viewing they seem slow and barely
relevant – but when set against the film as a whole it becomes clear that
they’re a crucial part of Tarkovsky’s attempts to find a visual and aural
approach to the novel’s dense philosophy and the key themes of memory and
renewal. By showing us Kelvin’s past life, as opposed to merely describing it
or flashing back to it, we can appreciate its solidity, its earthiness – and
it makes the magnificent final sequence that much more uncanny.
The bulk of the film takes place in orbit around the mysterious planet Solaris.
The astronaut Burton, recently returned from Solaris, is convinced that it
harbours life of some kind, but apart from a massive, swirling ocean there seems
little concrete evidence. Kelvin, whose job is to report on the state of mind of
its surviving inhabitants Snaut (Yuri Yarvet) and Sartorius (Tarkovsky favourite
Anatoly Solonitsin), is initially convinced that they’ve gone quite mad, but
their stories begin to make sense when Kelvin encounters his wife Hari (a
haunting performance by Natalya Bondarchuk in every sense), who committed
suicide ten years earlier.
Although the rational and logical part of Kelvin knows that she’s essentially
a ghost (or, as Snaut puts it, a neutrino-based projection created by the sea of
Solaris from Kelvin’s memories), he can’t get her out of her mind, and
despite harrowing reconstructions of distressing moments in their lives – most
notably her death – she keeps returning to him, her constant reappearances
becoming increasingly disturbing as it becomes clear that she knows that she’s
not the real Hari but she can’t do anything about it.
The fundamental problem shared by the inhabitants of the space station is that
of an inability to communicate, not just with the Solaris Sea and each other but
also with themselves, their lives, their culture and their feelings. Science,
philosophy and religion are constantly cited as evidence, yet they provide no
real answers, merely endless speculation – even supposedly reliable memories
in the form of home movies lay themselves open to reinterpretation.
Everything that Solaris throws at Kelvin, Snaut and Sartorius challenges their
perceptions and forces them to look at their world with fresh eyes – and much
the same is true of Tarkovsky’s approach to staging the film. Solaris is not,
to put it mildly, for people to whom the term “science fiction” means
high-speed action-packed escapism – although its glacial pace is eminently
justified by the context, if you’re not prepared to surrender to its images
and absorb its ideas the chances are you’ll merely be bored and baffled.
Indeed, Tarkovsky himself was never that keen on Solaris - “It’s the worst
of my films. I don’t like it. I don’t remember it.” - though this would
appear to be more because of a troubled and difficult shoot than any serious
artistic failing. True, there’s a certain awkwardness in his approach to the
genre – it’s a lot less confident than the later Stalker, for instance –
but there are sequences as memorable as anything else in his output: the
crosscutting of Kelvin and Hari’s weightlessness with slow pans across the
Breughel painting, Burton’s drive through the city, with endless
spaghetti-junction motorways forming a landscape quite as intricate and hypnotic
as anything in 2001, the recurring motif of characters (Burton, Kelvin and Hari)
watching their younger selves on video, the constant reoccurrence of images and
(especially) sounds to link seemingly disparate scenes.
These moments give Solaris its majesty and show what the cinema is capable of in
the hands of one of its supreme masters – and also reveal just how feebly
un-ambitious most sci-fi cinema is by comparison.
I was quite concerned at the decision to split Solaris across two DVDs, but it
quickly becomes obvious why - as disc one is billed as running 80 minutes and
disc two for 89 minutes – It's clear that the three-hour film is presented at
an impressively high bitrate. I
have read that it is typically 8 to 9.5 MB/sec; - and although the numbers mean
not a lot to me; with three Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks (Russian, English and
French) and twelve subtitle languages, the Russian Cinema Council have opted for
maximum quality and linguistic versatility over minimal inconvenience. The break
has been placed very naturally, though I was disappointed that side one just
stopped and cut back to the menu - some kind of end of part one title might have been nice (part two opens
with a ‘Solaris Part Two’ title card).
I would say that having played the film in cinemas I cannot for the life
of me remember an intermission.
But that's pretty much the only
disappointing thing about this presentation. The picture is quite simply
gorgeous. The print is in almost perfect condition - there are a few tiny
blemishes here and there (small dust spots, very occasional scratches and faint
tramlines), but you really have to look hard for them - and has been given a
transfer that does it full justice.
Although the box just says enhanced for widescreen television the ratio looks
like 2.20:1 which would be correct if I am right in remembering that it was
filmed in 65mm for a 70mm release. The picture is razor-sharp, every shot
crammed with fine detail (just look at the slow zoom out from Natalya
Bondarchuk's face at the 69-minute mark, where every hair on her head is
precisely delineated despite the low light level), equally convincing in both
the colour and black-and-white sequences. Black levels are dead on, and there's
plenty of shadow detail, whether it's in the haunting landscape shots at the
beginning or the darker recesses of the space station.
The soundtrack, too, is a joy to listen to. Some of the time it clearly is mono,
but the 5.1 surround sound kicks in from time to time, memorably during the
opening sequence with the water and the birds and also when Burton drives
through endless roads in a nightmarish spaghetti junction tangle, where
directional traffic sounds blend seamlessly with Eduard Artemyev's abstract
electronic score.
Having been used to the English soundtrack in cinemas I haven’t yet tried the
Russian one but – for some strange reason about 4 or 5 times the English track
stops and the actions continues for the remainder of the scene in Russian with
subtitles.
I have always been lead to believe that Russian films – like Italian films of
the same era were made ‘silent’ with most of the dialogue and the sound
effects dubbed in post production – in fact in one of the short extras on disc
two star Donatas Banionas says that on all his films his is dubbed because of
his accent. The voice talent are
not credited – at least not in English and it one of the films where the
dubbed voices sound as if they were done by the actors you see on the screen.
Andrei Tarkovsky is remembered in a
moving (if brief – around two minutes) interview with his sister Marina.
Rather more substantial Tarkovsky reminiscences are on offer in an interview
with Natalya Bondarchuk that manages to combine affection with a welcome refusal
to gloss over what sounds like a fairly gruelling shoot.
Donatas Banionas is represented by a short featurette celebrating his status as
an Artist of the Soviet Union and talking about his early career, presumably
made in the early 1970s, as it devotes a fair amount of time to Goya (1971) and
doesn't mention Solaris or any later films at all.
A stills gallery contains ten mostly colour images from the film, thankfully
accessible via well-designed thumbnails as opposed to the usual tedious
back-and-forth navigation system.
Two reasonably detailed text biographies of Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanislaw Lem
give a general career overview and list of major works. And finally, there's a
comprehensive set of filmographies for Tarkovsky and his cast and crew – it's
worth exploring these in full, as there are various trailers buried within them:
including Mirror, Andrei Rublev, At Home Among Strangers, A Stranger Among His
Own, and the original trailer for Solaris.
All in all, this is a fine package
that more than does justice to Tarkovsky’s film with the transfer alone makes
it well worth the money
Amusingly enough, when copies of the Ruscico NTSC version began to circulate
among American DVD importers, Criterion (who own the US rights and who will be
releasing their own Solaris DVD in due course) denounced it as a “bootleg”
– though rest assured that not only is it entirely legitimate, it’s given
Criterion a major challenge to live up to!
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