By Alexander B. Joy.
Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972
A quiet conversation in a remote country cottage explains the entire visual language of Solaris. The film’s techniques for turning the inner into the outer manage to give memories and perspectives physical embodiment — and demonstrate how externalizing what’s inside is about as painful as being turned inside-out. The scene (1) unfolds like this: two ageing friends, further aged by a world that has asked too much of them, discuss the looming departure of protagonist Kris Kelvin (2) — who happens to be the elder friend’s only child. Tarkovsky favorite Nikolai Grinko plays Kris’s unnamed father (sometimes dubbed “Nik,” after the actor), while his companion, the stooped and broken Burton, is played by the old-before-his-time Vladislav Dvorzhetsky. (Six years after the film’s release, Dvorzhetsky will die of acute heart failure at 39.) A wooden window frames Kris’s father against a backdrop of sun-drenched greenery as he negotiates the grass. Burton, indoors among the cottage’s rustic furnishings, addresses him through the open pane.
“When does he leave?” Burton asks. A former pilot himself, the logistics of Kris’s forthcoming journey hold greater interest than they would for a well-meaning layperson.
“He’ll be gone by tomorrow morning,” says Kris’s father.
He strolls beyond the left of the frame, with the anxious amble of someone unwilling or unable to share what’s on their mind. Burton follows, pacing past a wall of framed antique technical illustrations, where an open door awaits. Already the blocking depicts Solaris’s core motif: the inelegant, halting communication between inside and outside.
“It’s so pleasant here,” Burton says through the door, both as a sincere compliment and a stab at lighter conversation.
“This house reminds me of my grandfather’s house,” says Kris’s father, studying the cottage as he drifts back into sight. “I really liked it. So we decided to build one just like it.” He pauses, as if further explanation is needed, then adds, “I don’t like innovation.”
The line’s rich subtext shows in his worried face. The same scientific expedition that sent Burton to space – only to pulverize his sanity and spirit – now beckons Kris. If not for the pursuit of the new and unknown, if not for society’s unceasing demand for innovation, Kris would remain safely on Earth. Instead, he’s headed to the planet Solaris. And Kris’s father has no reason to believe that his brooding, dismissive son (who has spent the film’s first minutes skulking about the yard) is made from sturdier stuff than Burton.
A sudden cloudburst – a sturm to go with the drang – drives Kris’s father indoors. Burton steps aside, leaving his friend alone in the frame. The camera lingers on the old man, the curtain of blurred rainfall behind him sharpening his semi-silhouetted profile and downcast gaze.
End scene.
Straightforward (or cliché) parental concern furnishes merely the surface layer of the friends’ exchange. The scene’s emotional core – and therefore the visual logic at play – is apparent when contrasted with the screenplay’s rendering. In William Powell’s English translation (3), it proceeds as follows:
BERTON (4): When’s his flight?
FATHER: He’ll be gone from here by tomorrow morning.
BERTON: You’ve got a nice place!
FATHER: This house is like my grandfather’s. I liked it very much, and my mother and I decided to build one the same. I hate innovation!
Two key differences distinguish the written and filmed scenes. First, there’s a subtle discrepancy between the make and model of each version’s cottage. The screenplay leaves some ambiguity as to whether the cottage attempts a carbon copy of the grandfather’s house, or merely ventures a stylistically similar effort. The film implies that the cottage is intended as a clone. The film’s cottage doesn’t exist on its own terms; it “reminds” onlookers like Kris’s father of a house long vanished, leaving it subordinated to remembrance. What we see onscreen is less informed by memory than in thrall to it.
The motive behind the cottage’s construction shifts, as well. In the screenplay, Kris’s father reads like a curmudgeonly Luddite, exasperated or impatient with the new. His cottage is assertive, coming from a place of relative strength; it’s a declaration of defiance against a present and future found wanting compared to the past. The film, however, shows us someone wearier and more vulnerable, worn down by a world that time has made steadily less familiar and welcoming. (Notice how the spoken dialogue blunts his acerbic “I hate” to a weaker, more apologetic “I don’t like,” delivered quietly and without exclamation.) “The wish of all things,” claims the narrator of the Borges story “Shakespeare’s Memory,” crediting the idea to Spinoza, “is to continue to be what they are.” (5) And for the world-weary, like the film version of Kris’s father, this means treating the past as a refuge from the present. Accordingly, his cottage is more like a surrender, the desperate shelter of somebody with nowhere else to go. Hence, Solaris uncorks its visual logic: a procession of copies, distorted by the memories and desires of those who bring them into the world – intentionally or otherwise.
The engine powering this parade of off-kilter lookalikes is the planet Solaris itself. It shows a disconcerting penchant for reaching into people’s minds and fashioning physical manifestations of whatever it finds there. (Kris and company dub these apparitions “guests,” in part because they have no idea what the visitors really are, but also because anything more precise risks existential horror.) The arrivals are seldom comforting, but always revealing. Solaris sends Kris multiple copies of his young wife, Hari – who died of suicide ten years prior, and still bears the injection scars he recalls seeing on her body. Her recurrence is symptomatic of his unceasing guilt and grief. The supercilious biologist Sartorius is given miniature people whose short stature reflects his tendency to look down on others. The drunken, dishevelled cyberneticist Snaut receives feminine figures glimpsed in brief flashes in his bed; the sexual undercurrents of their brief appearances suggest a loneliness that has surrendered to fantasy. There’s little reason to think that the guests prompt healthy interactions. After all, Kris – a psychologist by profession – is dispatched to the Solaris research station to ascertain why its dwindling crew has been acting erratically. (“Everything we’ve received so far has been confusing or incomprehensible,” Burton says of the crew’s recent reports.) And the crew members that the guests haven’t driven from the station have been driven to more drastic escapes. Not long before Kris’s arrival, his friend Gibarian, a physiologist, has killed himself after being dogged by a spectral young girl.
The reasons behind Solaris’s guests remain inscrutable to the end. There are indications that Solaris might produce the guests by accident, like the byproduct of an uncontrolled chemical reaction as its environment mixes with human brain waves. (Burton notes that they started appearing after a pilot crashed in Solaris’s vast ocean.) It’s possible, given the planet’s potential sentience, that the guests are a welcoming gift of sorts – a well-intentioned, albeit misguided, peace offering as Solaris tries to give its visitors what it thinks they want. Then again, the guests could also be a defense mechanism, the result of Solaris bombarding its invaders with visions tailor-made to push them into madness. We never learn for certain. In all probability, an alien intelligence like Solaris’s is incomprehensible – especially to flawed minds like ours, which, as the guests’ warped and frightening presences prove, rarely know themselves.
For the moment, though, there’s only the Kelvin family cottage, a monument to the burdened inner lives its inhabitants can neither admit to nor explain. In time, we’ll find Kris all but entombed in Solaris’s reconstruction of this house – a copy of a memory of a copy of a memory, impossibly distorted at its great remove from the original. Internal becomes external becomes internal again; Kris’s ambiguous kneel at the end, at once channeling fear and sorrow and relief and gratitude, attests to how overwhelming it is to confront one’s inner workings. But back on Earth, there’s only the intimation of the mental choreography to come: the threat of storms, the sound of rain, and a shelter – or a stockade – shaped like a remembrance.
(1) This link leads to Mosfilm’s YouTube release. However, all my references to English dialogue match the subtitles on the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray. There are minor discrepancies between the two editions’ translations.
(2) Kris is played by Donatas Banionis, who, thanks to an accident of history, may bear some responsibility for Vladimir Putin. Legend has it that Banionis’s performance in the 1968 spy drama Dead Season (Мёртвый сезон) inspired a teenage Putin to join the KGB.
(3) Tarkovsky, Andrei. Collected Screenplays. Trans. William Powell and Natasha Synessios. New York: Faber and Faber, 1999. 136.
(4) In Russian, the character’s name is spelled “Бертон.” Powell transliterates it with a French-inflected spelling, perhaps as a nod to how the first English edition of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris was spun from its French translation instead of the original Polish text. The English subtitles from the Criterion Collection and Mosfilm YouTube releases both opt for the more Anglicized “Burton.”
(5) Borges, Jorge Luis. “Shakespeare’s Memory.” Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1998. 514.
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
3. Grant Maierhofer
4. Emma Jones
5. Des Barry
6. Lindsay Lerman
7. Joshua Glenn
8. Jessica Sequeiro.
9. Christine Hume
10. Jeff Wood
To pitch a submission, contact Nicholas Rombes at nrombesudm@gmail.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexander B. Joy hails from New Hampshire, where he used to spend the long winters reading the world’s classics and composing haiku. He now resides in North Carolina, largely against his will. When not working on fiction or poetry, he typically writes about literature, film, philosophy, and games.
