This is a translation of an old piece I wrote on Solaris. It's just a sketch for a reading of the film, it is in no way extensive. It might be idiosyncratic, it might be obvious. I have a feeling Tarkovsky himself wouldn't have liked the focus I'm choosing. But I think it makes sense. And I've spend a lot of time with Eastern European culture recently, and I think about the same themes and problems with a lot of it. So I'm going to talk a bit about Eastern European culture at the end. But first: Solaris. Spoilers of course. I'm not going to write a synopsis, that can be found at wikipedia.
I really like this trailer. Makes the film seem like an actionmovie, which is quite the acomplishment...
There are three scenes in Solaris, where the characters sit down and watch a film-in-the-film. One of them is Kelvin watching recordings made by his old friend Gibarian. I'm not going to talk about that one, but focus on the two other ones. The first important - for my argument - instance of filmwatching takes place from ca 10:19-23:40. The pilot Burton has come out to Kelvin's cabin, to show an old recording of an investigation. The young Burton is asked about what he saw on Solaris. The interesting detail for my argument is the way the scene is filmed. It seems to be some sort of futuristic automatic camera. Every time another person speaks, the camera cuts to a new angle and a small 'ping' is heard. The camera always tries to catch the person in the middle of the frame, and in mid-distance. This is an official recording, of an official investigation. I will take this as an attempt of an 'objective' observer. The camera also mirrors the content of the scene, where Burton's claims that he saw it all 'with my own eyes' are brushed aside as the objective camera on the plane doesn't support what he's saying.
The second scene occurs from 19:19-21:45 of my two disc version. Kelvin sits down and watches old films with the new version of his wife Hari. It is old homerecordings of Kelvin and his family. The camera zooms in and out and moves about. The people in the picture stare awkwardly at the camera, and you can easily feel the connection between 'observer' and 'observed'. I will take this camera as an example of a subjective observer. In the last part of the movie, we see the old, dead Hari in frame, and we realize that the new Hari has been constructed out of Kelvin's memories of these old films.
In a key scene from 27:12-29:50 we find Burton and Kelvin discussing the mission to Solaris. In this scene, we learn how Kelvin views science pre-Solaris. His view is that science should be done without involving feelings. It should be done by objective observers, the ideal would be automatic observers such as the cameras in the clip from the investigation. The discussion makes Burton leave in anger, while he yells that Kelvin is an 'accountant, not a scientist'. In my reading, the rest of the film describes how Kelvin the accountant has to reevaluate his views on science because of his confrontation with Solaris. Hari and the other constructs therefore symbolizes the subjectivity of the scientists, which in the end inevitably affects there work. At the end of the film, Solaris agrees to stop making constructs aboard the space station for some reason, but does this mean objectivity is possible? If that is the case, then Kelvin turns his back to it, and ends the film on an island on the planet, in a construct of his childhood home. But what are the implications of this turning the back on objectivity? One the one hand, it could be said to weigh subjective art higher than objective science, and every one of the deeply personal and uniquely Tarkovskyan shots of the film supports this view, as does the long takes dwelling over the art of Brueghel and others. But what about the context of Soviet 1972? Isn't Marxism built upon an attempt at an 'objectively scientific' model of history? If so, you could say that this is a fundamentally anti-Marxist film. Not because it's against Marxist ideology, but because it attacks the attempts at making objective foundations to build an ideology on. If Solaris talks against objective science in general, doesn't it then contain a multitude of social and political implications? Isn't it then a deeply political film?
But there are many problems with this explanation of the film. For instance, most people will probably see Hari as much more than just a symbol of subjectivity, she is too rich a character to be reduced to that. Furthermore, Tarkovsky himself would probably be very much against this reading of his film. He was against symbols, and he was against focusing too much on social and political questions. But let's look at Hari for instance, why can't she be reduced to a symbol of subjectivity? In my mind, it's because the film is so focused on how Kelvin percieves Hari. She is a symbol, but she is also Kelvins wife, and the film is much more focused on this personal relation. This is typical for a film by Tarkovsky, they are usually concerned with the personal consequences of situations. In Ivans Childhood, the horror of war is depicted through how it affects a single child. In The Mirror, the war is only shown through the memories of a single man. And in The Sacrifice, the end of the world depends on a very personal relation... Tarkovsky focuses on humans beings, not on society as a whole. But that doesn't mean he cannot be seen as being political. It says more about how primitive political discussions often become. Apparantly, Italian Marxists criticized Ivans Childhood as being too bourgois in focusing on the tragedy of one. But what value has politics if it isn't concerned with bettering life for singular human beings? For me, a huge part of the point of left-wing politics is in pointing out how liberalism so often devolves into freedom for a few individuals, at the cost of less freedom and more pain for the vast majority of people. Yet very many left-wing people seem to forget this at times. Tarkovsky is political at times, but he never treats politics as abstractly as so many politicians does. No matter how abstract he can be - and he can undoubtedly be very abstract - it's always rooted in people.
And I have similar problems with how people view a lot of Soviet/Easterneuropean artists. From the films of Tarkovsky and Tarr, to the theoretical writings of Mandelstam or Bakhtin. People are understandably wary of putting too much of a political framework over their works, but a lot of their stuff has wideranging political implications. A huge part of the problem is, that the context they were created in / are occupied with, was so primitive and simplistic. The only proper (or allowed) political response to Stalin and the Soviet Dictatorship was praise back then, and is condemnation today, so the space for artistic expressions is quite narrow. If you say that a piece of art from this context is political, people would think that it means that they are concerned with their political context. Yet Bakhtin's writings has a huge antiauthoritirians potential, which cannot be reduced to him being against Stalinism. So while I completely understand why people wouldn't want to let this stuff be 'infected' by their contemporary context, perhaps we're so far removed from that context today, that we can take the discussion of political and social implications of Soviet/post-Soviet art on another level? The thing is, exactly because this art is working on a more fundamental level than just critiquing its day, it's still relevant today. Solaris for instance: Is it possible to observe the world from an objective position? Or will every observer also see the ghosts of his/her past? Is the objective position even preferable? Doesn't the subjective camera that Tarkovsky uses give is a fundamentally deeper understanding of what goes on, than the objective camera used in the interrogation scene. It's fundamentally philosophical questions, and that Tarkovsky focuses on how these questions has consequences for a single human being does not mean, that these questions aren't important in a larger context.
