Solaris: Counterpoint of Sculpting in Time

Natalia L. Rudychev

Conference Procedings of Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities
Available on line at

http://www.hichumanities.org/AH2006.pdf (5318-5330) and as
CD-ROM ISSN 1541-5899, Honolulu, 2006


Andrey Tarkovsky finished the work on Solaris in 1972 – sixteen years after his first student work as a director Ubiitsy (aka: The Killers) and fourteen years before his death. Solaris became not only the central point of the director’s body of work, but (and it is much more important) the counterpoint of that which Tarkovsky defined later as sculpting in time. This paper seeks to explore the meaning of this counterpoint and its philosophical implications for Tarkovsky’s filming.
Tarkovsky’s film is loosely based on Stanislaw Lemm’s science fiction novel Solaris. What interests the director in Lemm’s novel is not advances in the technological progress of human civilization, but ever present dilemmas of human spirit. That is why Tarkovsky pays very little attention to the futuristic entourage of the film, as was the case with his previous film Passion According to Andrei set in 15-th century Russia when he made it a point not to stress any exotic details pertaining to that particular époque. What interests Tarkovsky is the phenomena passing through time that leave their mark on the canvas of the human soul.
In Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky says that “the cinema image is essentially the observation of a phenomenon passing through time”.[i] Therefore the counterpoint in filming is the ability to simultaneously express a phenomenon passing through time against another phenomenon passing through time in a comprehensible way. The counterpoint of Solaris deals with time - the time of a human being. What is this time of a human being that speaks in Solaris’ counterpoint? Tarkovsky says that in its essence it is “the relationship between man and his own conscience”.[ii] This way time of a human being reveals itself as a counterpoint inextricable from the nature of what a human being is. It is existence in time that cannot be separated from itself. It depends, as Levinas puts it in On Escape “on the very being of our being, on its incapacity to break with itself”.[iii]
The counterpoint of one’s presence to oneself is intelligible only because it harbors a need, a profound need to escape because one’s presence to oneself can be unbearable, shameful, nauseating. In this sense images of Tarkovsky’s films make the viewers’ presence to themselves radically visible. In the same way, Hari’s appearance on the Solaris space station makes visible Kris’ presence to himself in all its nakedness and brutality. In this light it is not accidental that the theme music of Solaris is J. S. Bach’s Prelude F minor - a hymn of supplication, an expression of a profound need to be delivered from unbearable solitude of our presence to ourselves. The last words of this hymn strike me as particularly relevant to the understanding of escape:

O make me now and wholly
Love Thee solely,
My neighbor hold as self,
And keep Thy word e’er holy.[iv]

We can hold the other as self only when we stop seeking excuses for all that is shameful, unbearable and nauseating in our presence to ourselves.
Solaris begins with long takes of nature: seaweeds gracefully waving in a stream, close-ups of green blades of grass, a beautiful landscape embraced by the light fog. Kris, the main character of the film, is present in this beautiful setting but is completely oblivious to its presence. Thus Kris’ presence in the landscape is given through his absence from its presence. Consequently Kris is oblivious not only to his presence in the landscape but also to his presence to himself in this landscape. This is time lost. Time we loose every day without ever noticing it. Tarkovsky’s images make this time lost visible. In other words, they reveal the difference between what we see without taking notice and what is visible as immediate intimate presence in our presence to ourselves. This is how cinematic image becomes expressive. It turns that, which we see without seeing it, visible. In Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky wrote that time can be felt in a shot.
It becomes tangible when you sense something significant, truthful, going on beyond the events on the screen; when you realise, quite consciously, that what you see in the frame is not limited to its visual depiction, but is a pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity; a pointer to life. (Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting in Time)[v]

Tarkovsky never ceased to stress that the artist has to be touched by the presence of that which he transcribes into his artwork. It is the main condition under which the artwork can acquire expressive force; the rest is the work of a pure skill. Benjamin, in his now classical work “The World of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, foresaw and highlighted the expressive potential of the cinematic image by pointing out that “the camera introduces us to unconscious optics”[vi].
Tarkovky wrote that the viewer must be ready to receive the selfless gift of the creator - it takes an equal effort to understand the work of art as it is needed to create one. He also points out that the director “from a ‘lump of time’ made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film.”[vii] The little metallic box for sterilizing syringes that is shown in the beginning of the film, keeps reappearing throughout the film and is present in the last scene was not cut off and discarded. It is there for a reason. Tarkovsky is subtle and it requires an effort to understand the cluster of meanings to which this image points. Kris is shown with the box in the beginning of the film, but it is closed and the viewer is left perplexed about what Kris is doing with this box during his morning work. Only before Kris’ lift off do we meet with this image again. The box is open and some soil is spilled over the Don Quixote novel. Kris puts the box in his bag to take it to Solaris. Thus Kris pays tribute to the ancient ritual of taking a handful of native soil into a long journey. But Kris - who has a concrete goal and is ready to destroy that which he cannot understand, who thinks like an accountant and is interested in abstract truth - is not capable to live through the ritual or to comprehend its meaning.
When Kris is shown in the beginning of the film in the midst of the beautiful landscape the viewer feels ill at ease about his absentee presence and preoccupation with a metallic box for sterilizing syringes. This feeling of uneasiness reveals that the old ritual that Kris performs there is empty. Only when Kris confronts his own self externalized by planet Solaris in the form of Hari does the true meaning of this ritual come to the surface: return. The impossibility to break up with what you yourself are that becomes painful to the point of malaise shows itself as presence, presence of Kris’ being to himself. This is return that in its essence is escape. It is a return because it is his presence to himself that is unbearable and it is an escape because, as Levinas puts it, “The fact of being ill at ease [mal à son aise] is essentially dynamic. It appears as a refusal to remain in place, as an effort to get out of unbearable situation.”[viii] This effort involves Kris’ being as a whole because it is the presence of this being as a whole is unbearable. The effort itself might be fruitless but it is the effort that counts. Only in this effort, which has no other goal but to get out of the unbearable situation of being oneself, does the dignity of the being that undertakes this effort have a chance to reveal itself and that which is co-present with this effort have a chance to acquire value and meaning.
The soil from the box was spilled over the Don Quixote novel. The whole life of Don Quixote was pitched towards escape in Levinasian sense of the term. His efforts are often fruitless but they engage his whole being and it is for these efforts that we love and respect Cervantes’ character. In a sense, this state of being pitched towards escape from one’s own self is very Kantian. In fact Kris’ consciousness turns into a battleground between pure science and morality. On the one hand Hari is a byproduct of a scientific experiment, on the other she is a being that shows all the characteristics of a human being and cannot be treated as a mere object for research. Hari is at the same time the most foreign as a creation of the Ocean Solaris and the closest as the most painful reproach of Kris’ consciousness. Hari makes visible that which Kris wants to hide even from himself. Presence of Hari makes Kris ashamed of himself. Hari exhibits the nakedness of Kris’ total being. As Levinas puts it, “Nakedness is shameful when it is the sheer visibility [patience] of our being, of its total intimacy.”[ix] Shame makes Kris conscious of his need to escape the shame of being the being that he himself is.
Kris is the being that makes the viewer feel ashamed for him. His presence is characterized by his absence from the presence of everything and everyone that comes into contact with him in the first part of the film. He is absent from the presence of Earth that is represented by the beautiful landscape near his house when he is about to leave it. Kris is absent from the presence of his aunt when she cries he does not find parting words for her. Kris is irritated by Burton’s visit during his last day on Earth and is deliberately cruel to him. Kris is ready to continue the research on Solaris even at a cost of destruction of that which we are not yet capable of understanding. In one of the most powerful scenes in the film Kris deeply hurts his father without even noticing that he does it. This happens in a scene where Kris and his father stand by the bonfire on which Kris burns the papers that he considers useless. Kris makes a passing remark that he has so many useless papers: student notes, research papers, thesis and notes with irritation that he cannot understand how all these papers survived throughout the years. At the moment Kris utters these words the camera shows his father’s back. The whole posture of his father expresses that he is helpless, caught in the act of caring that is not needed, considered a mere nuisance.
Thus the shame that Tarkovsky’s Solaris sculpts out of time is twofold. On the one hand it is Kris’ shame of himself and on the other viewers shame for him. These two kinds of shame are closely connected. Kris’ cheer visibility to himself makes him ashamed which in its turn makes shameful visible and enables him to be ashamed for others. The images of the film make the shameful visible in the same way as Hari makes what is shameful visible for Kris. And this enables the viewers to be ashamed not only of but for as well. It is not accidental that towards the end of the film Kris says that shame is the feeling that is going to save humanity.
How is this escape possible? Once Kris realizes the need to escape he makes an attempt to behave humanely in inhuman situation. But he takes the route that is fallacious. Kris wants to escape by protecting and loving Hari. He wants to escape from what he is by means of the pleasure of undoing what he has done in the past. It is not possible. As Tarkovsky says that one cannot do it “if he had been able to live this stage of his life differently, he would not have been guilty the first time, either”.[x] It turns out that the pleasure of being united with the being you love is a false promise of escape. The pure ecstasy of being united with the being you love that is skillfully rendered on the screen through levitation abruptly breaks up in Hari’s new attempt to kill herself. Contrary to common belief that the absence of sexual acts in Tarkovsky’s films is due to the censorship and Puritanism of soviet society, the director states in multiple interviews that the uniqueness of this act done in privacy acquires an opposite characteristic when performed on the screen.[xi] Tarkovsky searched and found cinematic expression of this act that would preserve its uniqueness – levitation. The pure pleasure and ecstasy of Kris and Hari’s embrace in levitation is cruelly cut short by the harsh sound of broken glass of the can from which Hari drank liquid nitrogen. The promise of escape through pleasure proves to be an illusion. Levinas formulates in the following words, “the moment when pleasure is broken, after the supreme break, when the [human] being believed in complete ecstasy but was completely disappointed, and is entirely disappointed and ashamed to find himself again existing.”[xii] Kris comes to the point where “nothing-more-to-be-done”, to the point of ultimate solitude that makes him physically ill. He makes one last subconscious attempt to ground himself by appealing to the most precious memory of his childhood – mother. But his past fails him too. His mother abandons him and fades into darkness. Kris’ memory turns into pure pain, time lost. By time lost Tarkovsky understands experience of death of another person. The moment of death is also the death of individual time: the life of a human being becomes inaccessible to the feelings of those remaining alive”.[xiii] The main character, Kris Kelvin, lost two very close people: his mother and his wife, Hari. Kris’ mother was cold and distant towards him. In a home video to which Kris constantly returns in his memory his mother never smiles to little Kris, never plays with or talks to him. She seems to be in some world of her own and this world is inaccessible to Kris. As a child Kris suffered because of lack of emotional connection with his mother. It was not his fault, but he still felt guilty. When she died there was nobody to reconcile him with his painful childhood memories and answer the question: “Why?”. But since she is dead she is inaccessible to Kris’ feelings, and his attempts to question his memory turn into pain: “As a moral being, man is endowed with memory which sows in him a sense of dissatisfaction. It makes us vulnerable, subject to pain”.[xiv]
When appeal to the memory turns into pain Kris finds himself in “limit-situation in which the uselessness of any action is precisely the sign of the supreme instant from which we can only depart.”[xv] This is the moment when the metallic box with the soil from Earth reappears on the screen. Only this time there is something different about it: little green plant springs out of it. Nobody planted it but it is there. It is the escape that springs out of the last memory where Kris tries to find refuge and fails. It is the point at which Kris realizes that one can love only that which he can loose. That preservation of simple human truths requires mystery. That one cannot rest in a satisfied illusion that his self is transparent to him. That it is not your world, other worlds or other people you are in conflict with. The conflict lies much deeper – it is in the self itself. As Snout puts it, “We don’t know what to do with other worlds. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror. We are in the foolish human predicament striving for a goal that he fears, that he has no need for. Man needs man.”[xvi] The counter point that Tarkovsky sculpts out of time is the self against self, the impossibility to be the being that you are and remain human. In this line of thought Tarkovsky comes very close to the idea that Levinas expresses in On Escape, “Every civilization that accepts being – with the tragic despair it contains and the crimes it justifies – merits the name ‘barbarian’”.[xvii] The barbarian civilization can occupy itself only with knowledge understood in a sense of rational and methodical appropriation of everything that is as a whole. This is exactly what Kris does in the beginning of the film.
The refusal to accept and justify what you are as “the fait accompli of creation”[xviii] means return to your true self and rediscovery of the mystery that makes simple human truths possible. Only through that refusal to remain in place can we rediscover people as the reason for love. This can be accomplished only when we are sick at heart of what we are, through the experience of nausea. Tarkovsky very skillfully prepares the viewer to the understanding of this intuition in the beginning of the film. When we feel ill at ease because of Kris’ cruelty to Burton who exposes himself to Kris in the uttermost way Tarkovsky reinforces this feeling by cinematic means. Burton makes an effort to reach Kris by sharing with him the most painful experience of his life only to be hurt at the moment he is most vulnerable. The viewer does not know that Burton has a proof of his experience on Solaris that would satisfy Kris’ requirement of verifiability but still feels ill at ease. This is highlighted by Kris father’s emotional response to the harshness of Kris’ position. When the proof is exposed and the viewer is made conscious that the cruelty Burton was exposed to was uncalled for the experience turns from uncomfortable into sickening. This is reinforced by the nauseating cinematic experience that follows. The long shot of Burton’s drive through the location of Akasakamitsuke in Tokyo is accompanied by electronic music that gradually increases in volume to the point of becoming unbearable. Olga Surkova writes about Tarkovsky’s work on this shot in her Tarkovsky’s Chronicals. She says that it was Tarkovsky’s intention that this shot would be unbearable to the point of nausea.[xix] Only after going through the experience of nausea ourselves we can comprehend Kris’ experience of it as true. This is how the viewer can see the possibility of return to our true self shown on the screen as the one that can be ours.
The film ends with a scene in which the Ocean Solaris brings from out of its depth that which can open the road for any contact – return to our true self. On the screen it is rendered through strong visual allusion to Rembrandt’s canvas The Return of the Prodigal Son. The little metallic box that Kris took from Earth is still there. It is closed. But this time the fact that it is closed is not entrapment in the self it is preservation of mystery.
In conclusion I want to say that counterpoint of self against self that penetrates all Tarkovsky’s films is not the only meaning of counterpoint that can be applied to Tarkovsky’s cinematic works. There is another meaning of this term on which I want to elaborate briefly – polyphony. It became a common place in viewer’s accounts after watching Tarkovsky’s retrospective that they are under impression of seeing on long film. In this sense Solaris stands out because in a crystallized way its images contain allusions to past works and seeds of the works yet to come. Visually Solaris sends us back to the images of Ivan’s Childhood through dreamlike shots of nature. Ivan’s Childhood opens up as yet another sense of shame - shame of being human with respect to our historical existence. History is not a glorious march toward progress and happiness if the price that is paid for them is a child’s life and sanity. Solaris evokes moral themes of Passion According to Andrei through the image of Rublev’s Trinity that is preceded by the return to the main musical theme of this film. Rublev’s dilemma of his inability to reconcile vocation to love humanity as a whole and inability to love that which is disgustful and cruel in individual human beings. This theme is very strong in Kris’ monologue in the second part of Solaris. Illogical sequences of Kris’ memories of his childhood and dream scene with his mother will later be developed in the Mirror. Science fictional setting and collision between moral and scientific worldviews stresses Solaris’ affinity with Stalker. Stalker will later reinforce the theme of human ignorance that is one of the focal points of Solaris. We are ignorant. And if we are forced to face our true self most of the time we choose to retreat. We consciously choose to ignore that which was best expressed by Plato through Socrates in the Apology – “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Apol. 38a). This thought is expressed in Stalker through the story about Dikoobraz. Dikoobraz was a renowned stalker who went into The Zone with his brother. He lost his brother in The Zone and upon his return became astonishingly rich. Dikoobraz hanged himself a week later. In The Zone there is a place that grants the most sincere desires of the heart. Dikoobraz might have cried his eyes out asking for the return of his brother but this was not the deepest desire of his heart. So he was granted money instead. Dikoobraz could not face his true self and committed suicide. This theme is particularly strong in Solaris. Hari asks Kris if he knows himself. Kris’ response is that he knows himself as every human being does. In fact he does not know himself. Moreover, he is fully aware that he does not. When Snout suggests that Kris’ waking thoughts would be transmitted to ocean Solaris, which is considered to be a gigantic brain with which the human race tries to establish a contact, he resents this suggestion for the fear that he might subconsciously desire Hari to be dead. This fear is very real. The nostalgia for Earth, for home, for the place of our origin of which we are ignorant in our everyday existence, which is stressed in Akira Kurosawa’s essay on Solaris[xx], finds its new development in Nostalghia, which practically quotes the shot of Kris’ aunt over the valley on the day of his departure from Earth. Kris’ readiness to sacrifice any hope for return to Earth for the sake of Hari foresees the main theme of the Sacrifice that quotes levitation as an ultimate expression of love between human beings. Viewed this way Solaris is a thread that is weaved into the fabric of Tarkovsky’s cinematic work as a whole.


[i] Andrei Tarkovsky. Sculpting in Time. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003, 67).
[ii] University of Calgary, “On Solaris”, 13 October 2005, (13 October 2005).
[iii] Emmanuel Levinas. On Escape. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 63).
[iv] Virtually Baroque, “Virtually Baroque”, 16 October 2005, (16 October 2005).
[v] Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting in Time. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003, 117-118).
[vi] Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in The Critical Tradition. Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends ed. by David H. Richter (New York: St. Martin Press, 1989, 584).
[vii] Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting in Time. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003, 64).
[viii] Emmanuel Levinas. On Escape. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 58).
[ix] Emmanuel Levinas. On Escape. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 64).
[x] University of Calgary, “On Solaris”, 13 October 2005, (13 October 2005).
[xi] University of Calgary, “Nostalghia”, 22 October 2005 (22 October 2005).
[xii] Emmanuel Levinas. On Escape. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 61).
[xiii]Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting in Time. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003, 57).
[xiv] Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting in Time. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003, 58).
[xv] Emmanuel Levinas. On Escape. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 67).
[xvi] Andrei Tarkovsky: Solaris, prod. and dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 169 min., MosFilm, 1972, DVD.
[xvii] Emmanuel Levinas. On Escape. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 73).
[xviii] Emmanuel Levinas. On Escape. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 72).
[xix] Old Kinoart, “Old Kinoart”, 13 October 2005 (13 October 2005).
[xx] University of Calgary, “Kurosawa on Solaris”, 23 October 2005, (23 October 2005).




Bibliograhy

1. Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
2. University of Calgary, “On Solaris”, 13 October 2005, (13 October 2005).
3. Emmanuel Levinas. On Escape. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
4. Virtually Baroque, “Virtually Baroque”, 16 October 2005, (16 October 2005).
5. Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in The Critical Tradition. Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. ed. by David H. Richter (New York: St. Martin Press, 1989, 584).
6. University of Calgary, “Nostalghia”, 22 October 2005 (22 October 2005).
7. Andrei Tarkovsky: Solaris, prod. and dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 169 min., MosFilm, 1972, DVD.
8. Old Kinoart, “Old Kinoart”, 13 October 2005 (13 October 2005).
9. University of Calgary, “Kurosawa on Solaris”, 23 October 2005, (23 October 2005).