Solaris by Mark Bould

Author:Mark Bould
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Solaris station: Tarkovsky vs Soderbergh

Solaris station

Tarkovksy’s depiction of space travel most closely resembles the funky, minimalist spaceship at the start of The Brother from Another Planet (1984). However, while John Sayles relishes getting away with doing so very little, Tarkovsky begrudges having to do even this much. He is just fundamentally not interested in imagining a future world.

For Andrei Rublev’s medieval setting, Tarkovsky insisted on avoiding ‘historical stylization’ and ‘historical details’ because they ‘divide the attention of the viewer’ when it is enough just ‘to convince him that the action really takes place in the fifteenth century’: ‘neutral set decorations, neutral (yet convincing) costumes, the landscapes, the modern language – all this will help us to talk about the most essential aspects, without distracting the audience’;80 ‘Nothing should impede perception, or distract’ the viewer, who should ‘not notice anything exotic’.81 Tarkovsky’s representation of the future takes the same tack. While many sf ‘filmmakers force the viewer to examine the details of the material structure of the future’, he wants his viewers to be ‘unaware of any … exoticism of technology’.82 He eliminated as much technological hardware from Solaris as he could, and downplayed the rest. He thought a moon-landing scene should not be a spectacular display of something the viewer has never seen, as in Kubrick’s 2001, but a commonplace, everyday event. So when Kelvin’s ship docks with the station, we see neither the complex procedurals such a manoeuvre would involve nor any images of the two vessels coming together. Instead, a pair of spotlights on a corrugated wall light up the darkness, steam is sucked into a metal grille in the floor – a detail taken from Lem – and Kelvin, who has already disembarked, wanders into shot across scorched floor tiles. The cavernous landing bay is unremarkable, well used. A grubby yellow pipe, easily as tall as Kelvin, curves around the edge of the chamber; silver pipes rise up from it and out of shot. Every bit as mundane as Kubrick’s spotless vision of space travel as an extension of business-class air travel,83 Tarkovsky’s grungy look somehow keeps it from seeming so banal.

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