SUBJECTS

Marriage -- Drama, Scientists -- Drama, Space flight -- Psychological aspects -- Drama, Space stations -- Drama

Solaris

featuring

Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Yuri Jarvet, Anatoli Solonitsyn,

On the planet Solaris, scientists believe, the ocean’s surface has an intelligence that can absorb human memory and materialize the objects of our thoughts. Psychologist Chris Kelvin joins the veteran cosmonauts in the Solaris project only to find them maddened from years of literally cohabitating with their unconscious desires. Kelvin himself becomes host to the presence of his dead wife and seems doomed to relive both the passion and the loss associated with her memory. “Outer space” plays almost no part in Tarkovsky’s science fiction, which relies on widescreen composition to paint a landscape of the mind, and static images that reverberate with their stillness in a timeless, lush land that could be Heaven, but is meant to be the country home of Kelvin’s youth. Tarkovsky initiates us into the secret of Solaris: that, like the oceans of the distant planet, the cinema serves up the most poetic longings of the human imagination.

Judy Bloch
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Andrei Tarkovsky
  • Friedrich Gorenstein
Based On
  • the novel by Stanislaw Lem

Cinematographer
  • Vadim Yusov
Language
  • Russian
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 167 mins
Source
  • Janus Films
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View Solaris documents  

Solaris (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, James Quandt, 2007

Tarkovsky at 70 (program note), Film Society of Lincoln Center, 2002

The poetry of apocalypse: the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, James Quandt, 2002

Back to the house II: on the chronotopic and ideological reinterpretation of Lem's Solaris in Tarkovsky's film (article), Ohio State University Press, Roumiana Deltcheva, 1997

At PFA : Solaris (program note), Pacific Film Archive Calendar, Judy Bloch, 1992

Soviet Union -- Andrei Tarkovsky : Solaris (distributor materials), Kino International Corporation, 1992

Back to the future, Soviet-style (review), Premiere, J. Hoberman, 1990

Kino releases restored version of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (distributor materials), Kino International Corporation, 1990

Solaris (newly restored versoin) (distributor materials), Kino International Corporation, 1990

A tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky (program note), Hong Kong Film Festival, 1987

Displaying 10 of 36 publicly available documents.


View all Solaris documentation on CineFiles.