As promised in our last issue, we present our beautiful print of Andrei Tarkovsky's science–fiction masterpiece Solaris, completing our Tarkovsky tribute of January and segueing into a small series of films based on the writings of Stanislaw Lem, brought to the U.S. by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York.
Tarkovsky's influential 1972 film, recently remade by Steven Soderbergh, exemplifies the strain in Russian filmmaking that finds in art a kind of secular metaphysics. The three rarely screened Polish films, too, "explore a worldview brimming with...reversals and contradictions, the overlapping realms of the real and the nearly so" (Edward Park, Village Voice).
