On Tuesday, December 10, 2013 at 9:44:44 PM UTC-10,
luisb...@aol.com wrote:
I had never watched this film all the way through. I'd seen the Clooney version before I'd seen the Tarkovsky one. I had to watch the Tarkovsky one a couple of times to "get" it. I wonder whether people like Dan O'Bannon and the Alien people had seen
it because the scroungy, dirty, lived-in sets prefigure the dumpy sets and wardrobe that gave Alien its look.
I guess it does kind of make a lot of our space sci-fi look a bit infantile, based as our movies are on confronting hostile alien beings in knock down drag outs or comparing who has the better civilization. Tarkovsky uses technology to actually reject
science as a mode of inquiry for what most deeply concerns people, which is other people. His characters see space travel not as exploration of other worlds, but as a means of extending our world out further.
It's interesting to see a drunken Russian birthday party on a distant spacecraft where the characters quote from Cervantes' Don Quixote: "All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — it
brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a
corpse.”
According to this:
- ...Tarkovsky pictures our future as worn-down and disheveled...
https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/solaris-50-year-anniversary
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