Solaris is the best-known work of the Polish novelist Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), a philosophical science fiction writer. It has been adapted twice into major feature films and on each occasion met with the author’s disapproval.
Lem’s 1961 book re-evaluates the nature of Contact with a truly alien intelligence, an immeasurable and unknowable entity. It opens with the arrival of a psychologist, Dr Kris Kelvin, at the station on Solaris, a distant planet dominated by its sentient, plasmic ocean. The disordered state of the station is reflected in the mental distress of the beleaguered remaining crew – the ocean apparently sends ‘visitors’ to them, (re-)constructed from their memories. From the initial premise, Kelvin recounts the science of Solaristics, the planet’s discovery, exploration and studies/theories of the ocean’s enigmatic organic structures, before he receives his own ‘visitor’.
The Yugoslav SF writer, Darko Suvin, a contemporary of Lem’s, credits the Polish author with raising sci-fi “to the dignity of a major literary genre,” praising Solaris as “puzzle, parable and cognition of freedom”. Critics have attempted to unlock the book’s “psychological puzzle” by placing it within a Freudian framework or interpreting it as a parable of madness/schizophrenia. Acknowledging the novel’s complexity, Richard E. Ziegfeld saw in it Lem’s depiction of “the infinite nature of the universe,” contrasted with “the limits of man’s knowledge”.
Both the English and Russian translations of Solaris are problematic – an English version (the first of any of Lem’s work) was not available until 1970, Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox basing it on a French translation. The background to the film adaptation is similarly complex and difficult. The very first film was made for Soviet television in 1968, directed by Boris Nuremberg and, though low-budget, regarded as faithful to the novel (more so than the following versions). It was Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, released in 1972, that remains the most celebrated and controversial version of Solaris.
An “uncompromising visionary” working within the Soviet system, Tarkovsky had no love of science fiction, but (correctly) reasoned that working within the genre would grant him greater leeway. He had seen numerous projects blocked outright, and others subject to lengthy delays before release. According to artist and the set designer of Solaris, Mikhail Romadin, in the eyes of the authorities sci-fi “was hardly serious and intended for youngsters”. Tarkovsky’s proposal of “a futuristic thriller set on board a remote space station” was granted official approval by Goskino (USSR State Committee for Cinematography), though an initial draft of the screenplay re-located two-thirds of the film to Earth. After meeting a disapproving Lem in Moscow, and working with writer Friedrich Gorenstein, Tarkovsky settled on another draft, closer to the novel.
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| Andrei Tarkovsky on the set of Solaris |
However, the final version of Solaris, clocking in at more than two and a half hours at a stately pace, concentrates more on the ‘human’ aspect of the narrative. The film inserts a lengthy prologue on Earth, at Kelvin’s dacha, where the pilot Berton’s report on the phenomena he witnessed in the ocean is delivered. Kelvin’s relationship with his own ‘visitor’ and the response of the other inhabitants of the station to theirs remains central. Even after filming was completed, at a reduced budget, further changes and cuts were requested by the authorities. Ostensibly science fiction, Soviet censors still objected to the religious themes (present in all Tarkovsky’s work) and caused the usual delays in the film’s release; meanwhile Lem, already irritated by the liberties taken with his novel in the screenplay, accused the director of making “Crime and Punishment in space”.
Coming soon after Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated 2001: A Space Odyssey, there was bound to be a perception of Solaris as a Soviet equivalent. Where 2001 used compositions by Johan and Richard Strauss, J.S. Bach provides the main theme for Solaris, with additional soundtrack contributions from the contemporary Soviet electronic music composer Eduard Artemiev (in the first of his three collaborations with Tarkovsky). The production values reflected the respective budgets, with Mikhail Romadin in charge of the slightly kitsch interior design of the Solaris space station at the state studio Mosfilm – cutting-edge certainly in terms of Soviet film at the time, the future has dated rapidly in this instance. However, Tarkovsky clung to his vision of a mysterious, philosophical epic, haughtily dismissing 2001 as “phony... a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth,” and continuing to bemoan his own film’s sci-fi trappings as “a distraction.”
After winning the Grand Jury Special Prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival (and also the BFI’s ‘Film of the Year’ award), the international reputation of Solaris was secured. Its many admirers see it as a high watermark for the genre in film: “the benchmark against which all sci-fi should be held accountable.” The English writer Trevor Hoyle was “absolutely blown away” by Tarkovsky’s “magical” film. Other critics have found it confusing, overly long, pretentious and – presumably in contrast to 2001 – commented on its “visual poverty” (New York Times). The director himself later came to regard Solaris as the least favourite of his films.
Like 2001, Solaris has been subjected to innumerable academic re-readings and critical interpretations, and remains the director’s most enduring work. Tarkovsky returned once more to science fiction for the similarly fascinating, grandiose and troubled Stalker in 1979. He left the Soviet Union the same year, made two further films during his European exile and died of cancer in Paris, aged only 54, in 1986.
Long after Tarkovsky’s death, a third adaption of Solaris was made, this time in the United States. Steven Soderbergh’s slick and expensive 2002 film version, while cutting more than an hour off the running time, is essentially a Hollywood re-make of the Soviet epic thirty years on rather than an attempt to return to Lem’s text. The author was distinctly unimpressed: “And I thought Tarkovsky’s Solaris was bad.”
In continuing to distance himself from both major versions of the film, as late as a 2002 interview, Lem stated: “As Solaris’ author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images.”
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| Stanisław Lem |
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