Signification: The Naming of Characters in Solaris by Guy Dugdale

Where do the characters in Solaris get their names? This brief study suggests that Stanislaw Lem, a cultured Middle European intellectual, is using them, playfully, to point back to specific historical individuals, and, in this way, to the nature and origins of the characteristic concerns of all his work.

Solaris follows the convention, found in other Soviet science fiction, of a world apparently, though not explicitly, unified on the model of the Soviet Union (and, in the film, speaking Russian). Black and Asian faces are seen, and names are often not Russian, as here. Apart from anything else, this ‘internationalism’ doubtless flattered Soviet authority on whom these artists depended.

There is more to these names. With one exception, each of Stanislav Lem’s characters appears to allude to a specific historical individual. Learning something of these namesakes supplies the means of guessing at the author’s thoughts about his own creations, or his novel more generally. ‘Guessing’, because the intention is often clearly playful or ironic. The final effect of these shared names is that the characters in Solaris are themselves something almost like ‘Visitors’ - fantastical re-imaginings from the recorded fragments of long-dead actual personalities.

Tokyo Night Ride: A Shadow Story Arc In ‘Solaris’ by Guy Dugdale

How to understand that strange floating freeway ride in Solaris? A dark parody of Kubrick's 'Stargate' sequence in 2001. A glimpse of a kind of hell, the 'fallen' cosmonaut Berton's alienated view of life on Earth, and so a warning or 'shadow narrative' for Kelvin: return home is impossible.

Just over half an hour into Tarkovsky’s Solaris we are suddenly tracking, with that familiar smooth disembodied unfolding perspective of the passenger, down the urban ring-roads of Tokyo, though the city is not identified. In plot terms, Henri Berton has quarreled with soon-to-depart Kris Kelvin and his father, and is travelling away from the dacha.  Though less than five minutes long, the sequence seems overextended at first, referring to nothing else in the film. In fact, it is oddly pivotal, serving several clear purposes.

As those who enjoyed the 2012 BFI season will be aware, there had been a history of occasional Soviet science fiction cinema since 1924. Famously, Tarkovsky, though he proposed the project, had no interest in the genre. Details of “the material structure of the future” and its “technological processes”, he complained, express only an empty “exoticism” which substitutes for and prevents the fiction being grounded in that human reality which is the only subject for art. For Tarkovsky, surfaces, objects and places are what the ‘exterior’ art of cinema has to work with, to refer to deeper, more oblique, uncertain, interior things. He could hardly agree to subsume this visual language to a techno-fetishised spectacle.

Solaris: A Pilgrimage of Self-Examination by Kiefer Taylor

Kiefer Taylor sees Solaris as an invitation to confront and examine the fragility and complexity of the human spirit. He argues that Tarkovsky’s declared lack of interest in science fiction allowed him to make a film cracking open the fantastical edifice of the genre, leading audiences to nothing less than a spiritual reawakening.

Upon its release in 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky’s meditative science fiction feature Solaris was greeted well amongst critics and general audiences. Not only did it receive the Special Jury Prize at Cannes (back then considered the second most prestigious award of the festival) but it also ran for more than fifteen years without breaks in the Soviet Union. Due to Tarkovsky’s vehement rejection of genre, however, the director himself was left underwhelmed.

In his insightful (at times baffling) book Sculpting In Time Tarkovsky states, “Unfortunately the science fiction element of Solaris was nonetheless too prominent and became a distraction.” When viewing Solaris one may be puzzled by the director’s severe self-assessment. Even with the visual tropes of science fiction – from high-tech spaceships to rockets - the film retains the mystical charms of Tarkovsky’s world with the core themes of longing and the sullied souls of man being ever-present. In doing so, the film asks us to look beyond futuristic sensations of outer space and technological advancements and into the interior feelings of its distraught protagonist.