Cryptic consciousness
consciousentities.com
consciousentities.com
It's a great book anyway, regardless of your interest in the issue of consciousness.
The one by Tarkowski is a classic and has an almost cult following (almost impossible to criticize it in certain circles). It is a remarkable movie, but I've found it a bit bombastic at times.
The other one, by Soderbergh, is the movie that opened my eyes to the art of cinema - or rather, to telling stories with the image, framing, and camera motion. It's hard to explain, it was like a revelation. I used to be very much focused on music, sound and words, and was almost blind to visual arts. Seeing Soderbergh's "Solaris" was a turning point to me, along with other major changes in my life at that point. I guess I was just getting ready and seeing the movie was probably the catalyst. Now I can actually take pictures in a conscious way and am able to "say" something by just framing the image in a certain way.
I read the book decades ago, when I was a high-school kid. It had a major impact on my thinking. It's a lot more philosophical than what you would expect from a sci-fi novel. Reminding of Borges in a way.
But a lot of what makes Tarkovsky's film sometimes bombastic is also what makes it work.
Solaris is ultimately about encountering something that you don't understand. The ppl studying it have theories, and draw conclusions, but its nature is ultimately a mystery that resists investigation.
Edit: so much so that essentially it's just a mirror (as mentioned)...the theories people have expose much about their own thoughts and preferences but don't seem to be getting any closer to understanding it...
The film is pretty obviously constructed to make you really appreciate the experience of interacting with the incomprehensible, by being deliberately obtuse and devoid of explanation.
Watching the film is as close as most of us might come to being stuck alone on a spacestation dealing with a high mystery; it's long, uncomfortable, wearying, and ultimately unsatisfying, as you don't come away from it with anything resembling a sense of closure...you end up knowing perhaps less than you came in with.
On the one hand, this makes it a crap movie in some ways: you never find out what 'the answer' is (what is solaris? why is it doing this?) or even a comfortable sense of the end (what happens to kris?). On the other hand, if the point of the film was not so much to tell a story as to communicate an experience, then many of the drawbacks and flaws can be seen as working towards that goal.
Contrast with say the monoliths from 2001: there's some kind of 'mystery' in the sense of 'who built them, how do they work', etc., but that's a very shallow mystery; it's understood / hinted at / explained (in the books, at least) almost exactly that they're artifacts that look for conscious life or the possibility of it, and then give it 'forward nudges' as needed.
So there's still a small mystery: 'who, exactly, built these things? how, exactly, do they work?' but for supposedly incomprehensibly advanced artifacts constructed by incomprehensibly advanced beings the reader walks away comprehending almost everything...
You have to decide upfront: is a film something that tells a story, or is it something that provides an experience...assessment will vary depending your choice there.
Soderbergh's version avoids dealing with the mystery (well, it's pushed in the background) and focuses instead on psychological exploration. The scope is much more narrow, and it's a very simple movie - in a way. But it does what it set out to do very well, it's very focused on its goal and taut. And the images and the camera work are mesmerizing - I was "tripping" mouth agape all the way to the end.
Soderburgh certainly improved a lot on the cinematography, no argument.
For people with a lot vested in their critical opinions I'm sure criticism of solaris is a no-go; for a lot of others, though, it's one of those films where you can see how it could be so much better if remade with less budgetary constraints (we don't need a cgi planet, really, but just a second-draft to get it right)...and Soderburgh being Soderburgh he got his chance.
One thing that's worth remembering is just how narrow Tarkovsky cut the book: the book goes on at great length, but Tarkovsky cut everything down to the core human drama:
- you're sent to investigate the mental health of people out on this space station investigating this incomprehensible object, b/c they've basically stopped communicating
- you get there and instead of anything you expect to find, you find your long-dead wife
- that's a pretty incomprehensible thing, no? It's something Lem included as a pretty smart move, but you could -- literally -- write a whole novel or make a whole film just trying to work through the psychological reactions that'd produce
By restricting that attention it humanizes the encounter with the incomprehensible:
- you get to 'cheat'; a cgi orange planet is obviously a cgi orange planet, and thus not really 'mysterious'; using interpersonal relationships for your mystery lets you tap into very primal emotional hooks
- but at the end it's still left deliberately opaque enough to remain an encounter with the incomprehensible
If you have read more by Lem you'll see his pet peeve is comprehensible mysteries -- just about every story he's written can be interpreted in some way as a kind of parable of how even 'explorers' are mostly uninterested in or incapable of encountering or appreciating anything they didn't already know or understand.
Fiasco fits the bill, as does 'Return from the Stars' (though it's harder to pick out, there). Lem was pretty prolific.