The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Andrei Tarkovsky · a film in two parts · 1972 · about 167 minutes · written with Fridrikh Gorenshtein, from Stanisław Lem’s novel · in Russian, as Solyaris
Mode
Science fiction turned from discovery to conscience; love story, drama of memory and religious parable in one structure
Mythos
The prodigal son who leaves the father’s house and returns to kneel; the dead wife who comes back and is lost again, as Eurydice is lost; the image that comes to life and becomes a person
Phase
Three movements by place: Earth, at the father’s dacha, with an old man’s testimony and a drive back through the city; a stay on the station through three appearances of the dead wife and a fever; a coda of a few minutes on an Earth that stands on the planet
Presentation
Feature film in two parts, about 167 minutes, in Russian; Sovcolor with passages in monochrome or tinted stock; Vadim Yusov’s camera, Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score with Bach’s chorale prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ
Register
Slow attention throughout: the documentary flatness of a commission, the clutter of a station in decline, a love scene without gravity, a revival from death; water, rain and fire as matter
Scale
One man’s return, through a father’s house, a dead wife and three scientists, to a discipline, an institution and an ocean wholly other
Governing Proposition
A man burns his papers at his father’s house by a stream and goes out to a research station above the ocean of a distant planet, where the ocean answers the scientists by giving them back the people they have wronged: to him, the wife who killed herself, made from his memory of her, who learns that she is not human and chooses to end. The wager of the film is that contact with the wholly other returns us only to ourselves, that a copy made of another’s memory can suffer its way into being a person, and that science fiction can carry this as the parable of the prodigal son, ending not in a discovery but in a man on his knees at his father’s door, on an island the ocean has made.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in water. Weed is drawn out in the current of a stream, and the camera holds on it until it is no longer a thing glimpsed but a thing seen. Kris Kelvin, played by Donatas Banionis, walks by the stream at his father’s dacha before he leaves for the station that orbits the planet Solaris. There is a horse, a house, rain on the table on the veranda. Round the planet’s ocean a discipline has been built over decades, and it is in decline.
Andrei Tarkovsky made the film at Mosfilm, from a screenplay he wrote with Fridrikh Gorenshtein after Stanisław Lem’s novel of 1961. Vadim Yusov photographed it, and Eduard Artemyev wrote an electronic score that runs at the edge of sound effect, set against Bach’s chorale prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ. Natalya Bondarchuk plays Hari, Jüri Järvet Snaut, Anatoly Solonitsyn Sartorius, Nikolai Grinko Kelvin’s father and Vladislav Dvorzhetsky Berton. The film runs about 167 minutes in two parts, in colour with passages in monochrome or tinted stock, and it moves in three places: Earth for about the first forty minutes, the station for the long body of the film, and a coda of a few minutes.
Berton, an old man now, comes to the dacha, and the film shows his testimony before a commission long ago, recorded in grey, a document of a document, staged as flatly as its furniture. Then a drive back to the city: about five minutes, unbroken, of roads, tunnels and flyovers, shot on the elevated expressways of Tokyo in 1971, which becomes a dread with no object. Before he leaves Kelvin burns his papers at the dacha. He keeps a photograph of a young woman.
Movement II
The station is seen only from the inside: corridors, cluttered rooms, the remnants of an institution in decline. Two scientists are there, Snaut, weary and ironic, and Sartorius, brittle. The institution that keeps them would now bombard the ocean. Things of the Earth have found their way aboard: a box of earth in a tin, strips of paper fixed to a ventilator so that it sounds like leaves.
Then Hari appears. She is the woman of the photograph, his wife, who killed herself, and she has come back made from his memory of her. Kelvin sends her away from the station in a capsule, and burns his hand on the launch. The ocean has answered him as it answers the others, not with knowledge of itself but with his own guilt made flesh.
She comes again. This Hari cannot bear to be out of his sight; when a metal door is shut between them, she tears through it. Her dress has no fastening. The film does not stage her arrival as an invasion. It stages a second chance offered to a man who has not earned it, and the slow change in her from a blank copy to a woman who wants to know who she is.
Movement III
Kelvin shows Hari a home film: a boy, snow, a fire, his mother. Then she knows the face. The home film is memory made into a medium inside the medium, and the copy learns from it the past she is made of. She begins to know herself as he has never known himself.
In the library the scientists gather among books and a candelabrum, and Snaut says what the station has taught them: “Нам нужно зеркало”
(We need a mirror). Men went out to meet the wholly other and wanted only to find themselves again. It is one of the two places where the film states its theses aloud, in a long speech.
Then the camera reads Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow inch by inch, the hunters, the dogs, the village below, the skaters on the ice: a winter of the Earth, far from the station. The station’s gravity lapses for a minute. Kelvin and Hari turn in the air among the candelabrum and the books, to the Bach chorale. It is a love scene without weight, and the film gives it the weight of everything it has held on Earth.
Movement IV
Hari learns that she is not human, and she tries to die by drinking liquid oxygen. Kelvin holds her as she comes back: the body bends back into life in convulsions, with a sound like breaking ice. She cannot die, and she has chosen to, and the choosing is what makes her more than the memory she was made from.
Around the two of them the scientists argue, Sartorius against Kelvin above all, and the quarrels restate positions already taken. Kelvin falls into a fever. In it his mother comes to him and washes his arm.
While he lies in fever, Hari arranges her own annihilation with Snaut and Sartorius. It is the third time she is lost to him. The wife who came back from the dead to the husband who failed her has been lost again, as Eurydice was lost by the one who could not leave her be; the image that came to life has become a person, and has chosen to give the life up.
Movement V
Kelvin is at the dacha again. The stream, the weed, the house; but rain is falling inside the house, onto his father’s shoulders. The son comes to the door and kneels, and the father lays his hands on his back, in the posture of Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. The parable has been the skeleton of the film from the first shot: the son leaves the father’s house, goes into the far country and comes home.
Then the camera pulls back, up through cloud, until the house and its lake stand as a small island in the ocean of Solaris. What was home is an island the ocean has made of memory, and the film has known it all along, as the station filled with things of the Earth. Nothing is answered: whether Kelvin has stayed on the planet, whether the island is an illusion granted or a grace, whether a house with rain falling inside it is a gift or a trap, why the son kneels to a father he had only begun to make peace with.
Shown at Cannes in May 1972, the film took the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury, and it has been shown, restored and taught for fifty-four years since. It has been read as Lem’s novel betrayed and as Lem’s novel deepened, as Christian parable, as a study of guilt and the dead mother, as an argument about what makes a person, and as a critique of a woman made from a man’s memory; Steven Soderbergh remade it in 2002 and chose other answers. It made science fiction a form for memory and conscience rather than for machines. What has lasted is a stream held until it is seen, a woman who suffers into being a person, and a man on his knees on an island in an ocean that gave him back what he had wronged.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and duration; length itself is not charged. Much that looks dispensable proves required: the forty minutes on Earth are the measure the coda returns to, and without the weed in the stream, the horse, the rain on the veranda table and the father’s house the last shot would have nothing to answer. The burning of Kelvin’s papers is needed for the leaving, and Hari’s arrivals and deaths are required to the frame. What holds the axis lowest is three stretches that carry more length than the argument compels: Berton’s testimony, which tells in exposition what the station will show; the drive, which could lose half its length without the film losing a thing it knows; and the scientists’ quarrels in the second part, which restate positions already taken.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Contact with the wholly other returns us only to ourselves: the ocean answers the scientists not with knowledge but with their own guilt made flesh, and Snaut says it in the library, “Нам нужно зеркало”
(We need a mirror). Under it lies a harder truth about love. The Hari who comes is made from Kelvin’s memory of the wife who killed herself, so that what he loves is his image of the dead; and the copy, by suffering and choosing, becomes more a person than the memory she was made from. Conscience is the one human thing that crosses to the other world unchanged. Held at the bar of the gate because the film states its theses in two long speeches, and the ocean itself stays a sign.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Height is reached often and in more than one key. The minute without gravity in the library, when Kelvin and Hari turn in the air among the candelabrum and the books to the Bach chorale, after the camera has read Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow inch by inch: one of the summits of the medium. The dreadful: Hari’s revival after the liquid oxygen, the body bending back into life with a sound like breaking ice, and Hari tearing through a metal door because she cannot bear to be out of his sight. The hypnotic: the drive, which becomes a dread with no object. Rain falling inside the father’s house, and the last pull-back through cloud. Held below the top by frequency: the commission, the corridors and the quarrels are long flats between the peaks.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, and the structure bears load. The frame is the parable of the Prodigal Son: the son leaves the father’s house, goes into the far country and returns to kneel, and the last image is composed after Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. The film is laid out on that departure and return, so the parable is its skeleton, not an allusion. A second myth carries the station: the dead wife who comes back to the husband who failed her and is lost again, three times, as Eurydice is lost; and with it Galatea, the image that comes to life. The particular stays particular: a box of earth in a tin, a dress without a fastening, paper strips on a ventilator. Held a step down because the Christian frame is announced as much as built, and the coda leans on it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is double: the science fiction film, with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, four years earlier, as its nearest and largest model, and Lem’s novel of 1961, whose subject is the limit of science before an alien mind. The turn from both is wide. The genre’s spectacle is refused: forty minutes on Earth before the station, a ship seen only from the inside, an alien never given a human likeness, a climax that is a man kneeling. Lem’s epistemology becomes a drama of conscience and a return home. The stake was real: after Andrei Rublev (8.7) had been held back from release, a director in disfavour made a long, unspectacular film with a Bach chorale and a Christian parable on a state studio’s money. Held below the gate because the style had been proven in Rublev, and the project was in part chosen as the more acceptable one.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The film’s argument is that a man must be returned to the weight of the earth and of time, and its duration is that weight: the stream held in one shot until the weed in the current becomes a thing seen. The three-part shape, Earth, the station and the Earth that is not Earth, is the argument’s shape, and the last pull-back rereads the whole film in one movement: what was home is an island the ocean has made of memory, as the station’s corridors have been filling with things of the Earth. The home film is memory made a medium. Held below the top because the alternation of colour and monochrome keeps no law, and Berton’s testimony is told as a document where its content could have been carried otherwise without loss.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: fifty-four years of re-examination that has not converged. The film is read as Lem’s argument betrayed or deepened; as Christian parable; as a study of guilt and the dead mother; as an argument about personal identity, whether the Hari of the end is a person and whether she is the dead woman; as a critique of the masculine image of woman, Hari being made from a man’s memory; and, through the stream and the ocean, as a film of nature. Its questions stay open in the film itself: whether Kelvin stays on Solaris, whether the coda is an illusion granted or a grace, whether the house with rain inside it is a gift or a trap. Steven Soderbergh’s remake (2002) chose other answers and did not exhaust it. Held a step below the top because some readings rest on the stated speeches.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force is high: the film made science fiction a vehicle for memory, conscience and the sacred rather than for technology, and set a slow, contemplative form against the grandeur of 2001 rather than imitating it. Part of that force is Tarkovsky’s style as a whole, made in Andrei Rublev (8.7) and carried further in Mirror (8.7) and Stalker (8.8), and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes in 1972; Soderbergh’s remake; the line of contemplative and metaphysical science fiction since; and the slow cinema of later decades, which owes Tarkovsky more than any other director, though not this film alone. The reach is real, largely within art cinema and shared with the later films; it redirected a genre’s ambition more than its practice.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the full release survives whole and restored; the shortened American release of the 1970s was a variant and took nothing from the work. Presence: fifty-four years of continuous life in repertory, on television and on every home format, taught wherever cinema is taught, with a remake that kept its title in circulation. Wide, but within the cinema; it has not passed into common culture as a line or a tune has. Fabric: the station’s design, the commission’s furniture and a Tokyo expressway offered as the future are of 1971 and read so, though the Earth sequences and the ocean do not date, and the Sovcolor image is of its stock. The usual figure for its age, short of the widest. Decades do not outscore centuries.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The making bears weight in its central instrument, Vadim Yusov’s camera, whose slow lateral tracks and long held takes compose every room as a picture, and whose studies of the Bruegel and of the stream are among the finest passages of looking in cinema. Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score works at the edge of sound effect, with the Bach set against it. Natalya Bondarchuk’s Hari moves from blankness to terror to self-knowledge without a false step; Jüri Järvet’s Snaut is weary and ironic, Anatoly Solonitsyn’s Sartorius brittle. The costs are real and not small: the ocean and the station’s exterior are modestly achieved, the interiors cluttered without the precision of the Earth scenes, the commission staged flatly, and Donatas Banionis solid rather than revealing in a part that carries the film. Below Tokyo Story (8.9) and Chinatown (8.6) in finish across the whole.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the stream at the dacha in the first minutes and the minute without gravity in the library; or Berton’s grey testimony and Hari’s revival. One law governs them: what is loved and wronged returns, in memory or in flesh, and knowledge is possible only through conscience. The Earth of the first part is already full of what the station will reproduce, the house, the horse, the father, the photograph of the dead wife, so the coda obeys a law laid down at the start. The range is wide: domestic drama, institutional procedure, science fiction, love story and religious parable, held in one register of slow attention. Held below the top because the drive stands half outside the law, more a mood than a step in the argument, and the commission obeys the film’s logic but not its manner.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Consciousness is held at the centre: Kelvin’s memory, guilt and fever given form. The family: the father and the son, the dead mother in the home film, the wife who killed herself, the aunt and the child at the dacha. Science and the state, as one strand: the commission, decades of a discipline in decline, the institution’s wish to bombard the ocean. The sacred: the parable, the chorale, the return, the image that suffers into personhood. The natural order: the stream, the weed, the horse and the rain, against an ocean that is nature wholly other. These are held, not listed, through one man’s return. Held lower than the rest of its strengths because history is a faint ground, labour is absent, and the social world beyond the institution and the household is barely present.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 8.7, then The Living Form at 8.6. Heights in more than one key, from the minute without gravity to the revival and the pull-back to the island; the parable of the prodigal son built as the film’s skeleton, with the thrice-lost wife carrying the station; fifty-four years of readings that have not converged; a film that survives whole, restored, in repertory and on every home format; and a form whose duration is the weight of the earth it returns a man to.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9: the Earth prologue and the long takes are required, but Berton’s testimony, half of the drive and the scientists’ quarrels carry more length than the argument compels. Above it, The Encompassed at 8.0, where consciousness, the family, science, the sacred and nature are held through one man’s return but history is faint, labour absent and the world beyond the institution and the household barely present; then The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3, a wide turn from the genre made in a style already proven, and a real reach within art cinema, shared with the director’s later films.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on three of five: The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall two tenths short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it covers falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. The work is held below the summit by one condition, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.4 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Solyaris (Солярис) in the full Soviet release, in two parts and about 167 minutes long, in Russian, the version shown at Cannes in May 1972 and carried by the modern restored editions, from the weed in the stream to the island in the ocean: directed by Andrei Tarkovsky for Mosfilm from a screenplay by Fridrikh Gorenshtein and Tarkovsky after Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris (1961), photographed by Vadim Yusov, with music by Eduard Artemyev and Bach’s chorale prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (BWV 639); Sovcolor, with passages in monochrome or tinted stock. Running times between 165 and 169 minutes are given for different transfers of the same version. The shortened American release of the 1970s is a variant and is not the object. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Russian film; the English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, and nothing here is charged to a subtitle. One line of the dialogue is held to the word with certainty and is quoted in Russian above the English; the rest is described. The novel is the source, not the work, and is named only where the film departs from it. The exact order of some short scenes in the second part is not relied on. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the American release, the reasons for the mixture of colour and monochrome, the dubbing of any actor’s voice, the novelist’s view of the film, the cuts asked of the film before release and the director’s answer to them, the later films said to descend from it, its places in polls, and its shot count, average shot length and share of dialogue, are not given.