164 Solaris

[thirtyframesasecond]

Limited edition (500 copies) box set with soundtrack on vinyl & CD, photo & essay book, and the film on Blu-ray (no idea on the provenance of the latter).

I have one on order from Germany as Rough Trade/Boomkat sold out. Fingers crossed it comes!

[rrot]

Limited edition (500 copies) box set with soundtrack on vinyl & CD, photo & essay book, and the film on Blu-ray (no idea on the provenance of the latter).

Email to me from the issuers states it is the Artificial Eye edition again

[eerik]

The commentary track incorrectly calls Jüri Järvet "a Latvian theatre actor", while, in fact, he was Estonian and had no connection to Latvia.

[colinr0380]

If anyone else has ever wished that the driving sequence in Solaris was ten hours long, here's a great ASMR video.

[Mr Sausage]

Saw this again last night and realized something I hadn't noticed before: the slow scan of the Bruegel painting, which I always took to be just another example of a Tarkovsky mannerism, occurs from Hari's point of view as she sits in the library lost in reverie. I think this is the first time we enter Hari's subjectivity, suggesting the flowering her humanness. Very Tarkovsky, I think, to use art inspiring a reverie to show the development of subjectivity and, hence, humanity. I think the moment shows how her subjectivity, tho' determined by Kelvin's consciousness initially, has lifted free of him. Her reverie associates the landscape with the image of the young Kelvin in the snow from the family video, so the reverie is also of Kelvin; yet Hari fails to notice Kelvin's presence in the room until Kelvin startles her from her reverie. She is free to pursue her own thoughts and feelings, think of Kelvin (nor not) when she chooses, while paying no mind to Kelvin himself. How tragic that this flowering of her humanness is immediately followed by the spectre of death, as she pursues suicide until achieving it. Unlike her earthly counterpart's suicide, tho', she does it for Kelvin, to free him from an emotional cage, rather than because of or in spite of him. The irony is that this second loss does not free Kelvin, but drives him inside himself to live in a world constructed entirely of his own consciousness as embodied by a living planet.

One of the most moving and complex moments in the film is when Kelvin admits to the reconstituted Hari that he did not love her when she was alive, but came to love her after her death. It reminded me of Thomas Hardy's poems to his dead ex-wife. They had an awful marriage that ended badly, but after she died, Hardy found himself grieving the loss of a future moment of reconciliation and apology for their having hurt each other. His poems laying out his surprised grief at having lost a potential tenderness are profound and moving. I was reminded of them; I saw Kelvin coming to a more keen appreciation for Hari only when he no longer had a future moment with her, and then, by a sci fi miracle, in fact got that moment with her and was able to express the love and tenderness he evidently couldn't find when her earthly form was alive. Hari's childlike devotion to Kelvin, maturing into a complex separateness and then a very individual choice to leave him, recapitulates, you feel, the whole process of their initial relationship, only this time Kelvin is emotionally present for it. Not a chance to redo a relationship, but a chance to actually live it instead of just experience it.

An emotionally devastating film. I actually suspect the film would work even better if it didn't have so many hard sci fi trappings. I do think Stalker made the right choice to limit those and become a sort of quasi-scientific philosophical/religious fantasia.

[Stefan Andersson]

Interesting info from 2002 about colour tinting in certain sequences:
https://www.nostalghia.com/TheTopics/ne ... laris.html

Comments from Issa Clubb and Stephanie Friedman:

"Soviet black and white film stock of the era tended to degrade, attaining tints that were not originally there. So some of the black and white footage, which home video viewers might be used to seeing with a slight color tonality, has been rendered in pure black and white. The print from the original /unreleased/ version bears this out as well."

"Contrary to what viewers have seen on previous video versions, the black-and-white sequences in the actual film elements do not have a pronounced blue cast. /.../ "the film's director of photography, Vadim Yusov /../ told us that the scenes were shot in black and white and that no additional blue tints had been added to the scenes in question. There were a few notable exceptions to this, where the film element did in fact have a darker, more pronounced blue cast. These all involved the representation of video screens in a larger space, and we did our best to accurately represent what was on the element in those cases. We can only speculate as to how or why the blue tints have appeared in previous versions. A number of the experts we contacted suggested that the blue cast in positive prints may have resulted from printing black-and-white footage on color film stock. Another contributing factor could be that the black-and-white material had faded toward blue, something we learned Soviet film stock of the era has tended to do."

The problem of b/w stock fading to some kind of colour might perhaps apply to video masters of other Tarkovsky films with reduced colour and/or sepia tints.

[hearthesilence]

It's probably much worse in the case of this particular film stock, but I feel like a lot of the older, beat-up black & white 35mm prints I used to see tended to yellow with age as well.

[Walter Kurtz]

Saw this again last night and realized something I hadn't noticed before: the slow scan of the Bruegel painting, which I always took to be just another example of a Tarkovsky mannerism, occurs from Hari's point of view as she sits in the library lost in reverie. I think this is the first time we enter Hari's subjectivity, suggesting the flowering her humanness. Very Tarkovsky, I think, to use art inspiring a reverie to show the development of subjectivity and, hence, humanity. I think the moment shows how her subjectivity, tho' determined by Kelvin's consciousness initially, has lifted free of him. Her reverie associates the landscape with the image of the young Kelvin in the snow from the family video, so the reverie is also of Kelvin; yet Hari fails to notice Kelvin's presence in the room until Kelvin startles her from her reverie. She is free to pursue her own thoughts and feelings, think of Kelvin (nor not) when she chooses, while paying no mind to Kelvin himself. How tragic that this flowering of her humanness is immediately followed by the spectre of death, as she pursues suicide until achieving it. Unlike her earthly counterpart's suicide, tho', she does it for Kelvin, to free him from an emotional cage, rather than because of or in spite of him. The irony is that this second loss does not free Kelvin, but drives him inside himself to live in a world constructed entirely of his own consciousness as embodied by a living planet.

One of the most moving and complex moments in the film is when Kelvin admits to the reconstituted Hari that he did not love her when she was alive, but came to love her after her death. It reminded me of Thomas Hardy's poems to his dead ex-wife. They had an awful marriage that ended badly, but after she died, Hardy found himself grieving the loss of a future moment of reconciliation and apology for their having hurt each other. His poems laying out his surprised grief at having lost a potential tenderness are profound and moving. I was reminded of them; I saw Kelvin coming to a more keen appreciation for Hari only when he no longer had a future moment with her, and then, by a sci fi miracle, in fact got that moment with her and was able to express the love and tenderness he evidently couldn't find when her earthly form was alive. Hari's childlike devotion to Kelvin, maturing into a complex separateness and then a very individual choice to leave him, recapitulates, you feel, the whole process of their initial relationship, only this time Kelvin is emotionally present for it. Not a chance to redo a relationship, but a chance to actually live it instead of just experience it.

An emotionally devastating film. I actually suspect the film would work even better if it didn't have so many hard sci fi trappings. I do think Stalker made the right choice to limit those and become a sort of quasi-scientific philosophical/religious fantasia.

Thank you for this.
This was especially good.

[Walter Kurtz]

i saw this film when i was quite young. Not too young to understand it, but at an age when you are very vulnerable. And it helped make me realize how huge the world is... not only the world out there... but also the one inside your head.

[Michael Kerpan]

The Ruscico (?) Solaris DVD featured black and white that was black and white -- so I never updated from that.