Description
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) examines humanity’s condition in its moment of space exploration. However, rather than celebrating the promise of unravelling the mysteries of space in the 1960s, the film is instead a meditation, and perhaps even a warning regarding the state of human existence as it blindly began imposing itself upon the universe. Instead of showing our future’s fantastic promise, Solaris presents it as entangled with the past. For Tarkovsky, the future would traumatically repeat catastrophes. The echoes Hiroshima still whisper as the scientist’s project threatens the repetition of history. The ghosts of each man’s conscience return from the repressed through a physical manifestation in their re-living of disaster. Adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Solaris also critiques the socio-political condition of Soviet culture. It was produced from the context of Lem’s literary critiques of techno-bureaucratic modernity,articulating the failure of socio-political communication and the instrumentality of the subject to the state. Scientific discourse and teleological ‘progress’ is profoundly ruptured in comparison to humanity’s knowledge, and confrontation, of itself. Its refusal to confront a traumatic past in its desire for the promise of the future is a system of an ability to acknowledge modernity’s own barbarism, and failure to seek redemption. Tarkovsky weaves repetition and simulacra throughout the visual imagery; as with his other films, nostalgia for the past unfolds into the future. Images,objects and different medias reoccur throughout the film, bleeding space and time, reality and fantasy through the traumatic repetition of the image.| Period | Apr 2010 |
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