film and architecture section: Solaris by Andei Tarkovsky, Architecture and Film appreciation

category: Architecture and Film

film index: 58

relationship with architecture: architecture of a space station, architecture used as elements to understand the psychological states of the characters

study subject in: The Waterloo University syllabus (click HERE for syllabus)

film: Solaris

director: Andei Tarkovsky

writers: Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Andrei Tarkovsky, based on the novel by Stanisław Lem

production: USSR

release: May13, 1973

playtime: 165 mins

visual: colour

Language: Russian

Subtitles:

Genre: Sci fi

Cast: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Nikolai Grinko, Anatoly Solonitsyn

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reference: www.warezws.com, avaxhome.ws, www.taringa.net, foriegnmoviesddl.com, tipete.com

Description and download:

The legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made this extremely deliberate science-fiction epic, an adaptation of a novel by Stanislaw Lem. The story follows a cosmonaut (Donatas Banionis) on an eerie trip to a planet where haunting memories can take physical form. Its bare outline makes it sound like a routine space-flight picture, an elongated Twilight Zone episode; but the further into its mysteries we travel, the less familiar anything seems.

Even though Tarkovsky's meanings and methods are sometimes mystifying, Solaris has a way of crawling inside your head, especially given the slow pace and general lack of forward momentum. By the time the final images cross the screen, Tarkovsky has gone way beyond SF conventions into a moving, unsettling vision of memory and home. Well worthy of cult status, Solaris is both challenging art-house fare and a whacked-out head trip.

Solaris is a meditative psychodrama that is set mostly on a space station in orbit around a planet called "Solaris". The scientific mission on the space station has fallen into a crisis. Psychologist Kris Kelvin travels to the station to evaluate and explore the situation, but soon experiences the same kind of hallucinations that have befallen the other crew members. The film concentrates on the thoughts and the conscience of its characters and is a "drama of grief and partial recovery". Solaris and its complex and slow storytelling has sometimes been contrasted with Western science fiction films, which rely on special effects and an imagined version of the future.

Tarkovsky wanted to create a contrast between Earth, which he saw as the sensual source of life, and the space station and Solaris. To convey this idea of earth as the source of life, they filmed underwater plants, fire, snow, rain and other elements of nature. One scene departing from this idea is the last visit of Kris Kelvin to the house on Earth. He walks to the pond near the house, which is frozen and surrounded by bare trees, but not covered in snow. This dead scenery, where everything is still and not moving, contrasts to the early scenes at the same location, where underwater plants are floating in the current and trees are in full bloom. This was not planned, but rather a happy coincidence as temperature in Zvenigorod had suddenly dropped below zero.

The final scene, showing the house on earth on a small island in the ocean of Solaris, was achieved by combining separate shots taken from both a crane and a helicopter, which were then composited with a special effects shot of the Solaris ocean. In order to create the unique texture of the ocean on Solaris, Tarkovsky and Yusov at one point considered using animal viscera from cows. In the end they chose instead to use a liquid mixture of acetone, aluminium powder, and various dyes.

The space station was designed by Mikhail Romadin, who was a friend of Tarkovsky. They decided to have an old and broken-down space station instead of a futuristic utopian design. They were consulted by Lev Lupichev, a scientist and aerospace engineer. Lupichev also lent them a mainframe computer to be used on the set. Romadin designed a mirror room, with all walls, the ceiling and the floor covered in mirror. The cameraman Yusov would be hidden inside a mirrored sphere, with only a small opening for the camera. Akira Kurosawa, who was visiting the sets, was impressed by the design of the space station and even asked to spend one hour alone on the sets.

Imdb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/
wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%281972_film%29

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