Solaris (1972)

Solyaris, USSR, 167 minutes

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Writers: Stanislaw Lem, Fridrikh Gorenshteyn, Andrei Tarkovsky

Photography: Vadim Yusov

Music: Eduard Artemyev, J.S. Bach

Editors: Lyudmila Feyginova, Nina Marcus

Cast: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Benionis, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Juri Jarvet, Sos Sargsyan, Vitalik Kerdimun

Solaris has always struck me as the Soviet response to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the Cold War then in its high anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better period. Director and cowriter Andrei Tarkovsky reportedly liked Solaris the least of all his pictures, which would fit with being pressured into doing it (or into doing it a certain way) by Soviet elements that inevitably had a lot of control over his life and career. But I don’t know—I’m just spitballing here. Based on a novel by the Soviet science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, Solaris is heady, trippy, slow, and frequently abstracted. But it is propelled by a deeply strange premise and Tarkovsky’s usual care in putting together a movie.

A new planet has been discovered, called Solaris. It has been under study for years by Soviet scientists but remains baffling. Landing parties have disappeared, always under strange circumstances. Even the space station orbiting it seems to feel some of the effects—hallucinations, delusions, madness. More and more a majority of government decision makers argue the project should be abandoned as too dangerous and expensive. But the scientists remain fascinated and who can blame them. One theory among many is that the planet itself is a kind of giant brain, or “thinking substance.” The station was built to house a crew of 85 but it’s now down to just three and their reports are increasingly nutty. A scientist and psychologist, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Benionis), is dispatched to assess the situation, with an eye toward closing it down. What he finds there will change and destroy his life.

Stalker (1979)

USSR, 163 minutes
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Writers: Arkadiy Strugatskiy, Boris Strugatskiy, Andrei Tarkovsky
Photography: Aleksandr Knyazhinskiy, Georgi Rerberg, Leonid Kalashnikov
Music: Eduard Artemev
Editor: Lyudmila Feyginova
Cast: Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Nikolay Grinko, Alisa Freyndlikh

Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's attempts at science fiction tended to falter from apparent basic misunderstandings of the genre—the high concepts of these stories are presented with such a light hand they are almost impossible to discern. In Stalker, something has happened to Earth, somewhere on the Eurasian land mass. An early note tells us it's not known what it was—a meteor strike or an invasion by a superior alien civilization are the two suggestions. The result is "a miracle": the Zone. Initially, armies were sent into the Zone, but were never heard from again. Now a militarized border has been erected around its perimeter, and no one is allowed in.

"Stalkers" have to sneak in through a no man's land of tanks, barbed wire, and machine gun fire. Stalkers have specialized skills that enable them to traverse the Zone and guide people to a room, where the innermost desires of those entering it come true. Yes, you heard me right. Another way that Tarkovsky seems to misunderstand science fiction, or use it so differently as to be alien, is by turning his geographies into soft dreamy places of externalized human psychology—remember that Solaris is about a planet that vivifies the people who dwell in the unconscious of its inhabitants. Even the plot point about the room in Stalker is handled obliquely, emerging late and talked about as if we already understood. The saving grace, and the point where people may begin to feel differently, because they may see no saving grace here, is the singularity of Tarkovsky and his visions. Whether or not he is consorting successfully with science fiction, he conveys the moods well. Never mind that too close consideration of the concepts may disturb the concentration, with ridicule.

The Mirror (1975)

Zerkalo, USSR, 108 minutes
Director: Andrei Tarkovksy
Writers: Aleksandr Misharin, Andrei Tarkovsky, Arseni Tarkovsky
Photography: Georgi Rerberg
Music: Eduard Artemev
Editor: Lyudmila Feiginova
Cast: Margarita Terekhova, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, Larisa Tarkovskaya, Oleg Yankovsky, Ignat Daniltsev, Anatoli Solonitsin, Alla Demidova, Arseni Tarkovsky

By all I can tell, The Mirror was shot and first released in the USSR (under heavy official sanction, which prevented it from entry into Cannes) and then made its way slowly across the world—the first screening in the U.S. was 1983, according to IMDb—approximately during the period when I was busy attending revival house and art film theater series, taking film appreciation classes, and thinking a lot about movies. Yet even the name was plain unfamiliar to me many years later when I ran across it in a list of Greatest Films You Must See or some such. I shoveled The Mirror on in to my Netflix queue, along with two more highly regarded Tarkovsky pictures I knew only dimly, Andrei Rublev and Ivan's Childhood.

In retrospect, I think I can see how Andrei Rublev could become for some what I found in, say, The Mother and the Whore or Berlin Alexanderplatz: a vast, bewildering, disorienting film unlike any other, certainly unlike anything before it, and profoundly formative somehow. By comparison, The Mirror is more chamber suite, moderated by the focused scope and intimacies of autobiography. No surprise, it requires patience, and probably some previously existing predisposition toward director/co-writer Andrei Tarkovsky's work. Few filmmakers seem to me as capable of exploiting the daunting levels of complexity the medium can accommodate. But the slipperiness of the narrative handholds are frustrating. Yet there it sits at #27 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

Andrei Rublev (1966)

Andrey Rublyov, USSR, 205 minutes
Director: Andrey Tarkovskiy
Writers: Andrey Konchalovskiy, Andrey Tarkovskiy
Photography: Vadim Yusov
Music: Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov
Editors: Lyudmila Feiginova, Olga Shevkunenko, Tatyana Yegorychyova
Cast: Anatoli Solonitsyn, Ivan Lapikov, Nikolai Grinko, Nikolai Sergeyev, Irma Raush, Nikolai Burlyayev, Yuri Nazarov

A friend of mine tends to be deeply suspicious of biopics for their rote recitations of all too familiar events and the distorting constrictions they impose: too much focus on one person, too many compressions to turn an entire lifetime into a two-hour narrative, too much temptation for hagiography, and too much reliance on the performance of a single player to make them work (and the performances, such as Meryl Streep's recent turn in The Iron Lady, often have the further hazard of feeling more like stunts and/or extended impressions).

It occurred to me that Andrei Rublev could well be the exception. Technically, it's a biopic, but it finds any number of ways to break the mold, starting with its imposing size, well north of three hours. The current Criterion DVD bears the "director's cut," which is about as long as Seven Samurai or The Godfather: Part II—requiring a commitment and your best iron butt. For many years after its release it played in a version closer to 180 minutes, after cuts were made by director and writer Andrei Tarkovsky based on requirements of Soviet censors (although Tarkovsky later defended the shorter versions, which he also personally endorsed, particularly a 186-minute cut). So, yes, folks, in short, it's another case of a widely hailed critical masterpiece of world cinema that comes with its own competing versions to sort through (after finding).

And, as with Children of Paradise, The Passion of Joan of Arc, or The Rules of the Game, it also has a troubled production/distribution history, which in this case was mostly caused by the Soviet government of the time, mired in the depths of the Cold War in the '60s and '70s. For many years tracking down and seeing Andrei Rublev was no easy matter.