Proust & Solaris

The aesthetic phenomenon of memory is elaborated by Tarkovsky into a much more consistent version of Proust's categories. The central conceit of Solaris(1972) dreams a kind of utopian reconciliation between two protagonists, Kris and Harry, crucial to the nobility of the film is the fact that the film provides a manifestation on memory. The film's metaphysical speculations which are immortality or metaphor of mortality are demonstrated only by the significance of the memory and its function on each character's conscience. The revelation of Kris' inmost wishes through the memory is the essence of the film. Trakovsky provides a striking example of his fondness for Harry's merging identities when the implications of the story are reaching to the embodiment of the character's guilt-ridden memories. Kris' confrontations with unresolved conflicts of the conscience can be revealed only through the materializations of Harry extracted from Kris' memory that shed light on the complexity of his remembrances of the past. Proust's categories of memories and their function can explain how they work in Solaris and why their categorization is reproduced and captured in the classical form of film within film. It occurs when Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) shows an old documentary of Solaris and when Kris shows Harry the filmed record of Earth that he has taken with him to the Solaris station. In each case the recollection of time past in the present is vividly illustrated. In fact, some physical and metaphysical of the meaning in the film can be elucidated by Proust's voluntary and involuntary memories. These types of memory are connected to the number of linked images in which Tarkovsky's interest and desire to show the spectator the metaphorical aspects of the past are palpable and impressive.

So much of the film is simply involved in looking, thinking, and contemplating in silence on nature, the past, and the Solaris. It seems that the sympathetic dramatization of religious hope talks about immortality in human terms while linking it to memory and desire. The opening shot of the film shows us the lake in the neighborhood of Kris' dacha where underneath the water gentle fronds of algae weave to and fro. The image is picked in the film on numerous occasions, for example, when the camera focuses on the hair of the sleeping Harry, spread out in baroque curlicue on the pillow of Kris' bed. perhaps most extraordinary of all is the dolly into the pond in the final sequence when there is a point of view from the copy of Kris(or Kris?) to the reconstruction of Kelvin's dacha. In Tarkovsky's film, the objects that become living organisms, or living organisms that turn into the objects, work as the link between Kris and his memories. Trakovsky's interest in filming Proust's voluntary and involuntary memories is hardly surprising as Green states in his book: "Although past time my be irrevocable, it can not be destroyed or vanish without trace. Time and memory merge, are two aspects of a single phenomenon" (Green, 59). Kris' filmed record of home represents the technique of reproducing time, through film within film, in which Tarkovsky explores complex relationship between memory and time and creates new images for the ideas of resurrection and eternity at the end of the film.  It is important to remember that a copy of Harry who is reconstituted out of neutrinos is learning how to communicate with the characters, how to sleep in bed with Kris, how to stand against solitude, and finally how to memorize and remember the images and the sounds. In fact what the copy of Harry earns through a kind of utopian reconciliation process with Kris is not only the image of love itself, but is the package of habits that she has to learn in order to become matured and human.

The abstraction and concreteness of dream sequences in the film and their relations with memory signify here not really a dreamlike quality obtained by making reality strange, but they suggest that we are dreaming and remembering not in order to enter non-reality but in order to find reality more real than before. The structure of the world without the participation of memories in Solaris is diagnosed with the symptom of scientific interpretation and logical understanding of the universe because the process of remembering the past attains the highest degree of mysticism that can be connected to the moral principle. The aesthetic world of memories linked to the subjectivity of the perception remains anti-materialist and loyal to mystical union of subject and object. Tarkovsky's aim is to see things and the entire world without adapting them to any definite perspective, neither to that of subjectivism nor to that of objectivism. The language of objective science creates distance between man as a subject or an authentic existence and his memories as the object. Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris  does not share with Lem's novel the central tenet of its narrative. The film can be analyzed based upon the director's emotional, moral, and religious preoccupations while the skeptical and rational side of science is also represented in the two important figures of the film, Snaut and Sartorius. On the other hand, things are just what they are and they present themselves to our eyes in an absolutely simple manner. In Solaris, Tarkovsky as an intuitive metaphysician attempts to deny the credibility of scientific resolution and to approach all mechanisms that can be complicate our rational perception.

Though Tarkovsky refused to become the disciple of Eisenstein's cinematic constructivism, it is fascinating that his concept of memory in formalistic structure is produced exclusively through the process of montage. This means that even for him the cinematic representation the memory through character's subjectivity can not be constructed unless by the juxtaposition of the shots that creates the concept of collision between the past and the present.  For Tarkovsky a single shot has time, and the process of formalistic reconstruction of time is solved by letting the actions be non actions that no longer follow the logic of experience of everyday life. The lack of Logic and coherence that we sometimes observe in reconstructing the past through the involuntary memory should not be dismissed as the failure of intellectual achievements, but that it contains its own form of intelligence which needs to be analyzed and understood. Tarkovsky's use of memory as an artist device which helps transform the past into the reality of the present appears also in accordance with the dream's concept of time. The merging of dream and memory in Tarkovsky's works is not done because of symbolic reasons as Bornstein states in his books:" Tarkovsky's expressions neither represent the 'real' nor do they symbolize the 'unreal'. They remain in the domain of the 'improbable" between symbolization, representation, and verfremdete [alienated] expression and this is what gives them their 'strange' character" (Bornstein, 8).To analyze Trakovsky's artistic strategy of expressing the past and memory through the film, one has to focus on the concept of Proustain Madeleine that has been reiterated in the conscious of the protagonists as Bornstein continues in his book:

"'Spaces' functions here rather...like a 'Proustain Madeleine' which one can perceive best when 'lying in bed'., meaning when suffering from a reduced mobility. In Tarkovsky such a space is produced by letting it be perceived not by a proud, conceptual, subjective man convinced in his mathematical capacity or in his 'stylizing power; but by a man whose being is reduced to nature" (Bornstein, 25).

For Proust, involuntary memory is able to capture the singular moments of the past that produce exactly the existential anxieties as Gross states in his writing: " In every instance in Remembrance of things Past when an involuntary memory sweeps over a character, it disorients him, makes him uncertain of who he is, even creates a feeling of 'dizziness' or' oscillation' between an earlier moment re-experienced and the existing one" (Gross, 378). For Proust, the truth is somewhere in the depth of the memory as Gross observes precisely:" All that is really important about life comes as a result of these eruptions from within. The most essential truths are those contained in the depths of memory and obtainable only by reflectively possessing the material that emerges involuntarily" (Gross, 378). For Tarkovsky, Proust is the person that he has to refer to when he needs to reconstruct the past through the memories in cinema as Tarkovsky states in his book: " Proust also spoke of raising 'a vast edifice of memories', and that seems to me to be what cinema is called to do" (Tarkovsky,59).
In fact, the individual should not be overwhelmed with a flood of disconnected images. His insights that arise from reading his memories are not enough to prove its reason d'etre. For Proust as Gross indicates in his writing: " One must find a way to turn them into art, which Proust was the spiritual correlate of the raw material thrown up by the reminiscences (Gross, 378). Though converting the involuntary memories to the art is not exactly what Kris does in Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky continues to do that from Mirror (1975) to his last film in self-reflexive approach to create art.

For Tarkovsky and Proust, involuntary memory can create an impression that has associations with existential and spiritual experiences. Tarkovsky's landscapes and objects in Solaris consists of the fact that, on the one hand, the notion of the landscape as a major aesthetic principle is necessarily to the structure of the film, on the second hand, "If there are landscapes in his films these landscapes are not geometrical but 'mental landscapes'" (Bornstein, 23). These mental landscapes that are connected to inner time represent a realistic and naked reproduction of the reality which comes sometimes very close to the kind of aesthetic that can be perceived in formalistic structure of dream sequences.

In Solaris, dream and memory are merging together and nor do they symbolize and represents the reality. They simply are the objects and are reality. Kris' memory does not seem exactly what it is. The complexity of the mise-en scene into which the architectures of his house in dacha and Solaris are integrating together and become one makes us suspicious about the credibility of pure form of memory. Due to the utmost expressivity of the scene, everything is part of a reality within which manifestations of dream and memory can not be distinguished. To say that all memories in Solaris come as an absolute form is erroneous. Kris' reconstruction of memories when he is hallucinating is hard to recognize as Robinson states in his book: "Harry, who is crouching bedside Kris' head, is comforting him; she looks up, into the camera; another light flares the lens. Then one of Tarkovsky's continuous dream shots in which multiple versions of Harry are seen..."(Robinson,338).The question is how Kris' existential contemplations to the philosophical questions of life, the spiritual and metaphysical expression of his experiences can intermingle together and create one entity. The conception of the image that should, according to Tarkovsky, manifest an organic link between idea and form present the transcendent without appeal to intellect. However, Proustian involuntary form of memory requires an intellectual receiver able to unite himself with the Western metaphysical conception of subjectivity that creates distance between the observer as the subject and the observed as the object. Therefore, Kris is not able to intellectually analyze the extraordinary phenomena that happen on the Solaris. It is only possible for him to mediate through the fabricated memories and to get rid of impurities of the soul. Tarkovsky's allegorical use of cinematic image accords with Proust's reflection on memory and artistic creativity. For Proust, categories of memory can only be revealed and rediscovered by the medium of literature that can work like a link as a media between pre-modern and modern world. Tarkovsky, whose metonymical cinematic art moves toward the aim that Proust is searching for in literature, creates anti symbolism that does not lead to a semiotic art of signs because we know how hard Tarkovsky tries to overcome symbolism. It leads to memory/dream images in Solaris which although utterly unreal, come to express reality itself. In other words, by referring to memory, Tarkovsky refuses to reproduce or stylize the past as Bornstein states in his book: " All there is dream and allegory, through which history is 'expressed'. Through the perception of flashing images able to twist the regular rhythm out of its routinized spin, the allegorician fractures the regular, naively progressive rhythm of modernity" (Bornstein, 102).If, for Proust, a sensation activates forgotten memories and reveals our discontinuous selves, the memories, for Tarkovsky, are important only because of their representation of love, family, oedipal relationship and death.

The involuntary memories in Solaris provoke the sense of guilt and trigger Kris' delirium that culminates to his nostalgic image of dacha that embodies Kris' existential suffering as Robinson tells us in his book: "Then Kris is seen beside the lake, as at the beginning of the film. It is now wintry, though...Dead bare tress. Mist" (Robinson, 389). In fact, the memories in Solaris appear to create moral paradoxes for the characters in the space lab. Moreover, Tarkovsky's stylization is here understood not as a simple abstraction from a concrete reality, but as being backed by a sophisticated relationship between the stylized memory of the past and reality of Solaris. Non formalist definition of style is relevant in regard to Tarkovsky's cinema. He has elaborated in his films aesthetics of memories and dreams in a way which many people think that all of his films can be considered as the zone between memory and dream. The idea of dreamlike realism inside of Proustian memory suggests itself a perfect way to maintain a constant contact with the waking world within the realm of sleep.

Tarkovsky's films deals so outspokenly with dreams and memories. In Tarkovsky's films, the logic of the dream/memory produces a distance. Obviously, this distance is not a Brechtian distance as Bornstein indicates in his book: "In Tarkovsky, the observing distance of the spectator projects the spectator(in a paradoxical way) right inside the time of the film" (Bornstein, 17). Tarkovsky's strongly of anti-symbolist and anti-realist concept of shot relies on the principle that every scene can produce its own time while at the same time the temporal phenomenon of each shot creates the distance between the spectator and the cinematic text. For Tarkovsky, both dreams and memories as phenomena of cinematic time arise out the inner and temporal necessity. In his cinema, neither symbolism nor realism represents the reality in the temporal necessity of each shot of dream/memory. The transformation of dream/memory to the reality and the reality to the dream/memory provide a decisive moment for cinematic aesthetics at the end of Solaris. Completely opposed to what Hollywood classic cinema once thought, memory and dream are the elements that avant-garde artists such as Tarkovsky, need in order to create the abstractive concept of the time and their cinematic expressions.

Bornstein, Thorsten Botz. Films and dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-wai, United Kingdom: Lexington Books, 2007.

Green, Peter. Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest Hong Kong: The Macmillan Press, 1993.

Gross, David. Bergson, Proust, and the Revaluation of Memory International Philosophical Quarterly 25 No.4, 1985.

Robinson, Jeremy Mark. The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky United Kingdom: Crescent Moon, 2006.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.


By: Morad Sadeghi