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) is dreams of
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 of 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 reach 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 the film
within the 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. Some
physical and metaphysical meanings 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 about
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 objects, work as the link between Kris and his memories. Tarkovsky's
interest in filming Proust's voluntary and involuntary memories is hardly
surprising as Green states in his book: "Although past time may 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 the home represents the technique of reproducing time,
through film within the film, in which Tarkovsky explores the 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. 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 to become mature 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 to enter non-reality but 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 the mystical union of subject
and object. Tarkovsky aims 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 on 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 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 of the memory through the character's
subjectivity can not be constructed unless the juxtaposition of the shots 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 nonactions 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 involuntary memory should
not be dismissed as the failure of intellectual achievements, but it contains
its form of intelligence that needs to be analyzed and understood. Tarkovsky's
use of memory as an artist's device which helps transform the past into the
reality of the present appears also by 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 Tarkovsky'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 consciousness 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 can 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).
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 involuntary memories to art is not exactly what Kris
does in Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky continues to do that from Mirror (1975)
to his last film in a self-reflexive approach to creating 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 consist of the fact that, on the one
hand, the notion of the landscape as a major aesthetic principle is necessary
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 reality which comes sometimes
very close to the kind of aesthetic that can be perceived in the formalistic
structure of dream sequences.
In Solaris, dream and memory are merging, and do they symbolize and represent 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 and becoming one makes us
suspicious about the credibility of the 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 in 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, and 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 the 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 the impurities of the soul. Tarkovsky's allegorical
use of cinematic images 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 the 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 allegorical 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 they
represent love, family, oedipal relationships, and death.
The involuntary memories in Solaris provoke the sense of guilt and trigger
Kris' delirium which culminates in 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 trees. Mist" (Robinson, 389). 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 the reality of Solaris. Non-formalist
definition of style is relevant 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 constant contact with the waking world within the realm of
sleep.
Tarkovsky's films deal so outspokenly with dreams and memories. In Tarkovsky's
films, the logic of the dream/memory produces a distance. 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 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 of 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 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
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