By the end of 1961, Yuri Gagarin returned from the first manned space flight having circled the globe in roughly the span of a couple of hours. With the Space Age entering its most formative period, science fiction writers increasingly looked outward toward the vast expanses, speculating both on what might be found out in the depths and the various means man would develop in order to reach them.

Acclaimed Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, however, took a slightly different approach with Solaris, a journey less emphasizing the interstellar and astronomical so much as the interpersonal and psychological. Sixty years later, Lem’s book remains a staple of science fiction and Polish literary achievement, remaining as thought provoking and, to some extent, relevant today as when it was published—something of a rarity in the field of speculative fiction.

But within a decade of the book’s publication, acclaimed Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky would choose the novel as the source for his third feature-length film. At the time, Tarkovsky was renowned by Russian audiences but, due to the bureaucratic meddling of the Communist government, had yet to reach truly international fame outside of the country. His first film, Ivan’s Childhood, had been a success, both financially and internationally, but his second, the much-beloved Andrei Rublev, had yet to even be screened by the time Solaris had started production—and, going even deeper into debt to finance that current feature, Tarkovsky had become increasingly pessimistic that Rublev would ever even reach audiences’ eyes and ears.

Fortunately, it did, and to massive international acclaim. Mere months after its eventual release, Solaris debuted as well, demonstrating to the world that Tarkovsky’s perfectionism, abstraction, and eye for beauty were accompanied by his versatility in genre and wide-ranging creative interests. Solaris was a massive success that, for Tarkovsky, relieved him of his debts while opening doors in the film industry that had until then remained closed.

This piece is not, however, much about what took place behind the scenes of the film, nor the prevailing culture either within or without the Soviet Union at the time. The interest of Solaris, both in the film Tarkovsky wrote and shot, as well as the original story penned by Lem, was more universal in theme than Cold War politics or the tedium of Soviet bureaucracy. It was of art and knowledge, self-knowledge, love, guilt and, to some extent, recognition. But before any of this can be approached, one other topic must be covered with some brevity, first: the issue of adaptation.

The Principle of Adaptation

Films and novels have shared a relationship for as long as film has existed. George Méliès directed several adaptations of novels at the turn of the twentieth century: Robinson Crusoe, Cinderella and Gulliver’s Travels to name just a few, to say nothing of the famous A Trip to the Moon. In the beginning, film was viewed as a way of merely illustrating the events of a novel, granting image and movement to scenes previously only grasped by the imagination evoked by words or the still drawings of inspired artists. This view of film persists today, even as the task of editing a novel’s story down for time, pacing, and narrative convention has developed into an entire field of screenwriting.

Alterations to a narrative are unavoidable when attempting to bridge mediums. How an artist decides to illustrate a striking scene from a novel involves considerations about space, framing, color or shading, lighting, geometry and mis-en-scene in degrees that pure literary narrative only barely needs to touch on. Adapting a story to a purely auditory format as well, whether in the form of sole spoken narration, or that of radio theater complete with foley effects and character acting, too requires a bridge from the medium of the novel into that the show.

Film, naturally, is no exception; it is perhaps the ultimate bridge, requiring a union each of sound, image and movement to bring a particular vision and interpretation of a work into being. For this reason, film adaptations of novels are often considered within their own right, and generally speaking, should be compared with some independence to the works they are adapting. The keyword here being ‘some,’ however, as the act of adaptation, the existence of a film as an adaptation, naturally refers back to the work being adapted. And this is a much greater and more direct relation between two works than one merely taking inspiration from another; one is explicitly and intentionally derived from the other, even when allowances are made in the act of bridging the gap of category.

This is all to say that, while the rubrics of judgment may vary between the those of film and those of novels, at times possibly even appearing to be at odds with one another, there remains something that should remain at the core of each that is discernible and therefore capable of being judged: “Is this adaptation good?” Does a particular adaptation get at the core elements, themes, and concepts of the novel it adapts, or does it fail? Worse, as is so often the case, does the adaptation even try to do this, or does it instead replace the core ideas with other ideas and go on to drape the work’s characters, settings and plot about these new ideas as a form of narratological taxidermy?

Answers to these questions aren’t always immediately apparent. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, for instance, is well known for its action packed blockbuster illustration of, presumably, its subject matter. It is only upon inspection of that subject matter, however, that one can see for himself how thoroughly Jackson’s adaptation misses the point—so much so that to call it an adaptation would like implying that an animal captured, plucked, skinned and stuffed for a collector still embodies the liveliness of its living cousin still in the wild. To be sure: just because an audience liked a particular adaptation does not mean the film is a good adaptation; judgment according to whether the film improved—or detracted from—its novel is a different question entirely.

Andrei Tarkovsky was certainly aware of these differences between media. In an interview given to Naum Abramov in 1970, he speaks with some brevity on bringing a novel to the big screen, but he goes about explaining it slightly differently:

Prose possesses the special characteristic that its imagery depends on the sensory experience of the reader. So, no matter how detailed this or that scene is developed, the reader, to the degree of his own experience, sees that which his own experience, character, bias, and tastes have prepared him to see. Even the most detailed descriptions in prose, in a way, will elude the control of the writer and the reader will perceive them subjectively.¹

Tarkovsky approached this issue from a more pragmatic source: drawing out from his own interpretation the elements of the story he found most relevant and interesting, and then pulling his audience into that experience using film as the medium. Although it may come across, in brief, as though Tarkovsky recognizes a high degree of subjectivity in a reader’s experience with prose, he does not advocate for any sort of radical subjectivism in the interpretive act. Stories remain stories about specific things, even if prose itself, structurally speaking as a medium and depending on style, allows for varying degrees of ambiguity that affords readers some of their own creative breathing room.

Film lacks such a breathing room, at least in terms of the raw elements of its medium. A camera will depict what is placed in front of it, and a series of shots will lead an audience to presume some order and meaning to their placement in time according to their editing. This does not make film purely naturalistic, however; it is not somehow a depiction of reality or truth simply by its nature. Rather, its presentation, like photography, bypasses certain creative choices that things like painting or prose feature built-in to their mediums and instead presents others. Tarkovsky’s oeuvre heavily features the incursion of dreams into reality, the intermingling of characters’ interior and exterior lives in the realm of experience, captured in the moving images of film acting as an imitation of a witness. In response to an inquiry regarding his thoughts on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, for instance, Tarkovsky illustrated his views on the subject well: “The film is so detailed that it ceases to be realistic,” he replied, expressing that he was “staggered that anyone can put on Shakespeare and completely bypass the spiritual issues.”²

Film, then, is not reducible to a blank and unmanipulated presentation of material reality. The director has a choice not just in what to depict with the camera, but how to depict it and, to add more complexity, how to depict it in time, as film presents images in motion. Tarkovsky’s belief about how film does this, how film is art, and moreover, the spiritual significance of art will become clear by the end of this piece. With all this in mind, we can turn then to the subject at hand: Solaris, and more relevantly, the notion of contact.

Contact, Intimacy; The Return

Stanislaw Lem begins Solaris without Kris Kelvin even leaving Earth; already, he is en route to the planet by some larger transport vessel before launching by shuttle to the station. What little is discussed of Earth is referred to more as a result of Kevlin recollecting his time as a ‘Solarisist,’ a research academic who studied the field that had arisen as a result of the entity’s discovery. Once aboard the station, the odd, reclusive behavior of the other two scientists, coupled with evidence of others living there, alerts Kelvin to recognizing that the mission, or whatever remains of it, has deviated far off course. Soon, after an encounter with Khari, his long-dead wife in the flesh, Kelvin’s efforts to understand the station, the planet beneath it, and the intelligent, silent Ocean all spiral toward the exhaustion of reason. Along the way, Kelvin surrounds himself with the reports of others who have come before him, trying in vain to understand the Ocean, what form contact with the Solaris entity could take, what—and eventually, who—this reproduction of his deceased wife is: a journey that Lem leaves on somewhat of a pessimistic note by the end.

Tarkovsky’s film charts approximately the same course, but it moves a few scenes around in the interests of both brevity and emphasis. There is a significant report on the Ocean’s apparent ability to create by a previous scientist, Berton, which takes place approximately halfway through the book and which Tarkovsky chose to move to the beginning of the film. Likewise, a tense conversation between Kelvin and Staut—Snow—on space exploration and the search for meaning was moved from relatively early on in the novel to one of the climactic, penultimate scenes of the film. It is in this exchange that Staut proclaims man’s folly in seeking contact at all: “We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.”³

Before visiting the Solaris station, both Kelvin and the audience are aware that the Ocean is some sort of organism that seems apparently capable of forming things out of what we eventually come to learn are neutrino fields. These are not hallucinations or false-images, like holograms, but tangible objects that can be subjected to analytical tests and exploration, though they don’t tend to last long. Berton’s report alludes to much of this, as well as the Ocean’s apparent ability to read the minds of the people who visit it. Still, the one thing made clear by both Lem and Tarkovsky is that, although the Ocean is obviously intelligent, efforts to communicate with it have proven so far to be completely impossible.

In addition to beginning the film on Earth, and in fact spending nearly a quarter of the film’s run time Earthside before Kelvin goes to the station, Tarkovsky includes a relatively lengthy and hypnotic scene in which Berton, with the accompany of a child in his care, cruise through the futuristic highways of the Tokyo metropolitan area. The Ocean is not just totally alien to such an artificial, ‘futuristic’ society, full of individuals sculpting concrete into pathways and hovels, firing off digital and analogue communications and powering combustion engines. The audio collages of passing cars and synthesized signals wash over the viewer not unlike the sound of surf against a shore, and the entire complex of roadways play out an apparently self-replicating algorithm of both mathematical and artistic sublimity: features the Solaris entity has, one might consider, its own versions of in the mimoids and symmetriads to be discussed below. Tarkovsky spends several minutes on this scene despite it having no analogue in the book; enough time that one can’t help track these possible similarities between the Solaris entity and mankind, only for them to seem utterly dwarfed by their differences, as if Tarkovsky offers the audience these similarities specifically to emphasize the scale of that gap. The other function this scene serves is to subtly draw the audience’s attention to Berton’s obvious unease and the exact identity of the child that he has with him. More on this, like the symmetriads, to be discussed below.

Lem places the notion of first contact at a central position in the book. The whole purpose of the station is, after all, to find a way of communicating with the mysterious Ocean entity that apparently lives beneath it. The scientists, Kelvin included, seek contact with the Solaris entity. The visitors, made by the Ocean by some unknown and unseen method, seek contact with the scientists. Kelvin seeks contact eventually with himself. As the story unfolds, Kelvin’s relationship with his deceased wife overlaps with Khari, the visitor that took on her form and memory, laying open his own guilt and neuroses as her character arc follows the same trajectory as that of whom her being had been derived from. This marks the introduction to the deeply psychological and horrific aspects to the narrative.

Lem brings all of this to a conclusion by bringing Kelvin down to the surface, to a fragile mimoid formed to resemble an abandoned town, there left with his thoughts and longing for both the Khari of the Ocean’s formulation as well as some scrap of understanding of what the Solaris entity is. Throughout the novel, the Ocean is so alien as to come across as if it guards itself; its powers so great and its actions so mysterious that even Kelvin, with his access to the vast repository of knowledge on the subject, at times considers whether the entity merely “toys” with them “to satisfy the demands of its satanic humor.”⁴ The mysteriousness of the art it makes, the symmetriads, also points toward a vast intelligence engaging in an act of temporary creation merely out of boredom.

Such boredom provides a cover for a deeper presumption: that the Ocean intentionally keeps its secrets. As Kelvin acknowledges prior to something of a last-ditch effort to communicate directly with the entity—an encephalogram of his brain patterns translated into bursts of x-ray and beamed directly into the ocean—the mere existence of the Visitors proved that “it had infiltrated my mind without my knowledge and surveyed my memory, and laid bare my most vulnerable point.”⁵ When confronted with a being that can read minds, construct objects out of powerful neutrino fields, and even animate them with all appearances of agency and ensoulment, how could one not then presume that its communicative faculties are withheld purely by choice and not by some other restraint?

With such consideration in mind, contact takes on its ultimate form: intimacy, or in other words, communion. Pulling even just a mote’s worth of information from the Solaris entity would be for Kelvin the same as gaining access—being granted recognition, in other words—by the Ocean. It would be the acknowledgment that Kelvin is some being like unto itself, capable of communication with it, the sharing of knowledge, and as such, the sharing of experience, including that of being. This is precisely the sort of contact Kelvin is looking for, and on that the Solaris entity, by the expression of its nature, invites man to hypothesize and desire partaking in. But the Ocean remains silent, offering him instead only the quiet landscape of the mimoid.

Tarkovsky ends the film with the same slight shift in emphasis as he handles the rest of the adaptation. After the climactic events surrounding Khari’s suicide, Staut informs Kelvin that it’s probably time for him to go. A jump cut places Kelvin in an identical place to where we discover him at the beginning: facing home, his property, his house where his parents live, the still waters of the small pond and the lush greenery around it. He ascends the hill toward his house and spies his father through the window, and there as he observes water pouring gently over stacks of books, his father busy about the kitchen, rain apparently falling inside the home, the viewer immediately recognizes that Kelvin didn’t actually go home. His father notices him outside, emerges from the home and Kelvin embraces him as the camera drifts back, upwards, outwards: the house exists on an island in the middle of the great Ocean.

At the start of the film, rain catches Kelvin outside the house. A normal occurrence interrupted his tea, but it is made surreal by Kelvin’s reaction to it—or rather, the lack thereof. He lets the rain wash over him, letting the shower come and go and soaking him without out fleeing for the dry shelter of his home. Here, in the penultimate shots, the figure of his father stands inside the home, now rained upon inside the house. The circumstances are inverted. The rain is where it doesn’t belong and, like Kelvin earlier, his father is unbothered by it, as if not noticing it altogether.

On one hand, this shot establishes that the jump cut to bring Kelvin off the station did not bring him home; Kelvin did not to retrace his path. Instead, he forged even further forward, past the limits of what rational knowledge could know. He dove into the deep embrace of the Solaris entity rather than retreating back to what lay familiar, and, in preparation for him, the Solaris entity constructed the visitor of his father and recreated his home.

Kelvin’s efforts to understand the actions and circumstances of the Ocean, its mimoids and visitors, its dream-intrusions, all yield no fruit. Meanwhile, his short-lived romance with the visitor Khari, at first an apparent distraction, becomes a consuming entanglement with his conscience. The notion of contact, then, is handled at once bifocally and attacked bilaterally; the unfolding of the conflict is separated across an outer/inner divide. The outer front relates to the Ocean and the Other, including the scientists and to some extent, the visitors; the inner concerns Kelvin’s own conscience, his awareness of his memory, and his guilt, all given personification in the form of Khari. Khari, however, is not just a mirror or narrative device. She’s an agent within the world just like Kelvin is. The visitors are recognized as characters, as persons, despite all appearances of their circumstances.

Tarkovsky comments on the ending of his film with some brevity during a couple of interviews given over the course of his life. It is easy to assume, based on the imagery, that Kelvin abandons reason entirely, that he throws himself into the fantasies of the Ocean in the parting shot. That he has, in effect, given up. But this is not the case:

The film ends with what is most precious for a person, and at the same time the simplest thing of all, and the most available to everybody: ordinary human relationships, which are the starting-point of man’s endless journey. After all, that journey began for the sake of preserving intact, and protecting, feelings which every person experiences: love of your own earth, love of those close to you, of those who brought you into the world, love of your past, of what has always been, and still is, dear to you. The fact that the ocean brought forth out of its depths the very thing that was most important to him—his dream of returning to the earth—that is, the idea of contact. Contact in the sense of ‘humane’, in the sense of ‘doing good’. For me the finale is Kelvin’s return to the cradle, to his source, which cannot ever be forgotten. And it is all the more important because he had traveled so far along the road of technological progress, in the process of acquiring knowledge.⁶

Tarkovsky ends Kelvin’ s journey with an intentional homage to Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son. Rather than illustrate Kelvin fleeing into the fantasies offered by the entity, he takes the images closest to Kelvin’s heart, images closer to him even than those of his deceased wife, those of home, and overlays them onto the notion of the closest contact possible between man and the entity.

Consider the dream sequences and the imagery offered by the blue sun during the film. Kelvin loved Khari while she was alive, and he loved the Visitor who took on her form and memories at the station, too. However, her absence in the film, following her suicide, brings about Kelvin’s ultimate reconciliation with his guilt over the real Khari’s suicide. This, coupled with his survival in the inhuman psychological conditions of the Solaris station, and his glimpses of intimacy provided by the dreams invaded by the Solaris entity, resulted in Kelvin’s inability to simply return home, despite it being the very thing he longed for most.

The ending, then, symbolizes this reconciliation. The Ocean is aware of his desires, obviously, and initiates contact in a form Kelvin is finally receptive to: it layers this contact into the image of the thing closest to Kelvin’s heart, which was closer even than his romance with his late wife. In this sense, Kelvin’s descent to the planet is not an escape into an artificial fantasy, but rather the culmination of Kelvin’s psychological journey and the capstone to the efforts at contact which the whole film has been about.

The Solaris Entity’s Living Art

“It has to be admitted that no semantic system is as yet available to illustrate the behavior of the ocean. The ‘tree-mountains,’ ‘extensors,’ ‘fungoids,’ ‘mimoids,’ ‘symmetriads’ and ‘asymmetriads,’ ‘vertebrids’ and ‘agilus’ are artificial, linguistically awkward terms, but they do give some impression of Solaris to anyone who has only seen the planet in blurred photographs and incomplete films.⁷

Lem’s description of the Ocean far exceeds anything that Tarkovsky eventually put onto celluloid. While it’s possible that this may have had to do with technical, budgetary and time constraints of the production, the exclusions more more likely resulted from Tarkovsky’s minor shift in focus away from the ‘hard-sci fi’ of Lem’s novel in favor of the psychological, redemptive and personal drama of the story, instead. The Ocean’s imaginary architecture, however, is not simply removed; Berton’s report, which is depicted at the beginning of the film, as well as the famous ending shots all depict the same phenomena though with understandably less elaboration or detail.

Again, before contending with Tarkovsky’s depiction of the Ocean’s creations, Lem’s original presentation is worth greater consideration. He writes of incredibly complex objects made in the spans of hours or, at times, minutes, that last for days or weeks, sometimes, before dissolving back into the Ocean after apparent “assaults” upon it by the Ocean itself. These ‘symmetriads’ “are the least ‘human’ formations,” he explains, “[bearing] no resemblance whatsoever to anything on Earth,” towering into the sky, forming landmasses hundreds of square miles across, featuring dazzling interiors that can never be fully explored. As they start to crystallize into something traversable, they seem less like purely abstract geometries and more like vast symmetrical monuments without obvious purpose. His description of these symmetriads is worth quoting at length:

The symmetriad now begins to display its most exotic characteristic—the property of ‘illustrating,’ sometimes contradicting, various laws of physics. (Bear in mind that no two symmetriads are alike, and that the geometry of each one is a unique ‘invention’ of the living ocean.) The interior of the symmetriad becomes a factory for the production of ‘monumental machines,’ as these constructs are sometimes called, although they resemble no machine which it is within the power of mankind to build: the designation is applied because all this activity has finite ends, and is therefore in some sense ‘mechanical.’

When the geysers of oceanic matter have solidified into pillars or into three-dimensional networks of galleries and passages, and the ‘membranes’ are set into an inextricable pattern of storeys, panels and vaults, the symmetriad justifies its name, for the entire structure is divided into two segments, each mirror the other to the most infinitesimal detail.⁸

As the Ocean compresses around the submerged base of the symmetriad, its displacement propels it upward.

First the process of creation freezes momentarily; then there is a ‘panic.’ The smooth interpenetration of moving forms and the harmonious play of planes and lines accelerates, and the impression is inescapable that the symmetriad is hurrying to complete some task in the face of danger. The awe inspired metamorphosis and dynamics of the symmetriad intensifies as the proud sweep of the domes falters, vaults sag and droop, and ‘wrong notes’—incomplete, mangled forms—make their appearance. A powerful moaning roar issues form the invisible depths like a sigh of agony, reverberates through the narrow funnels and booms through the collapsing domes…. Only the force of the hurricane streaming out of the depths and howling through the thousands of galleries keeps the great structure erect. Soon it subsides and starts to disintegrate.⁹

The sheer enormity of these structures is given quite an emphasis, as is the fact that some internal logic was at work in their ‘design’ and creation. But the design is made alien by the confusing admixture of styles and imitations, illogical alien presumptions of rational choices encumbered by a total lack of human knowledge. One can’t help but compare Lem’s descriptions to the image generation capabilities of modern large language models and AI engines, except at an unimaginable scale:

Let us imagine an edifice dating from the great days of Babylon, but built of some living, sensitive substance with the capacity to evolve: the architectonics of this edifice pass through a series of phases, and we see it adopt the forms of a Greek, then of a Roman building. The columns sprout like branches and become narrower, the roof grows lighter, rises, curves, the arch describes an abrupt parabola then breaks down into an arrow shape: the Gothic is born, comes to maturity and gives way in time to new forms. Austerity of line gives way to a riot of exploding lines and shapes, and the Baroque runs wild. If the progression continues—and the successive mutations are to be seen as stages in the life of an evolving organism—we finally arrive at the architecture of the space age, and perhaps too at some understanding of the symmetriad.¹⁰

If the symmetriads can be considered some form of Solarist art, then it stands to reason that the asymmetriads, whose form lasts for fractions of the time their more logical brethren do, and whose forms themselves are totally alien, illogical and grotesque by comparison, are in some sense expressions of a Solarist nightmare or product of madness. The reader is almost invited into taking these considerations to heart, even as he is warned by Kelvin’s own musings that efforts to apply psychological analysis to the entity again falls short of explaining the entity whatsoever, as they remain human concepts for human mental states and human mental processes. Staut’s declaration of turning all the cosmos into a mirror echoes even here.

Nonetheless, the structures formed by the Ocean are real structures, at least in the sense that they are tangible, documentable and explorable—if highly ephemeral—things. They are made according to some logic, and evidently are the products of the Ocean’s interactions with men’s conscious (or unconscious) minds. Their interiors may defy certain laws of physics or geometry, as they take on complexities such that they seem “a spatial analogue of some transcendental equation,” and that “it would only be natural to suppose that the symmetriad is a ‘computer’ of the living ocean” were it not that entertaining such a hypothesis proved “impossible to sustain.”¹¹

Like the mimoids and symmetriads, the Ocean is also responsible for the visitors. Tests on Khari proved that the visitors are flesh and blood, not mere tricks of light, holographic illusions, or worse, psychic projects on the level of somnambulist-induced hallucinations. But on a molecular level, both Lem and Tarkovsky take the time to note that they’re basically made of neutrinos; such constructs require enormous amounts of power to keep together, which gave the obvious indication that the visitors couldn’t leave the planet’s proximity of influence, as the neutrino field would presumably deteriorate. This is never proven, however, as Kelvin, although he had already launched one visitor away from the station out of panic, never went to retrieve the capsule.¹²

Tarkovsky shortens much of this background by doing away with the Ocean’s imagined architecture almost entirely; only the reports of the gardens included in Berton’s report and the ending shot of the film maintain what in Lem’s book are a significant portion of explication on the nature of the Ocean’s agency. In this case, the difference in medium makes the choice of exclusion by Tarkovsky apparent: time constraints, first, and their redundancy relative to the theme Tarkovsky himself was more interested in developing. Nonetheless, Berton’s report is enough to set the stage, so to speak; the audience goes in recognizing that the Ocean has some mysterious creative abilities that seem to defy logic, but more frighteningly, it’s difficult to tell exactly whether these creative abilities totally manifest in measurable reality or are instead somehow psychical attacks that trick the mind.

What is clear, however, is that the visitors are present on the station; they can be seen by other people, heard, substantiated according to both scientific (medical) testing as well as social confirmation. It is also clear that despite the visitors owning their own sense of agency, self-identity, and awareness, they—Khari, at least—are all bent towards the identity made for them by their host’s memories or fantasies of the original person. As such, the Khari produced by the Solaris entity comes across, as Kelvin notes, more distressed and more helpless than Khari had probably been. Not only are his memories naturally held captive by his own experiences with her, his memories are held captive too by the overwhelming sense of guilt he attributes to himself as a result of her passing.

In each of these aspects, the Solaris entity’s creative powers are self-evident. It takes the memories and experiences of men and applies to them, by its own power and with its own mysterious and unglimpsable agency, a material reality. And if Berton’s report is to be believed, it has been learning about the minds of men during the time man has been attempting to contact it, too. The visitor phenomenon was a relatively recent development in the Solaris station’s existence, for one thing. And for another, Berton’s description of a four meter tall child emerging out of the Ocean during a mimoid appearance seems to connect the visitors directly to the Oceanic structures as being more sophisticated but no less real ‘experimentations’ by the Solaris entity.

If all this is the case, one can see then that the Solaris entity uses these creations not simply to amuse itself, and not simply to attempt to contact man, in its own way, but one might consider as ways of doing both in a deeper mode. The visitors, being walking, talking, breathing mimoid structures, and made, apparently, alive by the memories that provide for them their appearances, mannerisms, presence, et cetera, are in some sense works of art produced by the Solaris entity for the men of the Solaris station.

Similar to the fullness of expression found in art, the intimacy of the visitors’ presences is unique to each of their ‘hosts,’ and not just because of the memories or desires they’re constructed from. In the book, Snow’s own visitor remains unseen, at times hidden in a cabinet; in the film, Kelvin glimpses the ear of a child in a split-second cut when he first encounters the same character, and Sartorius’ visitor is seen in a startling escape from his laboratory only a few scenes later. That the visitors should remain hidden things, private affairs, indicates not only a sense of deep shame that their hosts associate with them, but also, with regard to the Solaris entity, the penetrating degree to which it has delved into their unconscious psyches in order to bring forth the subjects of their most hidden thoughts.

This element of rumination, psychological examination and, as it were, confessional revelation is exactly the sort of energy that goes into the work of deeply personal artistic creation, not unlike the sort that Tarkovsky himself specialized in. This is because, as Tarkovsky repeated throughout his life, art is a form of prayer, and as anyone familiar with the spiritual life will confirm, contemplative prayer requires exactly such awareness of the self in order for the self to have enough possession of its own will to come to God, an act drawn out of the self by God’s Grace. In an interview with Laurence Cosse from 1986, Tarkovsky mentions that

through art, man expresses his hope. Everything that does not express this hope, whatever is not fundamentally spiritual, has nothing to do with art. Otherwise, in the best cases it’ll be but a brilliant intellectual analysis.¹³

Does this not sound exactly like how the Solaris entity is trying to achieve, except possibly in some backward, alien, mirrored like way? Artwork created by man, as a category, a definition, is best understood as a man’s best expression of beauty, which requires of him to find inside himself that expression, itself a transformation and synthesis of his experiences, memories, recognitions, referrals and, to some very limited degree, opinions and beliefs. The Solaris entity, in all of its creations, pulls all of this out of the characters and turns the result not into a static object, but something incomprehensible: another person. An ambiguous being. A visitor. To ask the purpose of these artworks would be to ask a question wreathed in more mystery than to ask that of artwork created by a human artist, considering the already difficult notion of contact between men, much less that unbridgeable gap between man and the Solaris entity. Such logic of artistic formulation is, as Tarkovsky stated elsewhere in an interview from the same year, somewhat “incompatible with art,” as any “art form is constructed only according to its own principles, and is based on its own, inner, dynamic stereotype.”¹⁴

Still, it’s hard not to see the symmetriads made for much the same reason that the line art of M.C. Escher exists for, the mimoids made like the landscapes of Paul Cezanne, or the asymmetriads collapsing into the incoherent lyrical rambles of an intoxicated and mentally disturbed poet. With such analogies in mind, and the visitors recognized as another point along a curve denoting increasing complexity, one can hopefully see how the Ocean’s efforts at communication begin to make some sense as artistic creations rather than alien objects that exist either only for their own sakes or, more simply, as mere puppets for some greater entity. And, with this in mind, Tarkovsky’s interest in a story with such a literary device in it becomes exceedingly clear, given his own obvious interest in dreams, experience, memory, and the expression of all these in works of art.

Conclusion

It is interesting reading and, to a lesser extent, viewing Solaris with the benefit of more than half a century of retrospection. The notion of alien entities taking on the memory-images of a singular character’s life, transposing the personal with the universal though highly intimate means, is not as novel a concept now as it was in either 1961 or 1972. Shows like Deep Space Nine, in the form of the Bajoran Wormhole ‘prophet’-aliens, the Leliel episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, to say nothing of the 1997 Zemeckis film Contact, each illustrate manners in which similar narrative devices have been employed.

What makes Solaris stand out from the pieces downstream of its influence, however, is that in most cases, the alien entities speak through the memory-images directly, albeit in broken language or incomplete and inconsistent thoughts. Benjamin Sisko, in the pilot episode of Deep Space Nine, struggles to explain the concepts of linearly-experienced time, death and traumatic memories to multi-dimensional creatures that, like Vonnegut’s aliens from Tralfamadore, see all of time at once. Grief and morning have no obvious meaning to them, as death is more like the ending definition of a measurement. In Evangelion, Shinji Ikari finds his existential dread magnified by the alien creature Leleil, who seeks contact through the use of the interior, mental personas he’s cultivated of the people he knows. Asuka, another character in the series, is subjected to a significantly more traumatic experience of alien contact about ten episodes later, when Arael dissects her conscience and uses her own memories as a means of telepathic, scrutinous vivisection. Zemeckis’ film, based on Carl Sagan’s book of the same name, similarly features an alien taking on the form of a dead relative in order to speak to the story’s protagonist.

In each case, the memories are not respected, per se, by the alien entities that use them as marionettes for contact. The entity of Solaris, however, brings out of neutrinos what are effectively living, breathing entities that fully embody the memory-images of their sponsors. The Khari on the Solaris station owned some semblance of self-awareness such that she was not obviously a puppet of the Ocean. She did not serve as a vessel of the Ocean’s rudimentary efforts at communication. Khari was another Khari, a false Khari, and yet still Khari in some essential way. She was Khari brought to life by Kelvin’s memories of her and the Solaris entity’s material and psychical participation. She was not Khari, but she was some other creature who bore the same name and drew her identity from the memory of this bizarre intermingling of Kelvin’s and the Ocean’s being. This sort of depiction of personality, particularly in how it served as a mirror for the psychological conflict that Kelvin (and presumably, the other scientists in their own ways and with their own unseen visitors) brought with them, opens forth much more complex aspects of alien contact. This is exactly what makes Lem’s novel so compelling, and indeed, why Tarkovsky focused so heavily on those elements of the story in his adaptation.

Where Tarkovsky’s and Lem’s stories apparently diverge is only in emphasis rather than in substance. Tarkovsky omitted those passages in the book that only work when provided in a literary mode, and he likewise focused on those aspects of narrative that highlighted interpersonal drama and the psychological tension of the characters.

It is important to reiterate that Tarkovsky did not completely insert new themes into the story. He certainly underutilized themes that Lem focused on, such as the limits of man’s rationality and the more epistemological concerns of the novel, but the emphasis on love, personal transformation and identifying humanity—human-ness—in the midst of a thoroughly inhuman environment and situation remain core elements of Lem’s narrative. And on the same note, Tarkovsky still expressed Kelvin’s sense of anguish and the other scientists’ malignant resignation at the total incomprehensibility of the Solaris entity’s powers, intelligence, and purpose.

In this, what both the book and the film illustrate is a sense of Otherness so alien that the only rational response to it would be a deep and profound horror. The conclusion of Solaris, both in film and in print, is the settling recognition that the entity can never be contacted by human beings—at least not the sort of rational, premeditated, self-aware sense that differentiates between ‘I-and-thou,’ the sort of communication that is built in not just to language, but to some extent, thought as well. The Solaris entity instead puts up no pretenses whatsoever: it is all there and available for study. It just isn’t possible for man to understand a single part of it—and, what makes the horror so distinct, it understands man so perfectly due to its powers of “psychic dissection,”¹⁵ as Kelvin’s mentor put it.

Later in life, Tarkovsky characterized Solaris as

an adventure that happens to one man, within his conscience. I had wanted to direct a film based on Sanislaw Lem’s novel, Solaris, without making a real cosmic voyage. That would doubtless have been more interesting, but Lem didn’t agree.¹⁶

Lem’s discomfort with the film was, predictably, the slight shift in focus from a purely unknowable external and intelligent Other and the means, or lack thereof, that exist to attempt contact with it, toward Tarkovsky’s greater interest in using this as a vehicle of total self-examination in pursuit of encountering true selfless agape love. In other words, it was the transformation of a scientific story into a religious one, even though, as hopefully can be seen by some of what has been argued above, the kernels of that religious story aren’t invented by Tarkovsky nor inserted into a narrative in which they didn’t already exist.

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1Andrei Tarkovsky, Interviews, ed. John Gianvito (University Press of Mississippi: 2006), 34.

2Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time: The Diaries, 1970-1986, (Faber and Faber: 1994), 365.

3Stansilaw Lem, Solaris, Translation by Faber & Faber, Walker and Co., (New York, Walker: 1970), 72.

4Ibid, 73.

5Ibid, 156.

6Tarkovsky, Time Within Time, 364.

7Lem, Solaris, 111.

8Ibid, 118.

9Ibid, 121-122

10Ibid, 120.

11Ibid, 119.

12Tarkovsky keeps this presumption by the scientists from the book but, similar to the book, Kelvin doesn’t thoroughly test the theory. This leaves ambiguous the identity of the child that Berton brought with him to Kelvin’s home at the beginning of the film. In the book, the scientists do note that the substance of the ocean itself seems to decay from plasma to some other base liquid when removed from the planet and brought back to Earth; whether this is relevant to what the visitors are or not isn’t made totally clear.

13Tarkovsky, Interviews, 166.

14Tarkovsky, Time Within Time, 369.

15Lem, Solaris, 87.

16Tarkovsky, Interviews, 167.

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