from russia, with love

Showed Solaris to the students last night. Surprised that a number sat through it. Was asked to say something on it and very gingerly agreed...

What can one say? What should one say. I don't know much about the technical aspects of the film and I'm not sure whether the biographical ones are important. It's a poetic vision by a unique individual that requires a unique response. After all, Tarkovsky once said (of Andrei Rublev, the great painter of icons), Traditional truths remain truths only when they are vindicated by personal experience.

So his films are not about 'explaining'-and I couldn't explain them anyway-but only showing us what is somehow familiar-if it touches us, that is. And if it doesn't, then it doesn't. I think Mark Rothko, who was Russian in a way, would have understood how feelings open the way to what Milosz calls a 'second space'.

In Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky says:

The aim of art is to loosen the soul, to render the soul capable of turning to good. Showing, not telling.

So, I don't like this film because it's a so-called intellectual film or because I like the"ideas"-Tarkovsky was right here when he said: thought is brief, but the image leaves an impression-but because, to take a deeply Russian notion: the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Of course, this is a slow and complex film with lots of 'inter-textual' references (Rembrandt, Breughel, Bach, Don Quixote, and others) and a particular emphasis on time. Tarkovsky himself was wary of films that aimed to merely pass time, or kill it, or forget it. His view was quite the opposite since bereft of memory a person becomes the prisoner of an illusory existence. So, memory has a spiritual quality to it.

I'm reminded here of a true story that I read in the papers some years back about a man who would forget all he knew every seven minutes. He described his life as like an island in a vast ocean. Incidentally, the only thing he could remember was music.

Finally, I don't think this is a science-fiction in the traditional sense of the term. Why I love this film is because it is, at least to me, a profoundly religious film, a film about the mysterious and that is something which leaves explanation open, but not too open. Like a broken circle, perhaps? And that brokenness implies an understanding of the truth, as one of the characters in the film says, that you can only love that which you can lose.