📽 Solaris on Screen

(Some of these thoughts were first expressed on letterboxd)

Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is a slippery beast, it's been translated into English twice, once, indirectly, first from the original Polish into French by Jean-Michel Jasienko, then to English by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (Lem was famously unimpressed with this translation), and a second time, directly to English by Bill Johnston, a translation the author did not live to see. Slipperier still are the adaptations to screen, three in number, each unfaithful, in its own way, to the spirit of the novel.

Solaris (1968)

The very first adaptation of Solaris was the two part teleplay directed by Boris Nirenburg and Lidiya Ishimbayeva, first telecast in 1968. This iteration is quite theatrical, and its budget is visibly minuscule — the only visualisation of Solaris is through the lights that pulse menacingly beyond the space station's shuttered windows, the action takes place in a series of closed sets, and the performances are expected to carry the narrative through — one might say that it is the most reserved of the three adaptations, the one that professes the most faith, for it attempts to depict the most contentious image from the novel:

I stood stock still, frozen to the spot. A giant Negress was coming silently towards me with a smooth rolling gait. I caught a gleam from the whites of her eyes and heard the soft slapping of her bare feet. She was wearing nothing but a yellow skirt of plaited straw; her enormous breasts swung freely and her black arms were as thick as as thighs. Less than a yard separated us as she passed me, but she did not give me so much as a glance. She went on her way, her grass skirt swinging rhythmically, resembling one of those steotopygous statues in anthropological museums. She opened Gibarian's door and on the threshold her silhouette stood out distinctly against the bright light from inside the room. Then she close the door behind her and I was alone.

— The Visitors, in, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (trans. Kilmartin and Cox)

I stood rooted to the ground. From the far end of the side passage, a huge Black woman was coming toward me with an unhurried waddling gait. I saw the whites of her eyes glinting, and at almost exactly the same moment, I heard the soft slap of her bare feet. She had nothing on but a skirt that glistened yellow, as if it were made of straw.

She had massive pendulous breasts, and her black arms were as thick as a normal person’s thighs. She passed three feet from me without so much as a glance and walked off, her elephantine rump swaying like one of those steatopygic Stone Age sculptures found in anthropological museums. At the place where the corridor curved, she turned to the side and disappeared into Gibarian’s cabin.

— Guests, in Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem (trans. Bill Johnston)

This is, of course, a racist image, and it is central to Lem's thesis about the encounter with the other in a scientific setting. It is a straightforward reference to the history of racism and colonialism that haunts the foundations of science and presents it with a limit. Now, the 1968 adaptation does not go so far as to reproduce this violent image, rather, it attempts to render it as a shadow, and I wonder whether the attempt to translate the image to screen is entirely successful; I've read the text multiple times, I've read both translations, I have prior context to the content of the image, but do others? Especially those unfamiliar with the text? Despite this attempt at faithfulness, the adaptation remains faithless, Solaris is reduced to human drama, a story of lost love and the possibility of redemption, not a single vivifying impulse from the novel is preserved.

Solaris (1972)

For most people, this is the definitive film adaptation of the novel, and those people are sadly mistaken, even the author hated it (note the ire towards Tarkovsky's later film, Stalker, as well), and I concur with Lem's frustrations. But, when taken as a film in its own right, it is quite remarkable, primarily because of Andrei Tarkovsky's cinematic technique.

If you ask me, Solaris was not an opportunity to adapt a science fiction novel for Tarkovsky; by his own admission,

I have to say at the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen,

Some works have a wholeness, and are endowed with a precise and original literary image; characters are drawn in unfathomable depths; the composition has an extraordinary capacity for enchantment, and the book is indivisible; through the pages comes the astonishing, unique personality of the author: books like that are masterpieces, and only someone who is actually indifferent both to fine prose and to the cinema can conceive the urge to screen them.

It is all the more important to emphasise this point now, when the time has come for literature to be separated, once and for all, from cinema.

— The Beginning, in, Sculpting in Time, by Andrei Tarkovsky (trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair)

Now, this quote is in reference to Ivan's Childhood, but it can be extended to Solaris, because for Tarkovsky, the film had never quite been about the question Lem poses about scientific inquiry,

Solaris had been about people lost in the Cosmos and obliged, whether they liked it or not, to take one more step up the ladder of knowledge. Man's unending quest for knowledge, given him gratuitously, is a source of great tension, for it brings with it constant anxiety, hardship, grief and disappointment, as the final truth can never be known. Moreover, man has been given a conscience which means that he is tormented when his actions infringe the moral law, and in that sense even conscience involves an element of tragedy. The characters in Solaris were dogged by disappointments, and the way out we offered them was illusory enough. It lay in dreams, in the opportunity to recognise their own roots — those roots which for ever link man to the Earth which bore him. But even those links had already become unreal for them.

I was no more interested, therefore, in the fantastic plot of Stalker than I had been in the story-line of Solaris. Unfortunately the science fiction element in Solaris was nonetheless too prominent and became a distraction. The rockets and space stations — required by Lem's novel — were interesting to construct; but it seems to me now that the idea of the film would have stood out more vividly and boldly had we managed to dispense with these things altogether. I think that the reality to which an artist is drawn as a means of saying what he has to about the world, must — if you will forgive the tautology — be real in itself: in other words understood by a person, familiar to him since his childhood. And the more real a film is in that sense, the more convincing will be the author's statement.

— The Artist's Responsibility, in, Sculpting in Time, by Andrei Tarkovsky (trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair)

Instead, he intended to use the novel's world as a canvas upon which to work out his own relation to creating cinematic art and entering into communion with the people viewing his films,

My most fervent wish has always been to be able to speak out in my films, to say everything with total sincerity and without imposing my own point of view on others. But if your vision of the world turns out to be one that other people recognise as a part of themselves what better motivation could there be for one's work.

[...]

Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path toward knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count

— Introduction, in, Sculpting in Time, by Andrei Tarkovsky (trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair)

From these scattered passages I can conclude that Tarkovsky's Solaris was never meant to be faithful to the novel, and because of this, its faithlessness is entirely forgivable, even though Lem might not have seen it that way.

Solaris (2002)

Steven Soderbergh's adaptation of Solaris also disappointed the author, before he even had a chance to watch it. Lem was clearly not partisan to the concept of the death of the author, but while I can make a case for Tarkovsky's artistic intentions and philosophical grounding, I remain reserved about Soderbergh's attempt.

Before I tackle my main issue with the film, let me go over what I found interesting about it: first, Harey (or, in this case Rhea, because Soderbergh presumably worked from the only extant English translation at that time, the one by Kilmartin and Cox) is characterised as a woman who resists the demands of romantic, heterosexual love. Her conflict with Kris Kelvin stems from her refusal to marry him, and from the fact that she aborts the fetus she is pregnant with, without consulting Kelvin. This leads to Kelvin throwing a tantrum and leaving, which acts as the catalyst for Rhea's first suicide. This characterisation is, of course, played as mental illness on Rhea's part, something nonchalantly tied back to hereditary traits from her mother, and despite this straightforwardly reactionary psychiatric explanation, it does make Rhea an interesting character who is given a degree of depth quite different from what Lem or Tarkovsky ascribe to her.

Second, there's Gordon, who replaces Sartorius, and is played by Viola Davis. This is an interesting choice, one that I believe is in direct conversation with Gibarian's visitor, the racist caricature of a black woman. While Lem's inclusion of this image may have been part of the novel's theme, it also exists in order to elicit a gasp; what in the world is a black woman doing on a space station?! Soderbergh's sober answer to this is, she's the head scientist and the only character that retains some semblance of logic, she's the one who survives the horror of Solaris. And while Davis's performance is wonderful (I maintain that the film is made at least palatable by every performance other than Clooney's), I think Soderbergh sidesteps the problem posed by Gibarian's visitor entirely, and that isn't even the root of the faithlessness of this adaptation.

What really irked me about this version of Solaris is the ending, where Solaris is posited as an enigmatic entity that saves humanity from the scourge of death, and this in turn is foggily tied back to a conversation denying the existence of god at some dinner party at Gibarian's house, which upsets Rhea into leaving the function. In positing the film this way, the entire narrative winds up as a subtle affirmation of the existence of god, and if Lem had actually watched the film, he might have disgorged his most recent meal on the spot, as I wanted to. The complexity and ambiguity of Solaris is flattened into a palatable drama that leaves the viewer with no questions after the spectacle concludes.

So, why don't they work?

There's no getting around the fact that Solaris is a difficult text to adapt, even approaching a semblance of faith is difficult. Any reader of Solaris will tell you that the book is very different from the film, and that the differences are primarily a matter of structure. But in my understanding, the difficulty of rendering Solaris in moving pictures is a function of what is translated to the screen and what is left to stew in between the pages.

Besides the appearance of Harey, and of the other guests to the station, the thesis of Solaris is tightly bound by three specific aspects of the narrative's contrivance; I have already mentioned the first; Gibarian's guest, a tall black woman constructed in the image of an anthropological specimen in a museum, the second is Snaut's monologue on the exploration of space,

"...We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath to them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but nevertheless remains, such we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it anymore."

— The Little Apocrypha, in, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (trans. Kilmartin and Cox)

"We head out into space, ready for anything, which is to say, for solitude, arduous work, self-sacrifice, and death. Out of modesty we don't say it aloud but from time to time we think about how magnificent we are. In the meantime — in the meantime, we're not trying to conquer the universe; all we want it to expand Earth to its limits. Some planets are said to be as hot and dry as the Sahara, others as icy as the poles or tropical as the Brazilian jungle. We're humanitarian and noble, we've no intention of subjugating other races, we only want to impart our values to them and in return, to appropriate their heritage. We see ourselves as Knights of the Holy contact. There's another falsity. We're not searching for anything except people. We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find out own idealized image; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past. Yet on the other side there's something we refuse to accept, that we fend off; though after all, from earth we didn't bring merely a distillation of virtues, the heroic figure of Humankind! We came here as we truly are, and when the other side shows us that truth — the part of it we pass over in silence — we're unable to come to terms with it!"

— The Minor Apocrypha, in Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem (trans. Bill Johnston)

This monologue is notable because it is reproduced in every single one of the adaptations of Solaris on screen in one form or another, Steven Soderbergh's version for example has Gibarian deliver it from beyond the grave, for Snaut, (or rather, Snow) plays quite a different role in the film.

The third aspect is the vast body of scholarship on the field of Solaristics that Kelvin reads through over the course of the novel, in this, Lem covers history, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, travelogues, institutional inquisitions, and Kelvin's own specialisation, psychology. The descriptions of Solarisitic studies are perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the novel's text, and the ground upon which the enigma of Solaris is built. In describing the extensors, symmetriads, asymmetriads, and mimoids, Lem brings Solaris to life, and the readers, like the academics before them are left with phenomena that cannot be interpreted, to which meaning is impossible to ascribe. Only Tarkovsky's adaption refers to the field of Solaristics, and that too in passing, at the beginning of the film, in order to establish a reason for Kelvin to go up to the space station orbiting Solaris, but in each cinematic text, the meat of the narrative, the meditations on the work of doing scientific research, is left by the wayside. By obviating these sections, the films essentially erase Solaris, the planet, the entity around which much of the narrative of the novel is centred, and the irony of this is never lost, for each film is still named Solaris.

So we have one monologue, disconnected from its theoretical context, that nonetheless sounds profound, which is included in every iteration of the film, the figure of a black woman that is conspicuously absent from all but one iteration, and that too, poorly rendered, and the entire field of Solaristics that is almost impossible to render on screen, and it is precisely the omissions that render the adaptations of Solaris utterly faithless to their source material. All that is left of the novel's narrative and philosophical complexity is an orphaned monologue which has little bearing on the ostensibly human drama each film struggles to portray, with different degrees of success. And yet, as Tarkoksky puts it,

And the beautiful and the finished in art — what is proper to the masterpiece — I see wherever it becomes impossible to single out or prefer any one element, either of content or of form, without detriment to the whole. For in a masterpiece no component can take precedence; you cannot, as it were, 'catch the artist at his own game' and formulate for him his ultimate aims and objectives. 'Art consists of its not being noticeable', wrote Ovid; Engels declared that, 'The better hidden the author's views, the better for the work of art.'

The work of art lives and develops, like any other natural organism, through the conflict of opposing principles. Opposites reach over into each other within it, taking the idea out into infinity. The idea of the work, its determinant, is hidden in the balance of the opposing principles which comprise it — thus 'triumph' over a work of art (in other words a one-sided explanation of its thought and aim) becomes impossible. That was why Goethe remarked that 'the less accessible a work is to the intellect, the greater it is.

— Art - a yearning for the ideal, in Sculpting in Time, by Andrei Tarkovsky (trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair)

Thus, it is the impossibility of adapting Solaris faithfully which keeps film makers from having the last word on it, and keeps them attempting to perfect the adaptation. More importantly, despite the faithlessness of the adaptations, the films themselves find viewers that resonate with their content. It's also the impossibility of ever fully grasping the text that keeps me reading Solaris and watching the films over and over again, despite my (entirely pedantic) disapproval of the latter, you see, like Stanislaw Lem, I too love complaining.