my continuing examination of world cinema

After my recent recollections on favorite films from my distant past, it seemed appropriate to relive another cinema experience from my yout. Last night I watched the film Solaris, by the great Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky. By all western standards of storytelling, this film at something like 2 hrs. 45 min. is nerve wrackingly frustrating. While some called it Russia's answer to 2001, it's beyond low tech - it's no tech. Tarkovsky was not that kind of film maker. Nor was he the slightest interested in the conventions of the sci-fi genre. While the story is an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel, Tarkovsky does his best to frustrate the expectations of anyone looking solely for a story to entertain. Where Hollywood would pump up the action and streamline the story (we'll have to save comments on Soderbergh's version for a later date - it's farther down the queue) so as to quicken the pulse, Tarkovsky's pace is exactly the opposite. He is in no hurry to tell a story, but many of his trademarks are evident: the beauty of the natural world, the alienation of the man-made city, the dominance of water in the visuals, and the complex and fluid dance of the camera with the actors.

As frustrating as the experience may be for even those with an open mind (I won't deny nodding off several times, but always felt as if I hadn't missed anything), it's one I'm ready and fully prepared to subject myself to again. There is something ultimately hypnotic about Tarkovsky's visuals, if not always his ideas about faith and the alienated human. The slow zoom into gently waving underwater grasses, repeated in Stalker, is an image to fall into. Unfortunately, Tarkovsky's films may be more intellectually challenging to write about, and rewatch in the mind's eye, than they are to actually sit through.