Kantian Themes in Tarkovsky’s Solaris

Demetre Gvaramia

Prof. W. Flesch

Brandeis University ENG61a

October 25, 2015

                                Kantian themes in Tarkovsky’s Solaris

Andrey Tarkovsky was known for molding his films around philosophical concepts in artistically captivating ways.  His 1972 film – Solaris, is a great example that I will be discussing in this paper. I remembered that movie after reading Kant’s ideas about the Space and Time. Solaris tells a story of Kris, Soviet scientist who was assigned to investigate a mysterious happening on a Soviet space station located in an obscure cosmic ocean called Solaris. The film is now considered a Sci-Fi classic and an extraordinary achievement in a super wide screen color cinematography and long shot editing. But I believe that It should also be appreciated for its philosophical value as a film analyzing and challenging Kantian ideas of space, time and human consciousness. After watching Solaris several times, and analyzing it thoroughly with Kant’s ideas regarding space and time in mind, I can conclude that the main theme in Solaris is the emotional and psychological struggle of human consciousness within the mysterious, foreign realms of space and time.

Solaris starts with shots of Kris, film’s protagonist wandering around the backyard of his summer home, so called “Dacha” in rural Soviet Union. We learn that he was just assigned to fly to a Soviet space station located in a mysterious cosmic ocean – Solaris, to explore what happened to three scientists who were working there. Before Kris departs, he is shown a recording of a Soviet scientific conference where one of the scientist suggests that they should not label mysterious happenings at Solaris station “unrealistic” due to the fact that Solaris is a completely unexplored place where our conscious understanding of how space can look and feel might be challenged. Once Kris travels to Solaris station, we realize that the mystery lies in that Solaris penetrates through visitors’ consciousness and distorts their senses of reality by altering their perception of space and time. As it is explained in film, the boundaries of reality are distorted when one falls asleep and engages in dreaming. During Kris’s dreams, he revisits his past memories, and when he wakes up, he sees his wife who is supposed to be dead. Kris realizes that he is awake, but she is completely real, lying next to him. At this point, we understand that his arrival at Solaris, signified his departure from a real-Phenomenal world to foreign-Noumenal world that exists within the Solaris. Kris tries to understand whether he is dreaming but fails to do so. His wife Hari, is kissing and talking with him, while Kris wonders how can all this be possible. He starts to comprehend that at Solaris, the ordinary laws of space and time do not function as they do on earth. Kant argued that the sense of space and time were a-priori intuitions for humans, something intuitively existing within our conscious world and this was true for Kris too, until he arrived at Solaris. Here, his a-priori sense of reality and consciousness are altered by the space itself in a way that slowly makes him completely confused. His synthetic, intuitive a-priori knowledge of world is shattered by the sudden appearance of his wife. We learn that she has committed suicide on earth, but Solaris managed to bring her alive for Kris. Kant also argued that the nature of space is intuitive and that we can only imagine/represent one space and all the other imaginary spaces can only be within that one space. This again is counterintuitive for Kris because he can remember his arrival at the Solaris, yet the space seems completely different, unpredictable and mysterious compared to the one he departed from earth. Throughout the film, Tarkovsky masterfully controls the rhythm of the narration with carefully staged long sequences. He, manages to simultaneously show the misery of Kris’s conscious state and the pure beauty of his young and sensitive wife Hari. Kris realizes that he is falling in love with her again. He is faced with a psychological dilemma. At one part he knows that she cannot be real and it all must be a dream, on the other hand he can feel her, interact with her and have a romantic relationship. As Kant argues in his “Critique of Pure Reason”, the only way to distinguish within the space itself, for example between the left and right hands, is to intuitively realize which one is which with depending on our perception and understanding of the space we are in. For Kris, it is almost impossible to realize what is real and what is not because he cannot properly perceive and understand the space he is in. The space itself interacts with his consciousness and disorientates him.