An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories
Revisiting Solaris
Deimantas Narkevičius
2007
18 Minutes
Courtesy of GB Agency, Paris
Date
September 6–20, 2021
The astronaut Chris Kelvin receives a visit from a woman who is a double of his dead wife. This story, told in Stanislaw Lem’s eponymous novel, was once adapted into the film Solaris by the legendary Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky. According to Deimantas Narkevičius, Tarkovsky was not as critical of the increasing impact of electronic media on relationships and on the complex nature of human memory as Lem, the original author of the story. In this video, the actor Donatas Banionis reappears in his role as Kelvin, forty years after Tarkovsky’s film was shot. Revisiting Solaris is based on the last chapter of Lem’s book, which had been left out of Tarkovsky’s adaptation. In order to visualize the landscape of Solaris and expose complex specters of the past, Narkevičius combines the new footage and a series of photos from 1905 taken by the Lithuanian painter and composer Mykolojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis.
Revisiting Solaris is presented as part of the program An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories, curated by Lukas Brasiskis and designed to precede the online symposium The State of the Moving Image (September 17–19).
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.