Anniversary of the "Soviet response to Kubrick"

On February 5, 1972, the premiere of Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Solaris" took place in Moscow. Everyone knows that the film was based on the novel by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. Many people know that Stanisław Lem was very dissatisfied with the film adaptation of his novel, which was carried out by Tarkovsky. In this regard - a few words about the author of the novel "Solaris" and the background of the film.

Stanisław Lem was born in Lvov to a Polish Jewish family in 1921. In 1939, Stanislav entered the Lvov Polytechnic Institute, but after the introduction of the Red Army into Eastern Poland, by the decision of the Soviet authorities, he was expelled from the institute due to "bourgeois origin". A year later, thanks to the numerous connections of his father, a well-known otolaryngologist, he was admitted to the Lviv Medical Institute. However, a year later, when the war between Germany and the Soviet Union began, and German troops entered Lvov, the Lem family had to completely change their names and occupation for the purpose of secrecy. Stanisław started working in a car repair shop.

At the end of the war, when Lvov became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Lem family was offered a choice: accept Soviet citizenship or move to Poland, to Krakow. The Lems chose the latter. There, in Krakow, Stanisław Lem began his first literary experiments. Lem reached the peak of his literary creativity by the end of the 50s. In 1959-1960 he wrote the novel Solaris, which was published in 1961. The emergence of the novel coincided with the rise in popularity of the science fiction genre around the world. "Solaris" was translated into 30 languages ​​of the world, including Russian.

In 1963, the Mosfilm studio offered Stanisław Lem to film his work. It is difficult to say how and why the film adaptation of Stanisław Lem's novel did not take place at that time, but it is known that in 1968 the TV show Solaris with Vasily Lanovoy and Vladimir Etush in the lead roles was released on Soviet television. It was the first film adaptation of Stanislav Lem's novel. Then, in 1968, as they say, Andrei Tarkovsky had the first, yet very vague outlines of creating a film based on the novel. But there is no documentary evidence for this. Only guesses. In 1969, Tarkovsky had the opportunity to get acquainted with Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, which participated in the Moscow International Film Festival and, by the way, did not impress the jury, receiving only a prize "for the use of technical means."

This film did not impress Andrei Tarkovsky either. More precisely, he did, but sharply negative, as evidenced by his interview given in 1970 to Naum Abramov. In this interview, Tarkovsky said:

“For some reason, in all the sci-fi films I have seen, the filmmakers force the viewer to explore the details of the material structure of the future. Moreover, sometimes, like Kubrick, they call their films premonitions. It's incredible! Not to mention, 2001: A Space Odyssey is fake on many counts, even to experts. For a real work of art, fakes are unacceptable."

According to Tarkovsky, Kubrick's film suffers from a lack of emotional truth due to its excessive technological ingenuity, that a detailed "consideration" of the technological processes of the future turns the emotional basis of the film, as a work of art, into a lifeless scheme with a claim to truth in the last resort.

Perhaps it was precisely such a sharp assessment by the Soviet director of the picture of the Western master of cinema that prompted the Soviet cinematographic authorities to offer him to create a sci-fi film as a response to Western cinema in the conditions of the Cold War. Stanisław Lem's novel "Solaris" was proposed as a literary basis.

Many experts on Tarkovsky's work note that until that moment the genre of science fiction was not included in the circle of interests of this director. But at that moment the director was going through far from the best of times: his previous film "Andrei Rublev" (1966) was never released, and his script "White, White Day" was rejected (in 1975 it was realized as "The Mirror"). All this led to serious material and psychological problems. But the conditions offered were very tempting: a large amount of one million rubles was allocated to produce the film at that time for Soviet cinema. Even the trip of the film crew to Japan was not forbidden. And besides, Tarkovsky fell in love with Lem's novel from the time it was published in the USSR in 1962.

Tarkovsky fell in love with the novel, but the work on the script based on it became a real test for both Tarkovsky and Lem. The Polish writer later recalled this episode from his life:

""Solaris" is a book, because of which we had a great fight with Tarkovsky. I spent six weeks in Moscow while we were arguing about how to make the film, then I called him a fool and went home ... Tarkovsky wanted to show in the film that space is very disgusting and unpleasant, but on Earth it’s wonderful. I wrote and thought quite the opposite...." Tarkovsky himself explained his goal of creating the film as follows: "I see the main meaning of the film in its moral issues. Penetration into the innermost secrets of nature must be inextricably linked with moral progress. Having taken a step to a new level of knowledge, it is necessary to put the other foot on a new moral level. I wanted to prove with my painting that the problem of moral stability, moral purity permeates our entire existence, manifesting itself even in areas that at first glance are not related to morality, such as penetration into space, the study of the objective world, and so on."

Be that as it may, Lem did not like the film "Solaris", created by Andrei Tarkovsky. However, in this capacity - the author who condemned the film adaptation of his literary work - Lem turned out to be completely unoriginal. I have already described similar reactions: Ken Kesey ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest..." by Milos Forman), Stephen King ("The Shining" by Stanley Kubrick), Vladimir Bogomolov ("In August '44...") etc. By the way, in 2002, the American film company Twentieth Century Fox and director Steven Soderbergh made another film adaptation of Lem's novel, which cost $ 77 million. The Polish writer liked this adaptation even less. Regarding her, he later wrote that his book was about something, but not about “the erotic problems of people in space.” At the box office, this American blockbuster also failed, collecting only 30 million dollars.

And Tarkovsky's film, although it was not released on screens with the largest circulation of 593 copies, even despite its impressive budget, brought a very significant profit. In the first year in the USSR, 10.5 million moviegoers watched it. Taking for calculation the price of a ticket for a film show of 30 kopecks per episode, we get that, according to the most conservative estimates, Solaris brought about 6.3 million rubles to the budget. This, by the way, is an answer to some spiteful critics against Tarkovsky, who are still moaning about the overspending on film during the filming of the film "Stalker". But in addition to the box office collection of the film "Solaris" in the domestic market, the film was very successful on the screens of foreign countries. One can only speculate about income received abroad, since such income has always been a secret behind seven seals in the USSR. But it is known that since 1973 Solaris, unlike several other films by Tarkovsky, was released by Mosfilm for export, which once again confirms the initial interest of the Soviet cinematographic authorities "to give an answer to Kubrick."

The popularity of Tarkovsky's film on the foreign market was added by the fact that literally 3 months after the Moscow premiere it was nominated for the Cannes International Film Festival, where it received a nomination for the Palme d'Or. Solaris did not receive this prize. By decision of the jury, chaired by British film director Joseph Losey, the Palme d'Or was shared by two Italian films: "The Working Class Goes to Paradise" by Elio Petri and "The Mattei Affair" by Francesco Rosi. But Solaris was awarded the Grand Prix of the Jury.

Most reviews from film critics were enthusiastic. Moreover, almost all reviews compared Tarkovsky's film either with a book by Stanislav Lem, or with a film by Stanley Kubrick. Thus, Desson Howe, a film reviewer for one of the most influential American publications, The Washington Post, wrote in his 1990 review:

“the third feature in Tarkovsky's brief, shining career will deliver you from the mundane to the sublime. An extended, cinematic poem, "Solaris" transforms the elements of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel into a Tolstoy-influenced, religious treatise on the human race. The film, which won the 1972 Cannes Special Jury Prize, is a series of encounters between humans and their fears, fantasies and faith — or lack thereof. This is not your high-budget ray-gun clash between space voyagers and slime-covered monsters."

The authoritative Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev wrote:

"his (Tarkovsky - FG) Solaris is not only about the Ocean of the Unknown, waiting for humanity in the process of cognition, existence in general. Since Solaris itself is a metaphor for a person's memory, his guilt and conscience. And the picture in general - a metaphor for the need to remain human in any conditions. But, in addition, a declaration of love for the Earth, for all of humanity."

Another well-known Russian critic Yevgeny Nefyodov:

"In "2001: A Space Odyssey" /1968/, the intellect dominates undividedly, even when on-screen events (for example, spectacular soaring of interstellar ships to the sounds of classical music) captivate the audience purely emotionally or when plot twists cannot be deciphered by the weak the human mind, inexorably following the highest logic - but precisely the logic! In Solaris, highly specialized, technical issues turn into their moral and ethical, value (qualitative, not quantitatively measured) side, involving in an unstable, like a neutrino system, a whirlpool of feelings and images a priori lying beyond the bounds of rational cognition."

Roger Ebert devoted two reviews to the film. Moreover, in the first of them, written in 1976, he rated the film three stars out of a possible 4 and rather dryly noted:

“"Solaris" isn't a fast-moving action picture; it's a thoughtful, deep, sensitive movie that uses the freedom of, science-fiction to examine human nature. It starts slow, but once you get involved, it grows on you."

After 27 years, having become wiser and becoming a real guru of American film criticism, Roger Ebert rated Tarkovsky's Solaris with the maximum 4 stars and included it in his list of "Great Movies". In the first paragraph of this review, he, as it were, explains to himself the features of Tarkovsky's creative style as a whole:

"The films of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky are more like environments than entertainments. It's often said they're too long, but that's missing the point: He uses length and depth to slow us down, to edge us out of the velocity of our lives, to enter a zone of reverie and meditation. When he allows a sequence to continue for what seems like an unreasonable length, we have a choice. We can be bored, or we can use the interlude as an opportunity to consolidate what has gone before, and process it in terms of our own reflections...."Solaris" is routinely called Tarkovsky's reply to Kubrick's "2001," and indeed Tarkovsky could have seen the Kubrick film at the 1969 Moscow Film Festival, but the film is based on a 1961 novel by the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Both films involve human space journeys and encounters with a transforming alien intelligence, which creates places ("2001") or people ("Solaris") from clues apparently obtained by reading minds. But Kubrick's film is outward, charting man's next step in the universe, while Tarkovsky's is inward, asking about the nature and reality of the human personality.”

Modern moviegoers, after several decades since the release of the film on the screens, rate it very highly. So, 69% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film a score of 8 to 10. And 23% of users gave the film the highest score - "ten". Considering this indicator and the above, the rating of Andrei Tarkovsky's film according to FilmGourmand was 8,587, thanks to which it occupies 289th Rank in the Golden Thousand.