Solyaris(Солярис) = cinematic genius

"We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we want a mirror. We seek contact and will never achieve it. We are in the foolish position of a man striving for a goal he fears and doesn't want. Man needs man!"

A while ago I made a list of my top ten sci-fi movies, one of them was the american version of Solaris. I said I never watched the original version because it looked like a boring 60s experimental movie. But then I learned of Andrei Tarkovsky's genius, and decided to see what his movies are like. This movie is a near masterpiece, and among the greatest movies made, making the american remake look superfluous and shallow.

What this movie does so well and so poetically, is present such themes as the inadequacies of human kind to comprehend the universe or the heart...human fraility, through its fundamental weaknesses of sentimentality and guilt...dependency. The alien in this movie is a planet comprised entirely of water, with which the humans try to communicate with. The planet, which is basically a perfect entity, tries to communicate with the humans by materializing people or things from the humans' memories or fantasies, in an attempt to understand them better. For the main character, it was his deceased wife. There is so much that could be said about this movie, perhaps another time I will exercise my philosophical thoughts in another post, but not this one, maybe never...as its better to destroy whats unnecessary than to create it, does it really matter what any of us has to say? Man generally writes to affirm his existence, to feel of some worth.

I would like to point out a cinematic theory that I love, that Tarkovsky created. He created the theory known as "sculpting in time", using long takes and few cuts to give the viewers a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship of one moment in time to another. I think, a movie like Children of Men is probably a good contemporary example of this idea(from my understanding of it), where there were several great long sequences with minimal or no cuts - the first car chase where Julianne Moore gets shot, Clive Owen escaping the safe house with the pregnant girl, just about the entire final 20 minutes in the refugee city. A long uncut sequence in a movie is more memorable than any other technique, in my opinion...leaves a more lasting impression as it is transcribes time in real time. It is this unique trait of the cinematic medium that should be better utilized. "The speedy jump-cutting style that is prevalent in music videos and many Hollywood movies, by contrast, overrides any sense of time by imposing the editor's viewpoint." Some music videos that I love that follow this theory are below, 2 for radiohead songs, the other for the old 90s band Wax, directed by the great spike jonez(Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine on the spotless mind).