LH: Natalya Bondarchuk claims that she, age 13, was the one who gave Andrei Tarkovsky the novel by Stanislaw Lem. Do you remember who gave it to you? And how and when did you encounter the movie?
DN: I saw the book for the first time at my cousin’s in the countryside. I looked at the book, asked his opinion about it. He did not reply to my question. And I didn’t read the novel then. I saw the film Solaris for the first time back in the 1970’s as a schoolboy. I must say that I did not get it at all. I was about sixteen or seventeen years old then. I simply didn’t understand what was going on on the screen. Nevertheless, the film engaged me and made me curious about it. I watched Solaris over and over again later on. I kept watching it until, having reached my thirties, I finally liked it lot. Perhaps that was also due to the fact that I started to lose people who were close to me.
Yes….the film breaks your heart. Tarkovsky was interested less in science fiction than in sensuous life on Earth, and he uses *Solaris to show how it would feel to lose Earth. This is a terrible simplification, but Lem’s book is about the living ocean, while Tarkovsky’s film is about the phantoms.*
Well, there is a paradox in Solaris the film (and Stanislaw Lem’s book). Astronauts have been challenged by a new, unknown phenomenon: a “conscious” planet. But this intelligent planet generates phantoms (materialized projections) based on astronauts’ memories and emotional experiences from their past. I came across some recollections by cinematographer Vadim Iusov that at some point they were discussing the possibility of setting the entire film on Earth. (This is when Lem threatened to retract his permission to use the book.)Iusov recalled that the necessary parts of the Cosmos would have been substituted by the Microcosmos, in the form of close-ups of the entrails of some animal. I imagine Lem wouldn’t have been so happy about this either.
In Solaris, before Donatas Banionis as Chris Kelvin leaves Earth, the old pilot Burton attacks him as “not fit to go into space” and “an accountant, not a scientist”. In Revisiting Solaris, Banionis/ Kelvin and an unnamed woman say these words to you.
Indeed, in my film I reenact the scene you mention from Solaris together with Donatas Banionis. This time Donatas was playing the pilot Burton and I was in the role of young Chris Kelvin. The difference is that, in my film, take-off does not happen. The image of the planet Solaris is represented as Banionis/Kelvin’s memories, or at least the film is constructed that way. The mysterious planet is revisited by evoking both the memories of a man who was “there” some time ago and also (I hope) our collective memories of the Tarkovsky film. “There” happened in the form of a fiction film in 1972, but I accept it as reality as well. There is a shift from one “reality” to another, and communicating to a person that is as real as his role in the old film.
Your purpose is not to reenact or analyze your sources, as in, say, Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory. Out of Tarkovsky’s film language, Lem’s book, photographs by a Lithuanian Symbolist, and Donatas Banionis you have actually made another Solaris.
Within my film, I meet Chris Kelvin, not Donatas Banionis. It’s a sort of extension of the Tarkovsky film, many years later. Donatas Banionis does not have any reflections on his current role. He does not make any comments on the old film either. In my film he simply “is” Chris Kelvin again. This sort of fantasizing is quite subjective. I would compare it in some way with the creation of an inspired painter, who invents realities. The difference is that I construct it using film footage without a lot of technical effects.
Without technical effects, but certainly using film language in an intentional way. Can you tell us about some of the text and location juxtapositions?
Most of the selected locations are functional architecture from the period of radical modernization. So, they are linked with the recent past, which was very much about creating a future (here I would like to mention the beautiful shots by Tarkovsky of the roads and highways in Tokyo, filmed in 1970, which represented the future in his film). But more importantly, I chose the locations for Donatas to discover them. I wanted him not to be indifferent to those locations and to establish contact with those spaces, accommodate them with his presence while being filmed. The room with two telephones is a former KGB prison, now the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius. Some decades ago people were actually killed for political reasons in that basement. There I choose an excerpt from Lem’s book on the nature of human thoughts. What potential dangers can result from materialization of some thoughts? What “phantoms” were generated by human minds in recent history?
It’s amazing to see the former (young) Banionis hidden inside the present (aged) Banionis. Is there some way in which, as a Lithuanian, he was hidden in plain sight during the Soviet years?
Donatas Banionis was one of most popular Soviet actors. And he still is in Russia. Nevertheless everyone knew he was Lithuanian, and hence a bit “foreign.” But that is more because of his looks, his features, which make him different from his Russian colleagues. At least it was evident to viewers then. So he was often given the role of the sympathetic stranger, on a kind of ethical journey. Chris Kelvin is a very typical role for him (perhaps the best of his film work, or comparable with his Donatas in No One Wanted To Die [1965] by Vytautas Zalakevicius). In Russian language films his voice is always dubbed. Probably his accent was too strong.
And what about the other “found” Lithuanian material, the photographs by Ciurlionis?
Mykalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis was a very sensitive person and an artist responsive to his time. His artistic heritage includes a series of magic landscapes, which are the results of his artistic fantasies. The photos he took in the Crimea in 1905 are clear evidence of his fascination with the exotic landscapes of the peninsula and the shore of the Black Sea. I can see his delight in discovery through photography. I thought this visual material would be suitable to illustrate the last chapter of Lem’s book, in which the astronaut Chris Kelvin is landing on the “soil” of the planet Solaris. Half a century after the photographs were taken, Tarkovsky filmed the landscape of the Black Sea and in Anapa to represent the surface of his mysterious planet.
In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, you said you’ve brought painterly subjectivity into documentary. Revisiting Solaris contains past and present, and documentary and fiction, at once. Footage of a living, breathing, contemporary Banionis cuts off the possibility of nostalgia.
With Revisiting Solaris I bring Donatas Banionis back to his role of Chris Kelvin, even though he was not so keen to do it again. As with my other work, I am awaking something anachronistic, something that has gone from our everyday (or contemporary media) experience. By bringing in a real man, a witness to an outstanding cinematographic achievement like Solaris by A. Tarkovsky, I emphasize that some dimensions of that film remain very interesting and relevant. The presence of D. Banionis is also a link between “then” and “now,” between created reality and its impact on a viewer many years later. The man is among us, the way he moves is the same, his look is the same, so 1972 is still “present.”
To me, the most interesting science fiction books and films are the ones in which “futuristic” gadgets are woven incidentally into the text, never explained but simply used, and everything is just as messy as it is in our real life lives. In a way, these are the most convincing portrayals of the future because they imply that the basics don’t change, and that we are not conscious of “our times” as we live our lives. Soviet ideology tried to create a future in which the basics actually had changed, and to make citizens conscious of their times as revolutionary, significant ones.
Futuristic design, the radical modernization and industrialization of the country, and finally the Soviet spaceflight program were the most widely seen attributes of the country from outside. In fact, life was quite messy inside. There were attempts to indoctrinate people with new values, but they did not succeed really. Perhaps, basics have not changed. As we all know, Communism was not implemented. It still remains the Utopia.
Let’s quickly talk about the work you are planning for Münster Skulptur Projekte, in which you propose to move the famous bust of Karl Marx from Chemnitz (formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt) to Münster. It’s very different from Revisiting Solaris. ... Or maybe it isn’t? Is it another transportation of a readymade through space and time (in Revisiting, Donatas Banionis could be seen as a kind of readymade)?
The film Solaris and the Karl Marx portrait in Chemnitz are monuments of the Soviet period. Even watching Solaris for the first time, I was surprised by the film’s “apolitical” setting. The space mission seemed to me like the united envoy of a globalized Earth. It was not important whether astronauts were Soviets or Americans. It looked like political confrontation (and the Cold War) had ended with a positive outcome, so human civilization was now able to challenge itself, to seek superior intelligence somewhere in space. When the countries of the former Soviet Bloc opened to the rest of the world, it was not a surprise to me. I had already seen it in the science fiction film by Andrei Tarkovsky many years before.
Recently united, Europe is still culturally distinguished because of its different modern(ist) pasts. The former East is still marked by the totalitarian social experiment that defines the cultural background of one or the other side’s past. Perhaps we cannot automatically apply the occidental modernist experience to the whole continent. ‘Enhancement’ didn’t mean the same thing in the East. By bringing the Socialist Realist monument to Münster, I would like to note that the liberal art developments in the West were also challenged by Eastern monumentality and scale. Why is the art of this period rubbed out of the collections of modern art museums? Are we still aware of the innovative nature of experimental art of the last century, especially within the political context of that time?
If you were in orbit over Solaris, is there any chance that Marx would be your phantom in the flesh?
In his novel, Stanislaw Lem described phantoms that are generated from the information stored in brains of the astronauts when they were not conscious (when sleeping). The phantoms were copies of individuals who were profoundly tied with the astronauts’ emotional past. As Chris Kelvin’s colleagues admitted, he was very lucky with his “visitor”, embodied by Natalya Bondarchuk in Tarkovsky’s film. I hope my phantom wouldn’t be a politician or even an outstanding philosopher from the past.
