Revisiting Solaris

Astronaut Chris Kelvin receives a visit from a woman who is the spitting image of his dead wife. This story was once filmed fairly freely by the legendary Andrei Tarkovsky. According to director Deimantas Narkevicius, Tarkovsky was not as critical of the increasing impact of the electronic media on human relationships as Stanislaw Lem, the original author of the story. In this short film, Donatas Banionis again plays Chris Kelvin, 40 years after Tarkovsky’s film. Re-visiting Solaris is based on the last chapter of Lem’s book, which Tarkovsky didn’t film. In order to visualise the landscape of Solaris, Narkevicius used a series of photos from 1905 taken in Anapa by the Lithuanian painter/composer Mykolojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis. (EC)