Courtesy of Pas Au-Dela, this Tarkovsky tribute site.
John Berger has a short essay on cinema, "ev'ry time we say goodbye", where he talks about the cinema screen as a kind of sky out of which things can come towards us, over the horizon of familiarity, as if for the first time. And we, full of nostalgia for the real, are drawn towards them.
"The screen, as soon as the lights go out, is no longer a surface but a space. Not a wall, but more like a sky. A sky filled with events and people." It's perhaps no accident that those great skies in Westerns - and parhaps, also, vast desert expanses - are so quintessentialy cinematic. We are transported, into that new sky, into an elsewhere. There, says Berger, we are brought into renewed contact with things:
"Even as we wait to be transported elsewhere, we are held fascinated by the presence of what has come towards us out of the sky. The most familiar sights - a child sleeping, a man climbing a staircase - become mysterious..
This 'mystery' derives from the fact that the cinema can offer things to us nude and untranslated. By contrast with film, a thing in a book or a painting - a child sleeping, a man climbing - has been completly 'translated' into the medium of expression, language or paint. There is no exactly comparable process in film, where there is always the extra-linguistic: mute, unsubdued to words or paint. Things appear, in their sudden enigmatic density. A thing in a book cannot surprise us, ambush us with its presence, whereas, in film
"the surprise is that of rediscovering the world (a child asleep, a man, a staircase) after an absence elsewhere. the absence may have been very brief, but in the sky we lose our sense of time. Nobody has used this surprise more crucially than Tarkovsky. With him we come back to the world with the love and caring of ghosts who have left it."
The curious thing about Solaris is that it makes the earth itself, earthly existence, the object of nostalgia. The space ship in Solaris is the very image of the place from which Tarkovsky sees the world in all of his films - across a space of radical separation and insufferable desire.
George Steiner once defined the utopian impulse as a 'nostalgia for a place that you have never been.' It seems to me that it is exactly this nostalgia that Tarkovsky, above all (and perhaps above all in Solaris) can make us feel.