One of the more confusing ghost stories I’ve seen. There were definitely lengthy portions of the film I felt very lost in terms of the relationships between the characters. I feel like there’s a lot of meaning to extract from this film. Why did they reference Faust so many times? Why the Don Quijote quote? What were the paintings on which the camera dwelt and returned to? The dialogue only occasionally dwells on the events of the film itself, its highly educated characters pontificating instead on the metaphysical consequences of their experiences and discovery. As a fan of pontification this appealed to me: I think it makes the characters more real, as they vocalize their ideas, rather than repeating what we’ve seen.

But the cinematography was beautiful. Can’t laud it e-

I WANT THAT SHOT OF THE GRASS FLOWING IN THE WATER ON MY TOMBSTONE

gorgeous

And the cinematography owes, of course, some to set design. The disheveled state in which the space station is found by the lead character provides strong clues to the psychological state of the Solarists. The long shots of artwork, of anxiety-inducing traffic dirges reminiscent of Koyaanisqatsi, of plants and animals, and the churning seas of Solaris all serve to express the character’s psychological states. It is art in its highest form. With that said, the early film especially suffered from weird editing jumps. Some of the cuts were clunky.

The audio revealed something to me about how I’ve been trained cinematically. Often the camera would turn away or pan away from a character, or they would turn away or move out of shot, such that their lines were spoken off screen. This was confusing to me at first and I had to adjust to iit. What I realized was that because American movies make special effort to put the speaker’s moving lips on screen, I use that as a crutch to locate the speaker. It’s something that takes only a little adjustment, but it was jarring for me at first.