Sculpting in Time
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, many settings and characters each time inhabit time. However, they do so in an imaginary or even dream-like landscape. Despite not having a precise orientation in logical space, it represents a chronic non-chronological sequence. What has remained consistent in each of Tarkovsky’s films is not his philosophy of time. Instead, it’s about the treatment of time in depth.
As a factor in its narrative and formal approach, the visual treatment of time is in slow motion. The shots are always unhurried but pensive. In brief, Tarkovsky often wrote about Greek philosophy or existentialism about time. He adheres to a consistent philosophy of time for himself, and he succeeds or communicates the potential symbolic or metaphorical meaning of his image remains the viewer’s responsibility to determine.
Tarkovsky wrote plenty about the time in texts such as Sculpting in Time. He relates an idea of space and time out of the connection in the text. However, it has commonalities and shared patterns, associating the ideas through what he has described as meaningful images that we find difficult to fathom. Abandoned without a steady application of his concepts, Tarkovsky gives us incredible images worth screen time exploring them.
Hamlet and the Sci-fi Odyssey
Therefore, he likes to explore the temporary in a way that is not different from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the play, the Prince of Denmark sees his father’s ghost and realizes spatial field and the Earth are not aligned. He observed how time did not go smoothly. The way of understanding and organizing time perceive through the units that compose and divide the universe into arbitrary formations.
The spatial form remains illusory but displaced. However, the process of making a film involves editing and taking pictures. When considering the perspective nature of the relationship between time and space in cinema, it is more than just a time separation in film. It becomes a case of the protagonist itself of the sci-fi odyssey Solaris, a film in which time and space exist in a state of constant flux through emotion, fantasy, or subjective memory.
Tarkovsky’s cinema invariably explores such disconnects involving non-linear and shifting relationships between memory, time, place, and people. The analysis of Tarkovsky’s approach analyzes wherefore the theory of time and image, not only Tarkovsky, according to Gilles Deleuze. The film explores disjointed representations of space and time. According to Tarkovsky, the figure of time can reveal reality at a certain level of objectivity.
Time in the Frame
The edits must be stealthy to prevent time travel interruption. Although Tarkovsky concentrates less on montage, he considers the universe of time and space that inhabits a single shot. According to Deleuze, the time in the frame should flow independently. In one attempt to be able to replace the montage, it will reveal the true nature of the passage of time. In addition, it will give wise consideration to the space to represent.
There is a continuity in time in the larger film universe. Individual shots can break the continuity. As well as functioning as a continuum of its own, time dissolves in the shot as its little galaxy. Then again, montage can connect the galaxies to create a temporary uniformity between them. According to Deleuze, montage is not unique to a higher order. It uses power over the unit shot to provide motion pictures with time as a new quality.
Tarkovsky, in such instances, denies how cinema seems to work with unique things. If the order and relative are different, then he believes in the power of his shot. In contrast to Tarkovsky’s approach, classic Hollywood cinema has always relied on motion pictures.
Montage and Motion
He does not operate within the structure of the form following the established functions of visual logic, linearity, or image assembly. By facilitating linear development through organizational means, motion images serve as carriers of narrative. A montage uses a consistent pattern between one connecting motion picture and another. Through editing to create a flow of time impressions, the essence of classic Hollywood motion emerges because of the montage.
Characters must move in a rhythm in such development. However, a film can build a passage of time through a montage through the rhythm of motion. In the end, the audience reads it as the present. However, it is present as a cumulative result of images in the past in reality. Every shot in the classic motion picture mode has an addition. Aside from the passage of time, it’s completely inconsistent.
According to Sergei Eisenstein, the dialectical order and the shooting’s discourse become one through many piles of images on top of each other. In relation, the montage acts as a movement-image of perfection but remains static, indifferent, yet shapeless. If it’s a shot of time that incorporates montage into it, it changes the movement. From the start, most of the film involves Kris Kelvin studying reports from the station on Earth.
Depiction of Space and Time
He prepares to leave his home planet and measure his mission. When Henri Berton’s colleague, an astronaut, and former scientist, visited Kelvin, they debated how to handle Solaris. Kelvin must assess whether to shut down the Solaris station or change the research by bombarding living surfaces with radiation to check the results. They watch footage from Berton’s return from Solaris years earlier.
He claims to have seen the ghostly image of a child 4 meters high on the planet’s surface. Through the setting, the depiction of time—according to Deleuze—finds a unique metaphorical corporeality in exploring Tarkovsky’s approach. Still, Tarkovsky tries to portray how his character perceives time and space through science fiction that binds strange imagery. He uses both genre and cinematic tactics to achieve this.
For example, much of the film’s second half incorporates Kelvin’s troubled emotional states, fantasies, and memories. When he reconciles how to handle the two “guests,” someone long since dead becomes only a memory. However, present-day spatial reality plays an important role. The beginning of the film is straightforward but chronological. Based on a 1961 novel by Stanisław Lem, Solaris sets in the future.
Space travel has led to the exploration of planets in other solar systems.
Doppelgangers and Gaze into the Abyss
It remains Tarkovsky’s most precise work on the effects of time in his filmmaking. Therefore, his narration presents a symbolic representation of his approach. Ocean planets’ study, or Solaris, has become unproductive over time. The former orbiting station crew (consisting of 85 scientists) reduce to three astronauts. Kelvin is a psychologist in charge of the scientific evaluation of Solaris in determining the future.
However, the station experiences strange phenomena from the molten planet below. It defies the temporary rules by which reason and science dictate it. The sphere reproduces humans based on the memories of those in his immediate vicinity, as Kelvin learned not long after his arrival. It creates what it calls “guests,” reflecting the troubled preoccupations of the station’s astronauts. Indeed, the idea revived thoughts about doppelgangers a la Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double and “gaze into the abyss” a la Fredrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.
In the film, the twins emerge from memory to form a sequence of the lost loved ones of the astronauts. When Kelvin’s late wife, Hari, who committed suicide ten years earlier, returns in guest form and begins to develop her memories and feelings, she becomes more than just a reflection of the past.
Crystallizing the Past, Present, and Future
At the same time, reality crystallizes the past, present, and future. In simple terms, Tarkovsky transmits time travel in one long shot to show his character’s perceptions. Indeed, most of his works have a long shot of allowing us to consider time in its own right. His films always leave narrative aside to such a degree. Time remains at the context forefront in which it shot. Together with its components like nature, objects, and characters, the expression of time through the long shot acts as the temporal world of natural physical space.
Long shots capture focus that resembles real-time through efforts that last much longer than conventional editing strategies allow. However, it struggles in its pursuit of perpetual presence. At the film’s opening, it sails to Kelvin’s parents’ home on Earth. While staring down into a pool of weeds swaying to the rhythm of the water, the shot pushes inward until it fills the screen with weed tendrils.
Almost like a moving tentacle as the camera continues to follow frames of Kelvin watching them. After enjoying mundane phenomena before going to Solaris, he washed his hands in the pool and let the rain fall on his face.
The Notion of Time
Besides Tarkovsky always using symbolism or poetry as a fixture of his films, he also contemplates Kelvin when he wanders the property pages. He surveys the mist-laden field at his close while placing us in his casual observation of nature. Certainly, Solaris could not deny the connection between time and space. They can neither exist independently nor exist without each other.
Consistently, Tarkovsky distinguishes time from the scope in a different way. As well as the spatialization of time, the creation of time through one long shot becomes a component that regulates spatial elements in time through movement patterns in one image. By representing the effects and decay on the body over time, the use of color and the respective methods attempt to recreate the experience of time.
When talking about the nature of the film, it can only approximate time and space in intentionally long apart moments. Solaris always has a point, not only in it but cuts always occur. With the edits, space and time create continuity in the film coming to a halt. While understanding the concept, the audience could reconfigure time with humans to perceive linear differences. The notion of time transcends the structure of temporal logic, suggesting a vast accumulation of consciousness or knowledge from various fields.
Transcending Solaris
According to Deleuze, the image of time is transcendental and presents time in a pure state. However, it is not through its relationship with other notions. It is no longer time under movement but a movement that subordinates itself to time. Time shots put motion and pictures in material time in long shots. It communicates the development of time that should pass through a procession of images in a montage.
According to Deleuze, montage can occur in the picture. Without the need to relate frames through editing, it supports Tarkovsky’s view of how time flows in shots because conveying time pressure. Time pressure runs through every moment, throughout the narrative stretch, and through every cognitive association. For example, Kelvin contemplates his family pool. His connection with the moment occurred when he arrived at the Solaris station.
At the station, he watched the liquid surface of the planet fluctuate and move. Back in the first scene around Kelvin’s parent’s house, the natural state of Solaris still cannot be penetrated or understood by the audience. However, Kelvin’s uncertainty fills the sequences. Another scene is when Berton leaves the Kelvin family’s house. He forgot something and called from the street, mislaying to mention the 4-meter-tall child he saw on Solaris.
Constructing Nature
A moment later, the shot follows Berton on the highway (one of the iconic yet phenomenal scenes) with his son in the back seat. Apart from the noise of the road and passing vehicles, they only traveled in silence. A series of long shots follow Berton’s car through traffic, merging lanes, and into an almost industrial monochrome to follow a steady stream of traffic for several minutes.
The vehicles sped through endless alleys and tunnels, serving as portals to other parts of the massive city scene. In addition, the pattern of the roads, the layout, the cars, the streetlights, and the concrete, recall the natural movement of the water grass in the Kelvin family’s pond. Regardless of the association, we can connect nature with construction, like a pond with a road. The sequence takes a long shot, forcing us to consider a scene urgently without worrying about what will happen next.
Instead, Tarkovsky encourages us to consider the scene’s context and the time that awaits the next scene. Instead, he used a long time to consider the effects of time through his observations of consequences. He believed showing decay through time was essential for film, especially color film. True to naturalistic art, the film’s most vibrant color images involve the crumbling teacher’s season leaves, the weathered surfaces of Kelvin’s parent’s house, and the tumbledown look of the station.
2001: A Space Odyssey
However, the most dramatic use of time through the color change involves his treatment of the human body. Oddly enough, Tarkovsky remains disinterested in exploring long sci-fi travel scenes. It was an approach that contrasted sharply with his contemporaries as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kelvin’s final trip to the Solaris station takes just seconds. Due to mysterious but frequent experiences around stations like Berton’s, the station houses only three scientists.
Tarkovsky adapts the viewer to the backdrop of visiting the empty docking room. Tarkovsky’s use of time isn’t for reveling in arrangement genre tropes or sheer sci-fi in the sequence. Vice versa, he felt that the genre origins of the books limited the films because of his requirements for genre details. Solaris has many fantastic levels, temporal as well as spatial. When watching Solaris, it is less significant to distinguish reality from imagination.
Despite differentiating fantasy’s or memory’s levels. Tarkovsky uses images that transcend time and space. To make the connection we can hardly fathom between an alien planet and the human mind that invades the film’s characters, Tarkovsky prefers to use damning, contemplative, but long shots.
Images
His films have become a vital text in understanding the image of time as it uses complex terms such as a volume image, a relationship image, a change image, and a duration image. Solaris uses a time-image that is in a specific field. It convergences the past, present, and future in one shot. As well as using Solaris‘ genre and narrative in facilitating the use of time imagery, it contemplates how the protagonist’s mind remains divided between Solaris and Earth stations.
The film’s ambition is to lift us out of psychologically unbearable boredom. Both reflect relief and anxiety, using science fiction for the opposite end. Therefore, Tarkovsky used the sci-fi idea behind the book to create a formal transition. It differentiates and links time images with internal registers; it facilitates dreams, memory pictures, and fantasy images from beginning to end.
Bibliography
- Deleuze, G. (2020). 8. Cinema I: The Movement-Image. In Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou (pp. 152-176). Columbia University Press.
- Deleuze, G., Galeta, R., & Tomlinson, H. (1989). The time-image (pp. 57-67). University of Minnesota.
- Eisenstein, S., & Gerould, D. (1974). Montage of attractions: for enough stupidity in every wiseman. The Drama Review, 18(1), 77-85.
- Skakov, N. (2012). The cinema of Tarkovsky: labyrinths of space and time. Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Tarkovsky, A., & Hunter-Blair, K. (1989). Sculpting in time: reflections on the cinema. University of texas Press.
- Tumanov, V. (2016). Philosophy of Mind and Body in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Film-Philosophy, 20(2-3), 357-375.
