Water, Solaris

An impending diving trip (to Papua New Guinea, hurray!!!) reminds me how much I love the water. I took this photograph (with a terribly obsolete digital camera) on my last diving trip on a liveaboard in Burma. It is a very bad photograph (see above parenthesis), but I was trying to capture, for myself at least, a little part of its immense fascination for me: how the glassiness accentuates rather than conceals its mysterious depths; how the calmness reflects its ethereal placidity (yet so transient, for the waters can also be angry and ferocious); how it converges with the sky, like the edge of the world (when one is out in the remote, open sea it is impossible to believe the earth is round) over which the sun slowly, slowly, slowly tips over and disappears.....

It has, therefore, always struck me how absolutely perfect that Tarkovsky's Solaris is so intricately linked with water; perfect because only water is sufficiently complex and fascinating for its themes. Because, if clear, one can see right through water yet it has depths one will literally never be able to fathom. Because water can be peaceful yet angry. Because it stretches forever, yet will never extend beyond the horizon. But also because water is completely versatile, moulding itself into whatever contains it, yet unyielding in its volume. Because one can float in water as easily as one may drown in it. Because water can engulf, yet recedes into nothing but dampness once it has run itself out.

So, too, is the nature of memory on the planet Solaris. On earth, one tries to deal logically with memories - to theorise them ("they are ninogens", or whatever it was), or to deny them by literally burning their manifestations, as Kris stokes his bonfire of mementoes, notes, his thesis, his photographs of his wife. But on Solaris, memories return as ghosts, indestructible and literally deathless. The key, then, lies in the water which covers the ocean planet of Solaris - its flow, its flux, its drift and ebb... the perfect and delicate nature of water by which one goes along yet does not let go, complies yet remains sure. And only when Kris acknowledged its mystery rather than outright destruction (remember he wanted to "bombard the oceans with high-intensity laser beams"?!) did his hallucinations stop.

So, too, is the nature of memory back on earth at Kris's father's house. In the last shot of the film, the house is threatened to be engulfed by water (the thought shot through my mind: "this, too, shall pass into memory......"). The house of generations (Kris's father built the house like his father's house), its lives and loves and fathers and sons seem to dissolve into time, whose edges are lapped by water. Or the house could be an island, a refuge against raging floods, an oasis against oblivion, just as islands popped up in the waters of Solaris after Kris's epiphany. Water, then, is no longer the key to understanding, but the shadowy darkness surrounding sunken treasure.

In a review of another film (Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet), Philip French wrote:

Have you noticed how many movies in recent years begin with shots of water, either from the surface or underneath? The epigraph of Ten Minutes Older is Marcus Aurelius's 'Time is a river' and it begins, and links each segment, with images of water. Two other films this week (Ned Kelly and Young Adam) print the opening credits against underwater shots in slow motion.

Has it something to do with the oceanic sense or the pull of amniotic fluids? Or sensations of memory, dreaming, being born, dying? Or is it merely picturesque?

"Is it merely picturesque"??!! (she exclaims in horror)

Really, the short answer is: no, water is used because only water is sufficiently complex and fascinating. Because it is endlessly dichotomous. Because it is absolutely perfect.