From Tarkovsky's Diary (1970-1986)
Time Within Time
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On the planet Solaris, Kelvin reunites with his wife, who died thirty years ago. Is this the only love story Tarkovsky tells, and an impossible one?
There are many facets to a film, and a love story is just one of them. In fact, Kelvin's mission on Solaris may have only one purpose, which is to reveal that loving others is indispensable to all living beings. If a person is without love, he is no longer a person. The whole purpose of the film is to prove that human beings should have love.
This adventure is much like a science fiction story, it is more of a spiritual adventure.
Rather, it is an adventure in consciousness that a person goes through. I once wanted to make a film based on Stanislav Lem's novel Solaris without actual space travel. Maybe that would be more interesting, but Rhyme disagreed.
But, in your own words, what really interested Tarkovsky in space was "the people who came out of it". It's also a way out of space travel.
quite correct.
Are this space, and later the stealth area in Stalker, some kind of metaphor for purgatory? In that place, people have only one desire, which is to change themselves.
I feel that even without purgatory, life still fits perfectly into this definition of changing the self. Human life has only one purpose, and that is this change. The existence of purgatory is necessary for us in order to calm down, to soothe our suffering. I don't deny that purgatory may really exist, though...
"Cinema Tuesday," French Culture Radio, interview with journalist Laurence Cosser, January 7, 1986. --Original Note
From the book "Andrei Tarkovsky", published by Peking University Press in October 2011
Author: Antoine de Baecque, film critic, historian, editor-in-chief of the literary edition of the French "Liberation". Translator: Fang Erping
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