Landmarks
Thursday 2 February 2006 21:30-22:00 (Radio 3)
In the latest of Night Waves' monthly series of programmes exploring some of the landmarks of our culture, Matthew Sweet is joined by Will Self and Mike Hodges to discuss Solaris - both the legendary Andrei Tarkovsky film and the haunting novel it was based on, by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem.
Programme Details
In tonight's Night Waves Landmarks, Matthew Sweet explores Solaris. This legendary Andrei Tarkovsky film was billed on its release as a Soviet answer to Kubrick's 2001 and has since come to rival it as a cinematic classic. But the programme also rediscovers the haunting 1961 novel by Stanislaw Lem which inspired Tarkovsky's film - and which was recently filmed afresh by Steven Soderbergh. To find out why both Lem's novel and Tarkovsky's film stand out as cultural landmarks, Matthew is joined by the film-maker Mike Hodges and the novelist Will Self - who first saw the film as a teenager and has returned to it regularly ever since.
Film and book alike tell the story of a psychologist, Chris Kelvin, who is summoned to a lonely space station orbiting the strange, oceanic planet of Solaris. Once there, he finds that his fellow crew members are haunted by visitors - figures who appear absolutely real, but who have been recreated by Solaris from their troubled consciences. Kelvin himself soon wakes to find that he is sharing a bed with the doppelganger of his long dead wife - now, it seems, conjured back to life.
Matthew and his guests discuss how what could have been an ordinary sci-fi story of a base under siege becomes, in both novel and film, an intensely moving story about the obsessive power of love - as well as a satire on the hopeless hubris of science. They explore what Tarkovsky took from Lem's novel - and how he brought to it his own spiritual and deeply Russian sensibility - to create a rare case of a sci-fi classic that endures even when the "futuristic" technology it features has long dated.
